[NA-Discuss] "Chicken and Egg" Problem

[Alan Greenberg]

On 4 Apr 2012, at 16:24, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
>The concern from my side isn't the revenue issue, but why these 
>registrars are not being kept to the same public disclosure 
>requirements (etc) as others simply because they haven't registered 
>a domain yet.

As I said in an earlier post, the issue is not whether they have 
registered a domain "yet", but whether they are in the business of 
registering domains and how. Posting policies and such on the web is 
only required if you do business that way. For instance, I have not 
checked, but I suspect that Mark Monitor, a large registrar dealing 
with corporate customers probably does not offer online registration 
and if so, is not required to post details (or even have a web site 
if they chose). Having a Whois service is moot if there are no 
domains to look up at all.


On 4 Apr 2012, Garth Bruen wrote:
>So what is that "business model" exactly. Folks on this forum don't know the
>details. Thanks

As Volker implied, it has to do with "drop-catching. More 
accreditations means more simultaneous attempts to pick up deleted 
names for resale or monetization. See my earlier post - 
http://atlarge-lists.icann.org/pipermail/na-discuss/2012-April/005553.html.

If you haven't read it, take a look at David Kesmodel's book The 
Domain Game: How people Get Rich from Internet Domain Names. It is 4 
years old and therefore surely out of date, but interesting reading 
nonetheless.

Alan