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

[Jeff Williams <jwkckid1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

George and all,

  As a very long time Berkshire Hathaway shareholder and a
GEICO customer, I have to agree.  ICANN's thirst and waste
of money as well as it's seeming greedy need for its Bod and staff
to have many high cost perks, is what seems to me to be the
motivation for driving costs to registrants and consumers far
higher than is reasonable.

George Kirikos wrote:

> 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/

Regards,

--
Jeffrey A. Williams
Spokesman for INEGroup LLA. - (Over 134k members/stakeholders strong!)
"Obedience of the law is the greatest freedom" -
   Abraham Lincoln

"Credit should go with the performance of duty and not with what is
very often the accident of glory" - Theodore Roosevelt

"If the probability be called P; the injury, L; and the burden, B;
liability depends upon whether B is less than L multiplied by
P: i.e., whether B is less than PL."
United States v. Carroll Towing  (159 F.2d 169 [2d Cir. 1947]
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