Re: [ga] Tiered (Variable) Pricing
Gomes, Chuck wrote: With regard to tight regulation of business practices, don't you think there are quite a few people in the community who want the tight regulaton of business practices? To which I reply - why should they be allowed to dictate the rules to the rest of us? Who made them the legislature of the internet? What is the source of authority? J.D. Rockefeller felt that his ruthless suppression of divergent business practices in the oil refining and distribution industry (there was a definite reason why it was called *Standard* Oil) was in the best interests of consumers and the industry because it eliminated the wasteful effects of competition. His position has been soundly rejected by nearly every country on the planet. It was more than a century ago in the US when we decided that Rockefeller's philosophy was contrary to our national principles. The idea of competition contains within it the notion that those who don't fit into the mold established by the incumbents don't need to ask permission from those incumbents. So what I am saying is that ICANN is trying to swim upstream against well established national policies against guilds and groups/combinations that try to impose their will on the marketplace and the products, services, vendors, and sales terms and prices of that marketplace. Yet that is what ICANN is doing with regard to new TLDs and the excessive regulation of existing TLDs. When, for example, with IOD get to go forward with .web? They've lost a decade, including the .com bubble - the hypothetical lost revenue is very large. And will I ever have a realistic chance of getting my .ewe into the ICANN/NTIA root zone? I draw one exception - protection of those people who have been locked into TLDs (Thomas Rossler just wrote a nice concise description of this effect at http://log.does-not-exist.org/archives/2006/09/01/2082_on_registry_pricing_persistence_and_stability.html#more ) The sooner we get enough real diversity in domain name product offerings that the consumer can be said to have had a real choice to get the product he/she wants, the sooner we can transform that kind of protection into a fading legacy. --karl--
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