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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?"
WTF do they mean by that.
.pro domain (not that i'd pay $300, but still)
I'm an engineer, and after 5 years of school, and 5 more being a professional i can't even apply for a
What is Good Standing ? why is it limited to those 3 professions ? who decided this ? and why ??
If they carry on like this I can't help but wonder how long .NET strategy).
it will be before Microsoft (and possibly AOL) offer their own
competing DNS services. (Indeed MS could well have this in
mind as a future part of their
(Yes, I know about some of the other alternative registrars
but they are small and (unfortunately) don't have the brand
recognition for the non tech-savvy to use them.)
Bah. Just like the elitist fscks down the road who want to build an 'exclusive community' on public infrastructure paid for with my taxes .
Let these asswipes manage their own root server. When the thing is 0wn3d by some teenager from Singapore, I'll be the first one in line to laugh.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
In a cyber-world of English companies with .com domains, Irish companies with .co.uk domains, ANY company with a .tv domain, it is quite clear to me that the original ideal of "relevant TLD suffixes" has never worked, and will never work in the future.
That said, it IS a good way of screwing laywers out of their hard-earned cash ($1000 for a letter??? I'll give you 4 for free!!!)
Who on earth thinks people still go for the extension? People should save their 300 bucks. Google's where it's at.
This is the age-old scam called the cred-con. You create a new nightclub with an exclusive looking facade and then you put out a velvet rope and a bouncer and you only let in one out of 1000 people. And then you charge a "premium" and let anyone in throught the back door.
Professionals are the demographic who least need a web presence. Is this just a scam to attract other scam artists who want to present their own facade of credibility.
un déception par jour maintient le docteur parti
consider coffee a lubricant that helps one penetrate the coding zone
Reading this, I couldn't help but think of the lead character's obsession with business cards in American Psycho. For professionals, a personal website today serves much of the role that business cards served in the 1980s.
Any website or businesscard will contain your contact information. But some people want more than that. They want to shell out extra money to make a statement. The extra $280 that they pay for a .Pro domain serves a purpose--it distinguishes them from the .Com rabble.
I hate to admite it, but what this company is doing with .Pro domains is innovative. If they market it well to people who want to make a statement, it'll sell. After all, we live in a world where loads of people spend $250 extra to get a gold plated nameplate on their Toyotas. Never underestimate the number of insecure people with money to spend.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Surely just like the ".com" tld, this is going to cause problems for both consumers and suppliers of accounting / law services with a lack of localization (if anybody takes them up on the £300 offer of course).
I think that the tld's should be reserved for global things only, e.g. java.sun.com seems good, sun is a multinational company, and the same java is used the world over. (and as a counter-example, I've seen people looking for the U.K safeway chain caught out by www.safeway.com, using the store locator and being given an address in Florida).
It does however seem a good idea for governments (or some other authority) to try to set up "authoritive" sources of information that people are more aware of, and with suitable degrees of localization.
For example if I want accurate information on Tax or benifits in the U.K, I'll start of with a google search including "site: .gov.uk", as I'm pretty sure that they don't let just anybody have a .gov.uk domain, or for non-crackpot theories of relativity, limit to "site: .ac.uk" or "site: .edu", or to find a local doctor, something under ".nhs.uk" for the national health service seems a good bet.
Back to the ".pro" idea, this is already partially implemented with for example the ".co.uk", ".com", ".ltd.uk" domains, except that:
Yes, it takes a nifty domain suffix AND a group of people stupid enough to pay outrageous fees to get the suffix.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
I wonder if that is how it would really turn out. If .pro did become popular, and then other countries started offering .pro.au and .pro.us then I bet the .pro people would sue over some perceived brand dilution.
Miko O'Sullivan
And so far, in every case, they've failed. .biz, .name, .pro, .museum (well, that _might_ make it, but not at the price their offering), all 4 of those are current failures in our eyes. and they're failures not because the company couldn't handle the registrations; they're failures because they suck, and we know it.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Um, YES!
Free markets are wonderful, up until a supplier gets a monopoly. Or collusion starts up. Then the lovely free market rapidly turns into a bloodsucking operation.
This, kids, is why we have "government". It's sort of this organization we collectively create to protect our national interests. It requires politicians and statesmen, not business majors, to review markets and issue controls.
We are now commencing a wonderful experiment in government by anti-government zealots. Watch what happens... inflation, monopoly, and control of markets by people who don't have our national interests at heart.