On Sat, 10 Jul 1999 19:22:04 -0700, Kent Crispin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>On Sun, Jul 11, 1999 at 12:26:19AM +0000, William X. Walsh wrote:
>[...]
>> A registry is no more a monopoly than a car manufacturer is Kent.
>
>There is no lock-in involved with cars -- if I don't like my toyata,
>I can get a honda or a ford, for just the cost of a new car.
>Changing cars doesn't involve significant switching cost. Changing
Sure it does. You already have a lot of capital invested in your car,
Kent. Probably more than your domain.
>domains involves huge switching costs -- amazon.com is embedded in
>hundreds of thousands of urls, it is loaded in search engines, etc
>etc. If amazon.com did not resolve for even a few days the damage to
>amazon would be catastrophic, perhaps fatal. "amazon.com" is worth
>millions to amazon, but almost nothing to the registry. Even in the
>case of songbird, the world's smallest web business, the value of the
>domain name far exceeds the cost of maintaining it.
>
>That's not like a car manufacturer. It's a monopoly.
Its not a monopoly. The simple fact is the registry depends on its
image and service levels. It must be able to compete with other
registries. The more registries there are, the less monopolistic
registries will appear.
>> Provided there are no artificial limits placed on the number of
>> registries and the models underwhich they operate.
>
>The lock-in effect is not materially eased by having a wide choice
>of TLDs available to switch to. There could be a thousand
>alternatives to .com -- if anything, that would only make amazon's
>problem worse -- if .biz were the only alternative, at least people
>could guess the new URL.
>
>In other words, for a $35 commodity you get a lock-in effect similar
>in magnitude to real estate, which is orders of magnitude more costly.
>
>The fact is, a TLD is a monopoly, regardless of how many TLDs there
>are.
Your logic is faulty, Kent. You twist it to suit your purpose.
--
William X. Walsh
General Manager, DSo Internet Services
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax:(209) 671-7934
"The fact is that domain names are new and have unique
characteristics, and their status under the law is not yet clear."
--Kent Crispin (June 29th, 1999)
