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TLD Registrar Wants To Charge $300 For .Pro Names
dipfan writes: "The commercialization of the net continues: RegistryPro, the ICANN-approved registrar of the new TLD name, wants to charge up to $300 for .Pro addresses - or about 10 times the price of a .com address. The company says it will restrict .Pro to doctors, lawyers or accountants: 'qualified professionals in good standing ... .pro will be a premium brand, enabling effective, secure communication between professionals and users for the first time in the history of the Internet.' The Washington Post quotes RegistryPro's chief executive: 'The goal of RegistryPro is to build out a gated community for professionals on the Internet.' Is this what happens when you give one company a license to print money?"
Why not just let the market decide?
.pro domain. There are after all other choices.
If people want to pay, that's fine. No one is forcing anyone to have a
I don't think there is really anything wrong with allowing people to pay for what is, in effect, a premium brand. (I won't be buying one.)
$300 is ridiculous. I remember trying to register a .tv domain, and they wanted $500.
"enabling effective, secure communication between professionals and users for the first time in the history of the Internet"
Um, no, it won' t be secure nor effective by default. LOL, this is not the first time secure and effective communication has taken place between "pros and users". Who do these people think they are? God?
Hacking the Network
I think it takes more than a nifty domain suffix to provide secure communications.
The revolution will be televised. Blackout restrictions apply.
Everybody simply black-hole the .pro TLD. I bet that'd reduce its premium-ness ;).
If we consider that Thawte is selling their 128-but SuperCerts at the price of US $300 per year, which is not even the highest price on the market (Verisign, $348, then:
it is completely understandable that the price is similar, as they are supposed to go into similar actions to verify the authentity of the registrant - or atleast this is what their marketing speach makes you think - that they only give this domain name for fully qualified registrants, this they can verify only by same procedures, as Thawte or Verisign. They sell different product, but need to do similar procedures to deliver the product
What is not understandable, is if their price for renewals is as high - as the work involved in renewal is minimal compared to first time granting. This is also the case with Thawte and Verisign, they charge way too much for the renewals too (Thawte, $300 Verisign $249 )
Are the .pro registry going to provide a warranty that all users of the .pro domain space are registered doctors, lawyers and accountants? If so, can I sue them if I am misled by an impostor? If not, where's the value in the domain?
http://www.glasswings.com/
Or does "gated community" have nothing but negative connotations?
I mean, unless you're one of those stuck-up, afraid-of-the-world, protect-my-possesions at-the-cost-of-community, keep-me-away-from-the unwashed-masses type of person who lives in one, I can't imagine anyone using these words in a good way...
-Russ
Me
Is this what happens when you give one company a license to print money?
No. If you give one company a license to print money, they will probably print money. However, if you give one company an artificial monopoly in a top-level domain name, they may pump-up prices due to lack of competition pressuring the price down.
And you're surprised, why?
Yes, .pro does sound like it will be a "kind of upper class boys club". So what?
.pro to have any value.
.pro to be visible on my network. If Bill O'Reilly has to pay radio stations for getting his new program out to listeners, I expect some sharing of revenue as well.
Except that upper class boys club uses my network and my customers to make it of any value. As a Internet service provider, they need my subscribers eyeballs and my infrastructure for
Sounds like I want $10.00 per month per subscriber to enable
*scoove*
Oh come on now. I would give you credit if you spent more than 5 years in school, but I imagine you undertook a co-op program and just have a B.S.
Doctors and Lawyers have 8 year programs and such. I would agree with your argument if you had received a PhD and spent 9 years in school but you can't expect every guy who gets an engineering degree (and man, there's a lot of them) to be considered a "professional" in the good-ole-boy sense that they are pushing for.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Why would a professional in a third world country want an uncommon TLD that is just part of an *English* word? There are lots of other domain names possible, no-one at all is forced to use .pro
.professional TLD, for example, or any number of other intuitive toplevel TLDs that would enable sufficient competition for the .pro TLD to be priced at fair market value.
.uk and .ca) have competing registrars that keep the price of a domain name in check. Those that don't (many counry specific ones like .tv) tend to be priced higher than a market of competing registrars would result in. .pro has no competing registrar, so it does enjoy something of a monopoly, or at least an oligarchical postion, in that ICANN severely restricts who can offer competing TLDs and has disallowed competing registars for .pro.
The problem is that the entire marketplace for domain names is unfree at several levels. ICANN enjoys an effective stranglehold on who is and is not allowed to join the domain name cartel and "compete." So while there are other names available, no one is free to start up a competing
The other TLDs (including some country-specific ones like
This does not a free market make, and until there is a truly free market (which would probably require the dismantling of ICANN to achieve) it is a fallacy, and a mistake, to assume that market forces will even be able to function in an unfettered fashion, with anything approaching the results one would normally expect and require from a market (lower prices and better quality, in short service of the public good).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I don't get this attitude of yours at all. On one hand a ton of people here on Slashdot bitch about how average people are morons and idiots some of them so stupid that they shouldn't be allowed to breed, and then you come across a situation where a group of people decides they have had "enough" of that kind of people so they make a gated community to protect them and shield them from it and you give them shit over it and mock them?
Can no one have discriminating tastes over those they choose to associate with? How the hell do you know they are sacrificing community? They may be as close as can be behind those gates simply because they KNOW they aren't living next to the unwashed masses. And whats so grand or great about the unwashed masses to begin with that no one should "dare" to move away from them or gate themselves off from them?
I don't think these people are afraid of the world, probably just tired of it. Stuck up perhaps, but being snobby isn't always a bad thing. If no one is able to say there is a point or a level of crap they won't tolerate anymore then no one anywhere would have any standards of any kind.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
.phd (which I'd like to get, but first I have to get grad schools to accept me) .engr (the people who *really* run the world.)
The narrowly-defined "professionals in good standing" can have all theIf anyone at RegistryPro would care to answer the following (here, for all to see), please:
1) define "professional"
2) define "in good standing" (as in with who?)
3) justify restricting which profession may purchase a domain. I am a NETWORK professional, in good standing with MY peers. I work with a CCIE who also deserves consideration. Between the two of us, we have 20+ years of additional classroom education (I have two degrees, both below a Masters.)
4) prove this will enable secure communication between anyone involved.