[CPWG] The crux of the COM issue

[Evan Leibovitch]

On Sun, 5 Jan 2020 at 15:59, John McCormac <jmcc at hosterstats.com> wrote:

> On 05/01/2020 17:09, Jonathan Zuck wrote:
> > My point, to be clear, is that these price hikes really only affect the
> > investor community and will, as Evan has suggested, help clear some
> > clutter out of the secondary market.
>
>
> You and Evan are wrong. These price hikes affect all registrants of and some
> of them have built their presence on a TLD and cannot afford to rebrand.


As someone who owns a bunch of domains and has acquired many, many more on
behalf of clients, friends and good causes, I see first-hand what's going
on with these registrants and I have worked with them myself.

The cost of programming, hosting and content creation by orders of
magnitude outweigh the costs of leasing domains. A 10% increase in domains
will likely constitute <1% total increased cost of maintaining a website.
Even when the software is free, the people to configure it aren't. And they
go up in price over time too.


> Price increases introduce instabilities into a domain name market and
> affect registrant confidence in a TLD.
>

Evidence? Your stats are great but assertions such as "confidence" are not
quite so easy to quantify. I would counter-assert that it's lack of
transparency, and the inability to have enough future data upon which to
plan, that causes the jitters. Domains that are expensive and thus have few
registrants may be the most "reliable" and stable on the web from an
end-user's PoV (registries' financial circumstances notwithstanding). Most
legacy TLDs have track records that indicate incremental increases which
registrants can live with. The lack of transparency, and the unawareness of
what Ethos plans to do with .org, IMO contributes more to instability and
lack of confidence than anything else. A pledge not to exceed 10% per year
does not alleviate that.

Much of the .ORG's registrations are brand protection registrations by
registrants
> who have registered the same name across other TLDs.


So it's not their primary domain, meaning that the holders of these
defensive domains are likely not NPOs.

Discounting is a far greater threat to the stability of a TLD than any
secondary
> market. In reality, unfettered discounting destroys the credibility of a
> TLD.
>

Agreed. And they do so far more than incremental price increases that hurt
portfolio owners more than those who use their domains to provide services.

The .ORG is one of the most stable of the legacy gTLDs.


Do you have 100% confidence that the switch to Ethos will maintain that
stability? Those opposing the sale are making your point that PIR under
ISOC was a great steward of .ORG, the cause of such stability, and there
were better ways turn it into stable income. while maintaining that status
quo.

> The strange idea that the secondary market is some big, bad ogre devouring
> all the domain names in a TLD is wrong. The reality is quite different.


As someone who has worked for decades with entrepreneurs and nonprofits who
struggle to find suitable domain names that aren't taken up by squatters, I
will challenge that assertion of reality.

Not so much in .ORG, but in .COM the availability of original-release
domains is pretty sparse unless you create your own coined word or resort
to dashes in the name.
But I'm struggling to find the point of this debate. The subject line says
it's about .COM. If you want to argue against sudden and non-incremental
price increases and other destabilizing forces in .ORG, I'm all with you. I
detest domainers but agree that their impact on .ORG is far less than .COM.
So what are we arguing about?

- Evan
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