Re: [wg-c] breaking up (names) is hard to do

[Dave Crocker <dcrocker@brandenburg.com>]

At 10:29 AM 8/26/99 , Christopher Ambler wrote:
> > However the fact that US$9 is still 2-9 times too
> > high makes clear that that effect is small, as does the failure to get NSI
> > to change its dispute policy.
>
>No, it's not. It's 3 times too low. I would pay $27 per year for a .com,

The number in question is back-end registry pricing, not front-end 
registrar pricing.

In any event, serious competition brings prices down to a reasonable profit 
margin, rather than having prices dictated by the maximum a customer will 
tolerate.

>and $30 per year for a .net, personally. Something is worth exactly
>what someone is willing to pay for it. If you don't like it, buy something
>else.

As noted earlier, that approach to discussing pricing gives no meaningful 
guidance, except perhaps in a pure monopoly situation.  On the other hand 
there is quite a bit of detailed and straightforward knowledge about 
reasonable margins for reasonable markets.

An example is to expect pricing to be 2-5 times "manufacturing" costs.

Since the registry operations cost for domain name registration should be 
US$ 0.25-0.50 (if not lower) and that leads to a rather lower price than we 
currently suffer with.

d/

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Dave Crocker                                         Tel: +1 408 246 8253
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