Bob Helfant writes:
> At 11:28 AM 2/27/98 -0800, Kent Crispin wrote:
> >the pen to change. If Amazon.com is forced out of .com because of
> >some policy change by NSI it will cost them hundreds of thousands of
> >dollars. This extra expense has no relationship to the $50 it might
> >cost them to register in .shop, for example.
>
> How many times have companies had to change TLDs because of NSI policy
> changes. This sounds like a "sky is falling" scenario.
I don't think you understand, Bob.
I've paid NSI well over the purported $50 a year because they keep
losing records about my payments. I pay them that money because losing
piermont.com would destroy my business for weeks if not longer. I
can't afford to change my domain name, either -- it would cause me
substantial disruption. Because of this, I'm ripe for corporate
blackmail.
I know many others who've had to do this, too, in the real honest to
god world.
> On the other hand, GlobeComm changed TLDs about 8 months ago and did
> not have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was more
> like zero dollars.
No new business cards? No employee time spent changing mailing list
subscriptions, informing people of new mailing addresses, etc? It
doesn't cost zero dollars to change your phone number, or even to make
a phone call, and you expect us to belive changing your domain name
can be a zero cost thing?
Hell, even if I just had to reprint all my business cards that would
be a cost. Take a company like IBM with several hundred thousand
employees -- changing their business cards alone can easily cost in
the millions of dollars. Imagine how much it would cost Netscape --
which has deployed tens of millions of copies of its browser with
"www.netscape.com" hard coded into it.
The 800-HOLIDAY situation which kept Holliday Inn from changing their
800 number provider even though another carrier could provide far
cheaper service is the canonical example of why 800 number portability
was important. The analagous situation in domain names is equally
obvious.
You aren't going to convince anyone that you can just switch domain
names and be fine, Bob.
Perry
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jan 30 2000 - 03:22:26 PST