Webwork - 6:36 pm on Dec 11, 2006 (gmt 0)

[eweek.com...]

ICANN officials ended a week-long marathon of meetings in Brazil on Dec. 8 that produced a number of results, including ICANN's first ever Regional At Large Organization, the approval of the three registry agreements and the birth of the dot-asia top level domain.

Is a 10% cap on registry fees "fruit"? For whom?

Would you like to have a monopoly - over the address assignments and rate setting - for the addresses chosen by online agencies to build their webidentity upon?

"Oh, but you can chose a new domain name".

Yeah, but how about a) all those inbound links; b) all those indexed webpages; c) all those bookmarks; etc.?

Maybe the rate structure will work out.

Maybe all those speculative and marginally unprofitable parked domains will be dropped as the fees rise.

Maybe, as the parked domains drop out and no one claims them for actual end use the income to the registry will drop - causing the registry to have to charge more - since the marginally (un)profitable parkers will no longer be underwriting the actual users.

One thing I learned from studying economics is that when you push down on the balloon "over here" inevitably the balloon bulges out "over there".

And sometimes it bursts.

[edited by: engine at 3:57 pm (utc) on Dec. 12, 2006]
[edit reason] added quote [/edit]