Hello, > I can't believe I, of all people, am having to defend capitalist > dogma, > but the problem to me seems right out of Economics 101: you simply > can't > sell something worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for six dollars > and > not expect chaos, no matter what rules you put in place. If you tried > it > offline, there would be riots. We're just seeing the online > equivalent.
Yes, but also look up in your textbook what a monopolist is -- this is simply Verisign trying to make a cash grab for a market where there is healthy competition. Why should they profit from these expired names, at the expense of other market participants? They're simply the registry operator, operating a database -- a technical role. I don't see the technical operator of toll-free telephone numbers charging extra to "recycle" vanity telephone numbers, yet somehow the telephone system works just fine. It is obvious that some names are worth more than others. Beijing.com, to most people, is worth more than gks54-jhg1gskj.org. BUT, it's not up to the monopolist registry operator to set the prices in the com/net/org space. It's a slippery slope. I bet names like Amazon.com and Microsoft.com have a lot more "WHOIS" searches done on them than say "fsjah.net" and "gjskdh1gh.org". Should Verisign be allowed to charge more to those companies, for having to perform all those costly WHOIS lookups? High traffic names have more DNS lookups in the root servers -- do we need a surcharge there too? Perhaps Verisign should charge more for 2 and 3-letter domains, because I bet more people do "WHOIS" and availability checks on those? Before you know it, we'll be having Verisign brainwash everyone into thinking that the dot-TV pricing makes sense, and $6/yr should be abandoned! If Verisign wants to make more money, that's fine, but don't do it by trying to monopolize an existing competitive market, with no additional value added service rendered. Personally, I think there'd be demand for longer domain licenses. E.g. charge $500 (root cost, allowing markups for resellers) for a 25 year licenses. This would save corporations from having to worry about renewals, and the expense of invoicing, etc. (if you work for a company, you know that sometimes the costs involved in paying an invoice are higher than the invoice itself). "Owned" domains, such as how the .edu domains are implemented might also be of value. Offering DNS services, such as UltraDNS (lower cost, though) would probably benefit lots of companies. Trying to profit from the value of the name itself is not the proper role of the registry operator Sincerely, George Kirikos http://www.kirikos.com/ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send FREE video emails in Yahoo! Mail! http://promo.yahoo.com/videomail/
