Question: Currently domains are avilable from $6 per year(.com) to more than $5000 per year(for some .TV). Do you think the price of a domain from a registrar should reflect the actual costs of registering the domain or should they be allowed to charge anything they wish?

Nominee Replies

Donald Langenberg - posted on 2000-10-01 19:59:16 Domain pricing is clearly a complex issue. I don't have a simple answer. A related question occurs to me: Should a cybersquatter be able to sell a URL at a price determined by the market, or should s/he be allowed to charge only the actual cost of registering? Barbara Simons - posted on 2000-10-01 14:36:51 When there are many TLDs, consumers will be able to shop around on the basis of price and service. Given adequate competition, price should not be an issue. ICANN should be focusing on an immediate and significant expansion of the number of TLDs, rather than worrying about the creation of a handful of new ones. Karl Auerbach - posted on 2000-09-30 17:59:59 I don't want ICANN to be in the business of regulating prices. ICANN's already too big and imposes too many arbitrary decisions. But until there is real competition in the DNS world the pricing will be artificial. The current set of registrars are merely resellers of NSI's registry services and are constitute only the most pale form of competition. Real competiion won't happen until there are many, many new TLDs - not 6 or 10 new TLDs but thousands and even tens of thousands of 'em. Lyman Chapin - posted on 2000-09-30 13:54:54 If we assume that the number of gTLDs will grow to permit real competition, registrars should be free to charge whatever they like for domain names. Competition among registrars will establish the price that corresponds to the value the market places on domain names in a particular TLD. Emerson Tiller, J.D., Ph.D. - posted on 2000-09-30 11:46:49 Registrars should be able to charge whatever the market will bear. Mandated cost-based regulation discourages efficiency and innovation. Only in the rare case of *natural monopoly* should cost-based regulation be considered. The Internet is not a natural monopoly. That is part of the reason ICANN was created and Network Solutions subjected to competition in domain name registration. Lawrence Lessig - posted on 2000-09-30 00:31:06 If there were enough gTLDs to be competitive, then I don't believe ICANN has any role in regulating the price of the service a gTLD offers. If some become known for providing services above simply registration, those other services could be costly. How gTLDs will develop is something we can't yet know, but the key is to assure there are many of them, and they are fully competitive.