On 22 Nov 2001, at 1:15, Patrick Corliss wrote:

> On Thu, 22 Nov 2001 00:20:50 +1100,  Chris Berkeley wrote:
> 
> > The sad fact of the matter is that whole deregulation/competition
> > thing will end up costing almost everybody money, only a few will
> > make money, it will be a nightmare of confusion and at the consumers
> > will end up getting the rough end of the pineapple . . .
> 
> Hi Chris
> 
 
> You have said the prices range "from $40 a year".  Of course, the
> reason prices are now comparatively low in the gTLD domain space is
> because, with deregulation in the United States, there are very many
> registrars who have been accredited by ICANN.  See this URL for a full
> list:
> 
> http://www.icann.org/registrars/accredited-list.html
> 
> These registrars are, of course, very price competitive.  Depending on
> who you are buying from, domain name prices can be as low as about $8
> a year. One high volume and efficient registrar, OpenSRS is charging
> $10 a year as a wholesale price as follows:
> 
> "Individual .com, .net and .org domain registrations to our
> Registration Service Providers at a cost of $10 US per year"
> http://www.opensrs.org/payment/apayment.shtml
> 
> So you are making a reasonable profit at $40 a year (if you are
> picking up sales at that price).
> 

Apart from the fact that I don't you to teach me how to suck eggs, we 
<adopt high moral tone> as a matter of policy offer domain name 
registration for our Australian clients through a publicly listed 
Australian based domain name registry </adopt high moral tone> so our 
margin isn't that terrific. Even if we were using bucket shops, the 
margins would not allow us to fully cost recover given all the other 
work that has to be done in connection with the transactions. If you 
don't understand this Paddy, I suggest you return to tech and brush 
up on BP.

> Now I'm not a gambling person but I would be very confident that the
> current retail price of com.au and net.au domain names, viz $137.50
> for two years through Melbourne IT or Connect.com respectively, is due
> for a dramatic fall in the near future.  This will surely happen
> within the next 6 months.
> 
> Within a year, or less, the price of .com.au domain names will be one
> hundred dollars cheaper i.e. $37.50 for two years.  And that is being
> conservative in my view.
> 

The point I was trying to make is that for essentially $1 per week we 
will be swapping a regulated understandable market with relatively 
sane rules and regulations for what is likely to be a mess. If you 
have dealt with some of the el cheapo domain registries overseas, you 
will be aware that getting anything resembling support and service 
other than robot responses is but a faint hope. Oh yeah... and a 
dispute settling system that is biased towards the big end of town 
and expensive.


Chris Berkeley








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