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At 10:52 PM 12/21/99 -0500, Michael Sondow wrote:
>Louis Touton wrote:
>> Until the initial
>> introduction of competitive registration services in June, registration
>> services in the .com, .net, and .org domains were provided solely by
>> Network Solutions, Inc., under a 1992 Cooperative Agreement with the
>> U.S. Government.
>
>Until the ICANN anti-competitive, anti-consumer monopolizing
>activities began, every ISP was a registrar. They just didn't make
>any money doing it.
>
Actually it was common practice for ISP's to charge fees on top of
the NetSol fees, I remember in my early days at InfoRamp and even
after iSTAR bought us we charged $150 CDN for domregs and people
actually paid it. Pretty well all the ISPs at one time had some
fee for it. It did drop pretty fast as time went on, until most
places were offering it "for free" or bundling it with other
services.
You have to admit, now that there are multiple registrars accredited
there is some competition. Joker.com actually broke the logjam in my
book, being the first one online to go lower than $70/2 years. Now
there's competing prices and what will happen more are competing
value-added services (read: you'll start seeing places like webhosting
companies getting accredited and eating the registry fees, etc)
Prices are coming down as a result of all this, but NSI still has a
registry monopoly no doubt about that.
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Mark Jeftovic, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
easyDNS Technologies Inc. http://www.easyDNS.com/
