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RE: [ga] Tiered (Variable) Pricing

  • To: ga@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Subject: RE: [ga] Tiered (Variable) Pricing
  • From: George Kirikos <gkirikos@xxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 22:42:43 -0700 (PDT)
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Hello,

--- Paul Stahura <stahura@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I think co.uk is not for profit too.

.ca is non-profit also, and has reduced its prices over the years as
the number of domains has risen:

http://www.cira.ca/news-releases/151.html

CAD $8.50 is approximately USD $7.65 at current exchange rates (1
Canadian dollar is worth 90 cents American). The prior fees were CAD
$10.00:

http://www.cira.ca/news-releases/121.html

.ca has only 730,000 domains registered, so it doesn't have the scale
of .com or other large registries, yet it's not much more expensive at
the wholesale level. And the Canadian dollar has risen substantially
over the past few years, so the premium used to be even lower.

Compare this non-profit with ISOC who runs the .org registry through
PIR:

If one views the ISOC budget in 2003, their annual expenses were $2.3
million, vs. $1.7 million in 2002.

http://www.isoc.org/isoc/reports/ar2003/ISOCar2003.pdf (page 31 of the
PDF)

Fast forward to 2005 (I couldn't find anything for 2006):

http://www.isoc.org/isoc/fin/ISOC2005budget.pdf

Total expenses = $4.9 million.

Of their $5.177 million in revenues, $3.4 million came from the ".org
surplus". That's straight out of the pocket of .org domain holders.

Vint Cerf, of course, was the founding president of ISOC:

http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html#vint

Fellow ICANN Board member Veni Markovski is founder of ISOC Bulgaria
and on the current worldwide ISOC board:

http://www.icann.org/biog/markovski.htm

So, you can understand, with such a high percentage of the Internet
Society's budget coming from operation of .org why they would want
"presumptive renewal". Otherwise, when the current contract expires,
they'd have to compete against other charitable organizations that
would want to operate .org, putting the $3.4 million/yr ".org surplus"
(notice it's a "surplus", not a "profit" -- political correctness....)
at risk. And, with the elimination of price controls, they can generate
even larger surpluses on the back of domain registrants. 

Sincerely,

George Kirikos
http://www.kirikos.com/
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