[council] Re: [gnso-dow123] Request for Data: Individual vs. Commercial Registration

[Ross Rader <ross@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Marilyn Cade wrote:
> Thanks, Ross. 
>
> Where would your 'quick popular stats at our fingertips' research approach
> put the 'professional portfolio' holders of thousands or millions of names?
> Would they have been in the business sector or the individual sector?
As I mentioned in my earlier message, this isn't my research. Verisign 
undertakes regular studies of the domain name industry and regularly 
publishes their findings. We should engage them directly if we wish to 
know more about their methodology.
The answer would not likely materially affect the results substantially 
in either direction. The largest domain portfolios are held by 
commercial corporations, and the sizes of these portfolio's numbers in 
the hundreds of thousands of domains. As a percentage of overall 
registrations, the numbers are actually fairly small, and thus any 
incorrect categorization of individual portfolio's or registrations is 
unlikely to have a material impact on the analysis.
Knowing a little bit about their methodology, my personal opinion would 
be that the vast majority of the names held in secondary market 
portfolios would probably have been classified as commercial 
registrations. But again, this is purely my conjecture. If we are really 
interested in hard data, we should ask.
-ross