Re: [ga] The facts about professional registrants (domainers)
Prophet Partners Inc. wrote: We'd like to dispel some misperceptions and point out some facts using your analogy of launching a new TLD compared to building a city. Might I begin with by noting that I completely disagree with you (hereinafter referred to as "you".) Because I actually pay for my domain renewals I pay for the costs of those 200 speculative short-term registrations that your euphemistically called "domainers" get nearly for free. 2) These annual registration and renewal fees are paid in advance. Sure, they put up an amount of money equal to the fees for some number of names. Of course that money is refundable or can be carried forward for another year, so that the registry only gets to book the interest. And since the money that is put up can be borrowed, the cost to the speculator is only the marginal difference between the rate of return on the money and the interest cost of the money - a few pennies on the dollar every year. I've cranked the numbers, even assuming a very high (20%) return rate above the cost of the money. The result comes out that the speculators are getting a massive discount as compared to those of us who acquire full-term registrations. I was on the board when the board unknowingly adopted the various 5-day "grace" provisions. And I believe that the ICANN board should move to eliminate these provisions so that those who engage in speculation have to participate on exactly the same terms as do the rest of us. It would be very interesting to know from the various registries how much of an infrastructure buildout that had to do to support this speculative fever. 3) Domainers take on higher degrees of risk by being among the first to buy into an unproven investment. It's the same as when American pioneers settled into the wilderness. Many died along the way, Higher risk? At what? "Unproven investment"? In what, a character string, in the ability of people to make typos and spelling errors?! That's bubble mentality, whether it be tulip bulbs, south seas stocks, or an internet store for cat litter. Pioneers? Not in the mold of Lewis and Clark or of Willa Cather's characters. Perhaps more in the mold of pioneering used car salesmen or the original JC Whitney Catalog (where, if you believed the promises, could use the add-ons sold in the catalog to beef up a VW bug to over 3000 horsepower and 1500 miles/gallon.) Regarding your final phrase in the quote above: Wow, I really would like to see you say that to someone who, in the future, during an emergency, mistypes "ambulence" rather than "ambulance" and finds their browser, not to mention their network access path (which may be carrying their VOIP phone service) rendered temporarily inoperable as their web page is filled with advertisements and pop-overs and pop-unders. 4) Domainers POSITIVELY impact the ability to attract new registrants by creating the perception that there is demand and a bright future for the new TLD.
I tend to believe that better products will attract customers. Thats why in my .ewe TLD I will offer a signficantly different domain name product than is found today - http://www.cavebear.com/cbblog-archives/000159.html In .ewe you are perfectly free to buy names on speculation. But you'd have to pay the full freight for a permanent registration just like everybody else. Moreover, what is likely to occur is that those of us who have our fingers on the filters will simply block traffic from TLDs that prove to be mainly empty bags filled with nothing but the vacuum of "domainer" names. And real users will tend to acquire domain names in TLD neighborhoods that are less tainted - Reverse osmosis - a TLD that is filled with speculative names will drive away full-term buyers. And although nobody knows Google's "page rank" algorithm, but it would not surprise me if it evolved so that it gave a significant negative ding to any search result that lives in a speculation-infested TLD. 7) The bottom line is domainers do not COMPROMISE the launch of a new TLD, but instead STIMULATE its growth. In the same way that the bacteria that spoil milk stimulate the cow to make more? --karl--
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