Reading the blog post by Jeannie McPherson VeriSign’s Director of Product Management, Social Media and Mobile Applications, one has to wonder if she understands the business of domain names.
Ms. McPherson doesn’t like that TurnCommerce the company behind HugeDomains, DropCatch and NameBright is lobbying Congress
And yet, TurnCommerce has been actively lobbying our government to freeze the wholesale price of .com domain names. When they can buy .com names at capped wholesale prices, and mark them up to $2,500, $50,000, $1 million, or even $7 million, does anyone believe they are lobbying for continued price caps in order to protect consumers?
The majority of the country doesn’t care about domain names, not even a little. Domain speculators or “scalpers” as she called them do not sell more than 2 or 3 percent of their inventory on a yearly basis.
VeriSign however does get renewals on every name, every year.
At the end of the article there seems to be a veiled threat to domain investors.
The bottom line is this: Since our government continues to regulate .com prices, then we should make sure that price regulation actually benefits consumers, instead of contributing over a billion dollars to domain speculators every year.
How can we ensure that the intended benefits of the .com price caps actually accrue to consumers? Stay tuned – that question will be tackled in my next blog post, where I’ll explore this question with industry experts. You’ll be surprised at how simple and effective some of the answers will be.
We will stay tuned, you might not like the tune.
