Quoting Anand Kumria on Tuesday May 18, 2004:
| 
| I'm not privy to the agreement between auDA and AusRegistry but you seem
| to be saying that the AusRegsitry prices are what it (the agreement)
| stipulates.

All parties tendered with a fixed price. I am trying to find the
archived RFT on the new auDA website but I haven't found it so far, but
it states the criteria in there.

| I'm not so sure, you make the point later on that many people envisage a
| multi-registry .au system. Do you mean many parties competing at the
| AusRegsitry level? If so, then I think the markup I put forward is
| meaningful.

A registry is a natural monopoly. You can have multiple parties running
different 2LDs, but not the same. So, hypothetically, one registry could
operate .com.au, another .net.au, another .asn.au etc. This was in fact
how it was before 2002.

So, no, you can't have multiple registries competing at the same
resource, as there needs to be a monopoly at the top controlling
allocation. That is in effect exactly what a registry is, and in the
current .au environment, most of the work in a domain transaction is
distributed down into the competitive registrar level.

| > There is basically one anomoly with Germany (~8 million domains), but
| > that has less to do with price, than the fact the ISP industry that
| > basically gives a domains as part of their products to almost everyone
| 
| Huh? That has everything to do with price. If domains were cheap enough
| to give out to customers, don't you think ISPs in Australia would? Not
| only would it "add value" it also raise the profiles of .au domains.

Well, .com's are approximately the same price as .de's; and American
ISPs don't give them out for free as standard. .uk's are about the same,
and UK ISPs don't give them out for free as standard. 

Whilst undoubtedly cost was a contributing factor toward ISPs taking
this approach, again, you can't correlate price with uptake in this
simplistic way. 

But if what you say is true, given that .com's cost the same for
Australian ISPs as they do to German ISPs, why aren't Australian ISPs
giving them out .com's to every customer for free?

Besides, it is misleading type of uptake if a large percentage don't
even use the domains they have been given. Is that what you want,
millions of .au's handed around, sitting around idle? You could argue as
there is no money involved for the end user, they have little considered
value, and there is a greatly diminished desire to either conserve or
utilise them.

| I'm not sure where you got this data from but that is an interesting
| tidbit.

VeriSign and Afilias.

| I, obviously, disagree. Long-term viability is about raising the profile
| of .au domains. I'd rather the various parties had sacrificied
| short-term profit for long-term gain.

One of the reasons AusRegistry was selected, as far as I understand, is
their tender included approaches to market the .au namespace that was
part of the tender criteria. Applicants to run the registry had to
provide plans for promoting the .au namespace, and that was evaluated
with the other factors.

(I'll point out here I was not involved in the tender process. I had
worked for one company that ended up submitting a bid, so it was
inappropriate for me to be involved for probity reasons.)

| > Then you'd end up with an exhausted domain supply, with auDA and 
| > AusRegistry and the registrars running all the way to the bank. 
| 
| I'm sure some would argue that is/has occured. Which is why I see the
| current situation arising from short-term concerns.

It is worth noting that auDA is a not-for-profit organisation, and can't
really make a profit. It is actively working on a new auDA base fee for
the 2004-2005 FY.

kim