Re: [Membership] Re: ICANN Names Eight New Post-Testbed Registrars

[Carl Oppedahl <carl@oppedahl.com>]

At 01:16 PM 5/26/99 , BRPWIT@aol.com wrote:
>What this doesn't tell me is :
>
>If I register a Domain name with one - how do i later change to another ?
>can I keep the same domain name or is it owned by the registar?

I don't know what "this" refers to.  But everyone in the Internet community
(except NSI) feels it is important that COM, NET and ORG domain name owners
ought to be able to transfer registration of domain names *away* from any
particular registrar and *to* a different registrar.  A domain name owner
who wants to be able to switch from one registrar to another should not
have to give up his or her domain name to be able to do so.

The US Government and ICANN have repeatedly said they want such
transferability to be possible.

As of the present time, however, it seems impossible to do such a transfer.
 While there are supposedly five registrars in competition with NSI for
COM, NET, and ORG domain names, at the present time the only functioning
non-NSI registrar for COM, NET, and ORG is register.com.  And at the
present time, for reasons I don't understand, register.com is only able to
register domain names that were not previously registered through NSI.  In
other words, present customers of the NSI registry are still *locked in* to
NSI the registry.

This lock-in imposes a ponderous cost on the Internet community.  Every
COM, NET, or ORG domain name that is more than two years old is a domain
name for which the owner is stuck paying an annual fee to NSI, even though
the domain name owner might well prefer to be able to transfer the domain
name to a competitor of NSI and thus pay the annual fee (perhaps a smaller
annual fee!) to a registrar other than NSI.

I figure there are over two million domain names in COM, NET, and ORG that
are more than two years old.  These two million domain name owners are
stuck paying, collectively, seventy million dollars per year to NSI in
annual fees.  The actual cost to NSI to keep these two million domain names
in the COM, NET, and ORG zone files is *at most* a couple of dollars per
year per domain name.  Thus the seventy million dollars per year to NSI is
almost pure profit.  

On a per-day basis, it means NSI is raking in well over a hundred thousand
dollars per day in nearly pure-profit annual fees from "locked-in" domain
name owners.  

It means that *every day* that the US Government and ICANN permit the
"lock-in" to continue, the Internet community is paying a wholly
unnecessary tax to NSI of over a hundred thousand dollars.