Re: [registrars] ICANN Proposed budget is out for public comment

[Eric Brunner-Williams <brunner@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Morning Tim,

We registrars have a higher duty of care for names-that-are-marks. We don't
have a mandated floor price above the base registry price that allows us to
recover the cost that higher duty of care imposes.

This is independent of ICANN mark-up or thread-rental or whatever else may
provide passing distraction.

A few weeks ago when Google rolled out their gmail product, someone wrote
on the economics of store -- something on the order of $2/GB/yr was the
cost factor. Quite a few domain registrations will "fit" inside of one GB,
so there is something wildly different about the registry-side of the real
business of maintaining accessable state and publication bandwidth, and the
same technical fundamentals that drive the content industry.

In a nutshell, the per-domain-year registry cost is pennies, not dollars.

This too is independent of ICANN mark-up or thread-rental or whatever else
may provide passing distraction.

Ignoring everything else (for the moment), there is a cost differential to
be recovered -- a "mark-up" to make a modest pun, and a protected margin to
be recovered.

If these can't be addressed, that is, if the interests of the registrars is
insufficient to cause true cost, in the case of marks and marks-associated
duties, and true margin, in the case of the annual per-domain registry fee,
to be reflected in the ICANN pricing structure, then we don't have much to
work from.

Eric