Contrast Beckstrom's interview with DelBianco's Argument Against New TLDs

[Jorge Amodio]

> Competition is expected to lower domain prices thus benefit consumers,
> but would you know of any studies that provide empirical "real cost"
> of a creating a domain record at the registry?

I have not seen any studies/reports that show any reasonable well thought
figures. Probably after the initial investment in infrastructure, people and
processes the additional cost is probably marginal.

I still need to see a good explanation about how the gTLD program will
foster competition. At the retail level there is competition already, with
the new gTLDs and current technology where we have to preserve the
uniqueness at the registry level we are just creating new but smaller
monopolies. For sure what consumers will get is additional choices
rather than competition that will drive down prices.

I don't see how we'll get into a more competitive model when by choice
most of the people tend to get names under the most popular and
attractive TLDs such as .com.

On the other hand, and something that I believe was mentioned somewhere
but not many talk much about it, getting a name in a new gTLD has some
painful glitches that has been experienced in the past when the new
TLDs were introduce during the "proof of concept" days.

There are many applications, canned scripts, filters, etc, that rely on
a limited number of TLDs and a quasi stable root zone with no frequent
changes to validate fully qualified domain names. For example some
popular scripts for processing forms on shopping carts or subscriptions
to electronic mailing lists do not validate the address you put on the
forms doing a dynamic query (even in some cases a dynamic query
may not help for validation because some ISPs are tampering with the
DNS to manipulate the responses to direct you to a web page of their
choice), they check the address against a static table that contains
the ccTLDs and the well known and established TLDs.

When I've got my amodio.biz domain it took me a while to deal with
all the sites that didn't recognize .BIZ as a valid TLD.

So despite that there will be some confusion with the new gTLDs,
some things will not work on day one.

> I suppose you already knew about "The True Price of SMS Messages"
> http://gthing.net/the-true-price-of-sms-messages.

SMS is a different monster, and IMHO what telcos charge for it is a robbery,

> Important to relate prices charged with absolutes costs incurred to
> help me understand why many individuals in African opt for much
> cheaper gTLDs that to register their ccTLDs due to the high prices
> charged by their local registries.

In some other places people avoid the ccTLDs because of the poor
service some ccTLD administrators provide, even if they don't charge
a dime for it (which is a warning sign that there is always a chance
that the ccTLD operation may become underfunded and not up to
the task).

> And exposing telcos colluding to fix internet connectivity prices
> "..shareholders are making a massive 2,000 per cent from selling their
> capacity before the cable officially goes live. The shareholders have
> said that they will first have to recoup their investment before
> lowering the internet connectivity prices."

Telcos are Telcos and they will always be Telcos, that's how they
make their money, no doubt is an industry that requires major
capital investments and constant upgrades, once you have the
machine running is a money printing business, much more if
you own the cables, right of way, etc.

Going back the root scalability reports, this is a very interesting
article that captures what is being said between the lines on the
reports, ie we may see new gTLDs perhaps in 2012.
http://www.internetcommerce.org/ICANN_Delaying_New_gTLD

I hope these reports (if not ignored by the board and the rest of
the community) help to remove some of the pressure from the
gTLD program and provide another chance to do it right.

Regards
Jorge