[ga] Put down the caviar -- wholesale price of .cn drops to USD 13 cents/year

[George Kirikos <gkirikos@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

According to:

http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2007/200703/20070308/article_308251.htm

CNNIC is reducing the price of .cn domains to USD 13 cents/year.

What again was ICANN's justification for allowing VeriSign to RAISE
prices by 7% per year from the already too high base of $6/yr??

One only has to look at the world of webhosting to see that technology
costs have been falling. e.g. at Hostgator.com, one can get 200 GB of
webspace and 2 TB of transfers for $14.95/month (visit
http://www.hostgator.com/shared.shtml ). At MediaTemple, one can ontain
100 GigaBytes of webspace and 1 TeraBytes of bandwidth for $20/month
(visit http://www.mediatemple.net/webhosting/gs/ ). At GoDaddy, one can
get obtain 200 GigaBytes of disk space and 2 TeraBytes of transfers for
$14.99/month (visit  https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/hosting/shared.asp
). Prices for similar offerings would have been 100 or 1000 times more
expensive just a few years ago.

ICANN should be looking at a price index of technology costs like
webhosting, not the price index comprised of Beluga caviar, Cristal
champage, 5 star hotels, Jimmy Choo shoes and Gucci bags.

In Warren Buffett's recent letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, 

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2006ltr.pdf

Mr. Buffett noted (page 3) how GEICO increased the number of policies
from 5.7 million to 8.1 million from 2003 to 2006, but did that while
the number of employees FELL 3.5%. Also, on page 19, he notes how their
home office (a total of 19 employees at World Headquarters) totalled
$3.5 million last year. I imagine most would agree those 19 employees
are doing a lot more substantial work than anything coming out of
ICANN, given Berkshire's market cap of $166 BILLION (see
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=BRK-A ).

In comparison, ICANN's budget for 2006-07 is to have 89 employees, and
a payroll of $12.5 million (see
http://www.icann.org/announcements/proposed-budget-2006-07-cln.pdf )
with total expenditures exceeding $30 million. In 2003-04, the budget
was under $10 million (see
http://www.icann.org/financials/financial-report-fye-30jun04.pdf ).

ICANN could learn a lot about running a lean efficient operation by
studying the example of Berkshire Hathaway or GEICO.

Sincerely,

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