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.
well, we may not like it, but increasing price, let’s say to 35 USD, would deter a big part of domain speculation where the big profiteers are speculators, not the general public.
now, on the other hand, Verisign makes a lot of money from speculators, that includes Registrars that are also speculators.
Oh right Jose, but they don’t have the power to raise to $35, that’s what I think they are pissed off about.
I agree 100%, without domain name speculators the domain name industry would look a heck of a lot different! Not in a good way for sure.
Amazing what seems so basic to some of us is foreign to others and she is one of them.
This Blog is just a thinly-veiled attempt to lay the blame on the .COM price increases right at the feet of the evil “domain scalpers”, and shift it away from Verisign.
“Don’t blame us for raising .COM prices, we’re fighting for consumers and business”
VM Freeman
DomainRecap.com
Well said, Raymond. The person who wrote that post on their blog sounds very naive.
We got a Saying Down here in Texas
“COME AND TAKE IT!”