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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?"
Sometimes the market is stupid. Sure let the market decide but I would like to see a large portion of the profits of domain names being taxed. Similar to the land tax ideas of Henry George (see http://www.henrygeorge.org and take the quiz - quite the eye-opener) massive profits on speculation on domain names is of no particular benefit to society. Maybe use the taxes collected to pay for additional net infrastructure.
90% of the wealth is in 2% of the pockets. Bummer to be in the majority.
This is frighteningly familiar...
does "gated community" have nothing but negative connotations?
My girlfriend and I used to think that, too. We live in a fairly big city-- one of the top 10 in the US, although that's as specific as I want to get-- with its share of upper class and lower class neighborhoods. While we were students we lived in some pretty cruddy parts of town because that's all we could afford, and we laughed at those idiots in their snobby gated communities. Every day we talked about how much we loved the character of our neighborhood, and how sterile those other places are.
Then some things happened. A car got broken into on our street. We noticed the police coming at all hours of the day and night to break up the domestic fights at our neighbor's house. And, most importantly, we got out of school and got real jobs.
Next month we're closing on a house in an expensive, gated community. Last year it was cold and sterile; today it's clean and pleasant. I can't describe how nice it is not to overhear anybody else's screaming in the middle of the afternoon, and to see clean sidewalks instead of uncollected trash and cars up on blocks in various states of disassembly.
Does that make me an elitist? Maybe. If so, I can live with that.
All I'm saying is, your opinion may change before you realize it.