Edwin,

Two points:

Firstly, who pay's your bills? Your antipathy to businesses making a buck
would look better if you lived in a $100 a week shack and worked as a
volunteer in a non-profit organisation.

We all profit from our economic activity. Individually we profit from our
jobs by way of our salaries after our expenses. Or at least we aim to
profit. This entire avenue of discourse about wealthy registrars is
irrelevant and condescending. Far from making registrars evil, profiting
makes us just like everybody else.

Secondly, I have no issue with the rest of your post - it's quite
interesting - good research.

What it does show is that Belgium, Netherlands and Germany - three countries
generally accepted to be advanced wrt the development of their internet
economies have dramatically higher ccTLD domain per capita penetration than
Australia.

The missing piece of the puzzle here is not what this says about the
relative wealth of these countries, but rather how well supported their
businesses communities are by the domestic domain name industry and
regulatory regime.

Australia has 1.2m non AU domain names. Double the number of .AU names. A
far higher ratio than the three countries mentioned. Many may say 'so what'.
I think it's a scandal that our regulatory regime drives Australian
businesses to register .com's over .AU's. Regardless of the relative merits,
it is auDA's job to SUPPORT uptake of .AU for Australian's, no RETARD that
uptake as it does.

Larry

-----Original Message-----
From: dns-bounces+larry.bloch=netregistry.com.au§dotau.org
[mailto:dns-bounces+larry.bloch=netregistry.com.au§dotau.org] On Behalf Of
Edwin Groothuis
Sent: Thursday, 8 June 2006 5:41
To: .au DNS Discussion List
Subject: Re: [DNS] france ditches magic number requirement Re: Domaindispute
heats up


On Thu, Jun 08, 2006 at 03:10:43PM +1000, Vic Cinc wrote:
> you can argue over the historical accuracy over which name space did 
> what when but it doesnt change the fact that australia for a wealthy 
> country has one of the lowest name space penetrations in the world.

I really don't consider the amount of registered domain names an indication
of how wealthy a country is. It only shows how wealthy the registars are.

> the rules have significantly stagnated take up of names in australia. 
> even a little tiny country like belgium has a million names (double 
> our numbers) with half our population.

Belgium isn't that small. For example, it has two languages so a lot of the
domains are registered twice for the same name.

Please walk with me (data coming from the CIA world fact handbook. Despite
their bad information gathering now and then, I do still consider it an
authoritative source of information)

I have always considered the statistics of .be, .de and .nl more or less the
same population consistency and economy style. So what you say about .de you
can say about .nl and .be:

Belgium has 10 million people, 2.2 million internet hosts and 5.1 million
internet users. And 1 million domain names.
Ratio: 0.22 / 0.51 / 0.10

The Netherlands has 16 million people, 7 million internet hosts and 11
million internet users. And 2 million domain names.
Ratio: 0.43 / 0.68 / 0.13

Germany has 82 million people, 7.7 million internet hosts and 48 million
internet users. And 9 million domain names.
Ratio: 0.09 / 0.59 / 0.11

Except for the number of internet hosts, this is more or less right.


Let's see the rest of Europe:

The UK has 61 million people, 4.5 million internet hosts and 38 million
internet users. And 5 million domain names.
Ratio: 0.07 / 0.62 / 0.08

High internet uptake, but a lower domain name ratio.


France has 60 million people, 3 million internet hosts and 26 million
internet users. And 490 thousand domain names.
Ratio: 0.05 / 0.43 / 0.01

And a very much lower ratio here. 


Australia has 20 million people, 5.3 million internet hosts and 14 million
internet users. And 500 thousand registered domains.
Ratio: 0.27 / 0.70 / 0.03

Japan has 127 million people, 21 million internet hosts and 86 million
internet users. And 830 thousand domain names.
Ratio: 0.17 / 0.68 / 0.01



What does this show? That the population, the number of internet hosts, the
number of users and the number of domains registered have absolutely nothing
in common.



Last one, if you're looking at these big top-level-domains, you need to look
at the number of domains active vs the number of domains parked, the expire
rate of the domains, the registration rate and the renewal rate.

If 100 domains expire today, and 100 new ones are registrered, the growth is
0. If 100 domains get renewed today, the growth is still 0. But you still
make 200 * AU$ some random number. Not bad for a industry where the only
real costs are the people to sell the goods.


Edwin

-- 
Edwin Groothuis      |            Personal website: http://www.mavetju.org
edwin§mavetju.org    |          Weblog: http://weblog.barnet.com.au/edwin/
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