On Sun, Jul 11, 1999 at 12:26:19AM +0000, William X. Walsh wrote:
[...]
> A registry is no more a monopoly than a car manufacturer is Kent.
There is no lock-in involved with cars -- if I don't like my toyata,
I can get a honda or a ford, for just the cost of a new car.
Changing cars doesn't involve significant switching cost. Changing
domains involves huge switching costs -- amazon.com is embedded in
hundreds of thousands of urls, it is loaded in search engines, etc
etc. If amazon.com did not resolve for even a few days the damage to
amazon would be catastrophic, perhaps fatal. "amazon.com" is worth
millions to amazon, but almost nothing to the registry. Even in the
case of songbird, the world's smallest web business, the value of the
domain name far exceeds the cost of maintaining it.
That's not like a car manufacturer. It's a monopoly.
> Provided there are no artificial limits placed on the number of
> registries and the models underwhich they operate.
The lock-in effect is not materially eased by having a wide choice
of TLDs available to switch to. There could be a thousand
alternatives to .com -- if anything, that would only make amazon's
problem worse -- if .biz were the only alternative, at least people
could guess the new URL.
In other words, for a $35 commodity you get a lock-in effect similar
in magnitude to real estate, which is orders of magnitude more costly.
The fact is, a TLD is a monopoly, regardless of how many TLDs there
are.
--
Kent Crispin "Do good, and you'll be
[EMAIL PROTECTED] lonesome." -- Mark Twain
