[ncdnhc-discuss] Names Council agenda item request: discussion of wholesale price for names

[Milton Mueller]

Federal Trade Commission economists did an analysis 
for the Commerce Department back in 1998. The answer
in a word, is "long-term contracts;" i.e., competition 
would push registries into offering longer contracts
to those who were concerned about lock-in. I don't
have time to go into more detail. One can find the FTC
report here
http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/domainname/130dftmail/scanned/FTC.htm

>>> "Harold J. Feld" <hfeld at mediaaccess.org> 08/26/02 01:21PM >>>
_sigh_

Any half-way competent economist can tell you the answer (or at least, 
an answer).  For some domains it will be high (e.g., "Amazon.com" has 
tremendous brand recognition and the cost of switching to "Amazon.store" 
or "XDFE at .random" or even "somethingelse.com" would be very high.).  For 
  others it will be lower.  Competent economists will work their models 
for general costs and come up with a range of answers depending on who 
is paying their bill.

"Lock in" is not unique to DNS.  And there are various ways to try to 
solve it.  Folks in the U.S. telecom world may be familiar with "number 
portability."  We are now dealing with this in U.S. mass media policy in 
DTV and fights over channel placement.

Whether introduction of new TLDs creates sufficient competition to 
resolve the switching cost issue is actually subject to economic 
analysis.  I'd love to know if anyone has actually studied it or applied 
anything more than SWAG analysis.

Harold