Question: Other companies have been competing with Network Solutions for a while in the registration business. What are your thoughts on how that has gone?

Nominee Replies

Harris Miller - posted on 2000-09-22 05:53:11 I think that additional steps can be taken to open more competitionm. This is one reason I favor more TLDs being introduced. The actual business model arrangements and contracts involved to date have been fairly rigid. More competition will arrive when competitors will be able to distinguish themselves beyond just pricing, but also on products. Karl Auerbach - posted on 2000-09-19 11:29:51 I question your suggestion that there is actually competition with Network Solutions today. As I see it, ICANN and NTIA have created a body of licensed resellers of NSI registry services - NSI makes a profit no matter who sells a domain name. As for the registries that compete with one another - one must remember that ICANN has dictated much of the basic contract with customers, hence the real difference is merely of price. I personally don't consider that a very rich differentiation of product offerings. As for the registry sharing system - from a technical point of view it is very inadequate and has many significant flaws and should be replaced as soon as possible. But back to the original point - that of competition - we won't have real competition until we have new TLDs, many of them, operating with terms quite different than we see from today's NSI resellers. We see some of this from the country code TLDs. Lawrence Lessig - posted on 2000-09-19 09:01:55 The opportunity for vigorous competition has not yet been provided. Only when there are a sufficient number of gTLDs and a range of different contracting options among the gTLDs will there be real competition. .com should compete with a .biz, or .firm, or a dot-something-french, and each of these TLDs should have the freedom to set different terms for registration. Only then will real competition come to this system. Donald Langenberg - posted on 2000-09-19 04:57:11 I really don't know enough about the details to answer this one properly. Emerson Tiller, J.D., Ph.D. - posted on 2000-09-18 20:50:04 Prices of domain names have gone down while quality of service has not. So there has been a positive effect. Competition is good.