Re: An observation

["Marty Modell" <ir001264@mindspring.com>]

If I remember my marketing courses correctly, brand name development 
can exist only where there is competition.  As innumerable perople 
have pointed out NSI has a defacto monopoly on .com.  If NSI has done 
anything, and I strongly suspect that they didn't have a hand in it, it was to 
promote the posession of a home page, any home page, as a status 
symbol for both personal and commercial interests.  Today they are 
the only source of unique home page URLs, that discounts such 
home pages as mine which resides on my ISP's server under their URL

I doubt whether the purchasers of unique URLs care what NSI.  And I 
suspect that they also don't care whether they get their URL from NSI, NSF, IANA, IAHC, or little boy 
blue. I also suspect that given no frame of reference or comparison, 
the cost could be $2, $20, $200, or even $2000.  If that is the 
price then that is the price.  But I also suspect that those same 
would be purchasers would not pay anything for a unique URL under 
.XXX or anything else without a lot of publicity to informe them and 
convice them that .XXX and .COM hold equal weight and have equal 
status. If you doubt that ask the folks trying to sell alternative 
yellow page space (the hard bound kind that folks use to look up 
phone numbers)


> Subject:       Re: An observation
> To:            iahc-discuss@iahc.org
> Date:          Mon, 30 Dec 1996 16:26:54 -0800 (PST)
> From:          durrell@innocence.com (Bryant Durrell)

> Simon Higgs writes:
> > The first, and most important thing NSI did to develop .COM as a brand
> > was to place a higher perceived value on each domain than it's annual
> > fee. They did this by charging $100 for registration. They could have
> > charged $50.00, and just had each domain renewed every year, but they
> > didn't. They made the cost of entry a higher value than the per year
> > cost for each SLD. Anything that costs something has to be worth
> > something in the eyes of the consumer, or they will never buy into it
> > in the first place. Since that time the .COM space has been plagued by
> > name horders and speculators.
> 
> Huh?
> 
> Speaking as someone who used to handle half the new domain
> registrations at Netcom, I'd say that the horders and speculators were
> out in force well before NSI started charging.  Clearly the number has
> increased, but then again, so has the number of spammers and that 
> didn't have anything to do with the .COM fees.  Further, there 
> hasn't been any notable increase in the number of people speculating
> in .ORG, and that costs too.
> 
> I think, with all due respect, that your analysis is a bit off.
> 
> -- 
> Bryant Durrell (sysadmin, cynic, coyote) | "well, it seems doable so we should
> durrell@innocence.com / durrell@bofh.net |  do it.  if we can't then we should
> http://www.innocence.com/~durrell        |  get no biscuits."  -- tim@meer.net
> 
--  
Marty Modell                     e-mail: ir001264@mindspring.com 
      http://www.mindspring.com/~ir001264/Home.htm         
                  author of 
      A Professional's Guide to Systems Analysis
         Second Edition - McGraw Hill - 1996