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?"

Comments

In good standing ??

[Tensor]

WTF do they mean by that.

I'm an engineer, and after 5 years of school, and 5 more being a professional i can't even apply for a .pro domain (not that i'd pay $300, but still)

What is Good Standing ? why is it limited to those 3 professions ? who decided this ? and why ??

Price Gouging may increase competition.

[AnotherLinuxUser]

If they carry on like this I can't help but wonder how long
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 .NET strategy).

(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.)

Compare it to Business Cards

[Schlemphfer]

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.

Localization,or"for the non-US residents of Earth"

[Confuse Ed]

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:

• there is not enough checking of the validity of peoples claims to them, e.g. .com's and .co.uk's can be owned by anybody, not necessarily real businesses (though at least the ".ltd.uk" domain is meant to be only available to registered limited companies)
• not enough people (either companies and consumers) are aware of them, so lots of companies still feel they need the ".com" domain when something else would really be far more appropriate
• There are too many overlapping domains that a company or service could register in (and a global ".pro" will only add to the confusion).

Re:Let the market decide

[mikosullivan]

... there is nothing stopping the country registrars from offering .pro.au or .pro.uk and the like.

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.

Is this what happens when you give one company ...

[Catbeller]

"Is this what happens when you give one company a license to print money?"

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.