[CPWG] The crux of the COM issue

[Evan Leibovitch]

On Sun, 5 Jan 2020 at 12:28, Nat Cohen <ncohen at telepathy.com> wrote:


> I find it disturbing that while you are participating in At-Large
> nominally as a representative of the best interests of end-users, you
> consistently adopt talking points pushed by Verisign and PIR and bash
> domain investors.
>


Let's be absolutely clear. From the pure PoV of non-registrant end users,
domain investing is evil. It is a disease that extracts value out of the
Internet rather than adding value. It impedes the ability of legitimate
providers of Internet goods and services to affordably acquire useful names
to identify themselves to end users.

"I got in the queue to buy it before you" does not constitute innovation.
Domaining is transparently the Internet equivalent of ticket scalping and
deserves all the public loathing that scalping attracts.

The cost of a domain name to a provider of Internet-based goods and
services is a tiny portion of maintaining a web presence. Web hosting,
programming and content creation dwarf the costs of domain-name leasing.
But for the domain squatter it's everything.


> While domain investors are affected by price hikes, so is each and every
> registrant of .org and .com.
>

Yup. And paying two dollars more a year for a domain is nothing to someone
actually using it for something. Indeed if the money from a price hike goes
into enhanced security and rules enforcement, the result is a benefit to
registrants and the people who use their services.

For those who have to judge the "value" of which domains to shed and which
to keep when prices go up by such small amounts, there are no tears to be
shed. Indeed I am amused at the reaction of those who are quite happy to
let market forces determine selling prices but scream when anything close
to that logic is used to determine their buying prices. It's practically
the definition of exploitation.


>   You have so far failed to explain why it is in the best interests of
> .org and .com registrants to pay unjustified higher prices to continue the
> use of their domain names, for the sole benefit of those registries that
> are already being overpaid for the services they provide.
>

Actually, it's not in the interest of registries or registrars to increase
prices in a manner that causes domainers to flee as it hurts their volume.
And as stated above, the result is not for their sole benefit, it also
helps all the entrepreneurs and service providers that have a larger pool
of affordable domains from which to choose as speculators abandon them.

-- 
Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada
@evanleibovitch or @el56
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