🚀 go-pugleaf

>Let me try again.
>
>David Schwartz writes:
>> we handle domains in the future. But let's face it, if you got handed the
>> TLD '.DOQ' tomorrow, you'd need to put a lot of work into that domain
before
>> anyone was willing to pay much for it. Why should others get the benefit
of
>> your marketing for free?
>
>This presumes that there is value to being registered in one domain
>vs. another.  Apart from Netscape's [www.]hostname[.com] hackery, .com
>is no more valuable to new registrants than e.g. .biz.


    I don't think that's so. For one thing, many people looking for XYZ's
homepage will try www.xyz.com FIRST, so if your competitor has that, they
can steal much of the traffic looking for you. In addition, COM and BIZ are
more memorable than say FOZ or KSO. So there's value there as well. There's
also a difference in subjective prestige associated with 'NET' versus 'COM'
or 'EDU'. I have no reason to think this wouldn't extend to other domains as
well.

>This is separate from the value created by the cost of switching from
>one registry to another.  It is that value that is being handed to NSI
>without any effort on NSI's part.


    You don't need to do any special effort for it to be expensive for
people to change companies. Ford went through no special effort to make it
expensive for me to get rid of my Thunderbird and get a Saturn. People get
locked into vendors for many reasons.

    But don't mistake a large number of vendor choices, where all vendors
are locked into the same policy, for real vendor choice. If no registry can
accept a registration for an SLD with wildcards, don't fool yourself into
thinking there's vendor choice.

    David Schwartz