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At last,
the contents of Aardvark's "million-dollar ideas" notebook
are revealed for all to see!
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Like most businesses, organisations or interest groups you probably either have,
or will soon need an internet domain name -- but how do you choose whether
to get a '.com/org/net' or a '.nz' one?
Well if price is a consideration -- you might as well rule out .nz right now.
You can register one of the generic TLDs (.com/net/org) for as little as NZ$25
but registering a brand new .nz name will cost you a whopping NZ$83.25 incl GST.
What's going on here -- why the massive difference in pricing?
Of course we all know that Domainz has incurred a huge number of unnecessary
and ill-advised expenses in recent years -- witness the new registry system
that's about to be trashed and the funding for a defamation suit brought by
the former CEO.
However, despite all these extraordinary expenses, Domainz seems to have still
been able to produce a profit of almost NZ$1.6 million from
a turnover of $4.5m.
What's going on here?
Surely it would be in the best interests of NZ and the desire/need to build
a distinctive knowledge-based economy that our new hi-tech industries proudly
carried a .nz domain name with them into the global marketplace?
Why, therefore, are we forced to pay more than three times as much for a
.nz name than for a generic TLD? Does Domainz really need a $1.6 million
dollar annual profit to allow for future operation of the NZ registry? I don't
think so.
Isn't a 35 percent profit margin extraordinarily high in the post dot-com
bust?
Surely the .nz namespace should be treated as a public resource and something
that should not be leveraged for extortionate profit by a monopoly provider?
Of course changes are in the wind and the move to a shared registry system (SRS)
will hopefully also produce some price-parity with generic TLDs.
Unfortunately, the move to an SRS is likely to take some time and perhaps,
in light of the grotesque profits announced by Domainz, it might be time
to lower the prices currently being charged -- or to provide a pretty damned
good reason why Domainz needs to make a 35% profit on those fees!
Aardvark also makes a summary of this daily column available via XML using
the RSS format. More details can be found
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