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TLD Registrar Wants To Charge $300 For .Pro Names

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the mercantilsm-has-its-privileges dept.

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?"

8 of 381 comments (clear)

  1. Let the market decide by iangoldby · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why not just let the market decide?

    If people want to pay, that's fine. No one is forcing anyone to have a .pro domain. There are after all other choices.

    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.)

    1. Re:Let the market decide by reemul · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sure, .pro is a monopoly. In the same sense that Pepsi has a monopoly on, well, Pepsi. Plenty of other beverages in the world, but you bet, only Pepsi can sell Pepsi. Bastards.

      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, and frankly if that name did become wildly popular there is nothing stopping the country registrars from offering .pro.au or .pro.uk and the like. If you want to get angry about something absurd in this market, complain about how small countries got good extensions just by a quirk in their names. No-one seems to be complaining about the folks in Moldova who got .MD, you'd think doctors would be lining up for that one. And the folks in Tonga just sold off the rights to .TO to some corporation. Tuvalu went for the big bucks with .TV, what did they do to deserve a good name for free? That sort of thing seems far more unfair than some desparate internet company trying to cash in on a new TLD by charging higher rates.

      And while $300 does seem a little stiff as domain registration fees go, its still pretty cheap compared to other means of creating name awareness - that's the equivalent of a couple of boxes of business cards, some letterhead, and a small sign over the door. Not a big ticket item for a company looking to improve their image.

      --
      You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
    2. Re:Let the market decide by Xzzy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Whole concept of "good" and "bad" domains is so laughably absurd, the arrival of new tld's and people's attempts to hype them up turns it from "roll ones eyes" to "I just lost faith in humanity".

      When are people gonna realize that DNS does NOT scale well to the business world?

      When is a system going to arrive where joe schmoe just types in the name of the company he wants into his browser, it resolves to an ip, and away he goes. Or if there's multiple matches, the browser fetches the full company name, perhaps their market (eg "computers" or "vacuum cleaners"), a street address, and maybe a phone number. Joe user goes through the list, selects the company he wants, and again, away he goes.

      No clever domains, this asinine "domain name" market dissapears, and every company gets represented the way they want to be.. by their very own, human readable name.

      DNS for more than basic name->ip translation is a joke, and the fact an entire industry has sprung up about it only proves that.

      DNS names should NOT be a method of brand recognition.

  2. Ridiculous by RoC+MasterMind · · Score: 3, Insightful

    $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
  3. Perfectly suitable price by jukal · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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 )

  4. Let the Service Providers decide by scoove · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes, .pro does sound like it will be a "kind of upper class boys club". So what?

    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 .pro to have any value.

    Sounds like I want $10.00 per month per subscriber to enable .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.

    *scoove*

  5. Re:In good standing ?? by lkaos · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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));
  6. Re:In good standing ?? by Jaeger · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Personally, I'd go for a few more tld's:
    • .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 the .pro domains the can handle.