RE: [wg-review] Clarifications requested from BoD, Staff, NC, TC, Chair prior to co-Chair elections

["Judith Oppenheimer" <joppenheimer@icbtollfree.com>]

Title:

Percentage of Consumers versus
Companies Registering Domain Names

85% of registrants are companies, BUT 75.5% of companies registering domain names are small businesses, in fact, the smallest of the small:  1 - 4 employees.  also:

 

...the average income of domain name purchasers is $35,000-75,000

...in 1999, Network Solutions' consumer base increased 6.5 times its original amount

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http://www.icbtollfree.com/Article4910.htm

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-wg-review@dnso.org [mailto:owner-wg-review@dnso.org]On
> Behalf Of Kent Crispin
> Sent: Thursday, January 11, 2001 1:26 PM
> To: wg-review@dnso.org
> Subject: Re: [wg-review] Clarifications requested from BoD, Staff, NC,
> TC, Chair prior to co-Chair elections
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 11, 2001 at 12:53:49PM +0100, Robin Miller wrote:
> > Kent Crispin wrote:
> > > The question is, of course, who are the customers? The
> primary customers
> > > of the domain name system are in fact *businesses*, not individual
> > > netizens -- a very large majority of domain-names in use
> are used for
> > > commercial purposes.
> [...]
>
> > please provide the statistics that support your obviously fallacious
> > opinion...
>
> ???
>
> I haven't looked recently -- about a year ago there was a
> news article
> quoted on the various lists, where NSI was quoted as saying that
> approximately 80% of domain names were commercial; that the rest were
> individuals and organizations.  They did note at that time the
> percentage of individual users was growing, but it was still
> small.  I
> will try to find that article for you.
>
> In the meantime, in fact what I say is quite obviously true, and you
> can verify it yourself -- go to your favorite search engine (I use
> google these days), and put in a common word like "dog". 
> This will get
> you thousands of hits.  The URLs returned will contain a sample of
> domain names that you can look at.  Then go down through the list of
> URLs, and look at the main site for each domain name you see, and
> classify the domain name as commercial or not.  Note that if you see
> something like "http://members.geocities.net/...", that
> clearly counts
> as a commercial domain name.
>
> If you do this exercise you will quickly discover that the
> overwhelming
> majority of domain names (not urls) are commercial.
>
> > Its my experience that if any business has any majority on
> the net at
> > all, its the small businesses owned by individuals.
>
> Nothing surprising here -- small businesses vastly outnumber large
> businesses.
>
> > Some of those small
> > businesses that were birthed by individuals became larger businesses
> > like Amazon and Yahoo.  I am also a small business owner and an
> > individual at the same time - and my business is totally
> dependent on
> > the Internet
>
> Precisely.  Songbird is a small business.  But it *is* a business.
>
> > - the opportunities for me were birthed out of the amazing
> > technologies of the Internet - which were also invented primarily by
> >INDIVIDUALS.
>
> So what?  Ultimately *everything* is done by individuals. 
> The issue is
> whether they are running a business.
> 
> > The big corps were late-comers to the Internet game, all of us that
> > have been on the Net for a while KNOW this... Even Esther
> Dyson herself
> > has noted the majority of us are individuals and small
> business owners -
> > most being one and the same thing.
>
> Sorry, you are mixing things up.  There were many large businesses on
> the net quite early on.  ED's quote simply reflects the obvious fact
> that the number of small businesses vastly outnumbers the number of
> large businesses.
>
> > And so, now the owners of small business want their
> individual and business
> > interests represented. Those interests have NOT been represented.
>
> Oh yes they most certainly have.  The Internation Chambers of
> Commerce,
> for example, represents literally MILLIONS of SMALL
> businesses, and the
> International Chambers of Commerce is a member of the business
> constituency.
>
> > Big business interests are NOT the Net majority that registers a
> > domain name,they do NOT represent the Internet consumers,
>
> But internet consumers don't have domain names, and are for the most
> part totally indifferent to the issues surrounding domain names.
>
> > they do NOT
> > represent the huge diversity of business on the Internet,
> and they are
> > the business interests that have been EXCLUSIVELY catered to in that
> > so-called 'consensus' that resulted in the current structure.
>
> Sorry, that is simply incorrect.  The Business Constituency
> is organized
> to include *organizations representing businesses*, and collectively
> they represent a huge number of businesses, of all sizes.
>
>
> --
> Kent Crispin                               "Be good, and you will be
> kent@songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain
> --
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