Re: [gnso-consumercci-dt] Draft v5.1 of our Advice, for discussion on Tuesday 14-Feb-2012

[Evan Leibovitch <evan@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 14 February 2012 12:57, Jonathan Zuck <jzuck@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>  Hey gang, I'm sorry I have a conflict with the call. I'm free all day
> tomorrow! Anyway, thanks to Steve for circulating this. I only have one
> comment. I don't think that lower price alone should be among our
> competition measures.    Prices for new gTLDs could well be much higher
> than for today's legacy gTLDs, and in some instances the higher prices are
> the result of greater choice and competition.  For example,
>
>  Suppose  <http://rayspizza.com/>rayspizza.com costs $10 and
> rayspizza.nyC costs $25.  The .nyc name may be much better value,
> especially if there are multiple Ray's Pizza parlors in New York City.
>
>
It might.

It might be just as easily be the case that rayspizza.com -- the #1
preference -- is taken, and the next best choice is both less desirable AND
more expensive, but itself less expensive than other alternatives (since,
to keep this real-life example going, "rayspizza.co" is already taken by a
squatter). At an early point in domain name "shopping" -- by many
registrants wanting to provide content -- value takes a back seat to
"what's available."

This has been an observation I've made in multiple instances of obtaining
domains. If you did a survey of registrants and asked why they settled on
the domain they got, I don't think that "value" would crop up as a top-10
reason. But that might be a survey worth doing.

In any case, cost is most certainly a relevant factor. It may not be the
only one, but this WG isn't charged with evaluating the relative merits of
various criteria, only the ease of obtaining the data.


What about highly secure TLDs, which will probably have a higher domain
> name price?  If you are conducting highly secure transactions, it's
> probably worth a much higher price to have the assurances that comes with
> that TLD.
>
>
Those "assurances" would likely be backed up by extra enforcement,
evaluation, certification, internal security and maybe even insurance. So
the registrant is aware that the extra cost is being incurred compared to
the norm. That's a value-add that's well understood to mean something more
than "we're just another string, but we may have what you want if your
first 15 choices are already taken".



> Dot Info currently charges $3 for a domain name (thru GoDaddy).   Even
> though that is 1/3 the cost of a .com name, does that make it better value
> for the registrant?
>
>

Well, by definition it's better value than before the sale started and
.info was its regular price of $12. Whether price sensitivity is a
compelling issue is for the marketplace to decide; elastic demand versus
inelastic is Economics 101.


> Competition needs to focus less on money coming into a registry and more
> on how it's spent.
>

It's not for us to say where competition needs to focus, merely to note
where and how it exists.

- Evan