[ga] RE: [icann-delete] WLS Input - Greatest Good vs. Benefits of the Few
Title: Message Ron, I was the one registrar who said “when Verisign goes live with the WLS, we would offer it.” But before I made that statement I also said, “in my opinion in doesn’t matter what decision we come up with today, I think Verisign will go through with the WLS no matter what the registrars opinions are!” I went on to say that I thought the price was WAY too high, but it was an interesting concept. But don’t get too excited yet.
The WLS will be the end of Snapnames! If the WLS goes live either using the Snapnames technology or not, the snapnames service that is offered today on their site will no longer exist as it does today. So Snapnames has the largest amount to lose in this entire proposal. If the WLS never goes live, Snapnames will continue as usual. If the WLS goes live as proposed, they will all be rich and happy. If the WLS goes live, without using the Snapnames technology, all of their employees will be looking for new jobs! So this must go through for Snapnames to stay in business.
WLS without the Snapnames technology? Sit down and think about what would be involved in creating this technology. I mapped out the entire WLS backend technology on a napkin in 10 minutes. It’s very easy! And I would give my technology away for free, not charge $40 a domain for it. Sure, it might not be in some pretty 90 page pdf file with all of the EPP commands, but mine comes with some doodles on the top of the napkin and is a lot cheaper.
Let’s talk about chargebacks with the WLS system. Let’s pretend I’m Enom (the have said they will charge $1.00 over their cost). A customer comes to the site and does a “WLSback” or whatever it’s going to be called. They want donny.com, because they really don’t like Donny Osmond. So they pay their $47.00. The initial $40.00 goes to the new registry Verisign/Snapnames and the $7.00 goes to the registrar. If the domain is really registered, then $6.00 would go to Verisign and the registrar would get their $1.00 profit. And now they can go on that vacation to the bankruptcy court you always wanted.
But guess what? The customer didn’t get donny.com, because the current registrant renewed the domain. So the customer charges back on you. So let’s see you are now out $40.00, because you already paid Verisign/Snapnames and you can’t get a refund, and you are out the chargeback fee, which we will say is $20.00. So you are out $60.00, because the customer charged back on you, because they were confused about the service. Now you have to sell 60 more “WLSbacks” to break even again!
How does the WLS system handle chargebacks? It’s never been mentioned.
The WLS will NOT lower the number of check domain queries send to the registry, in fact I bet it will more than double the current number of queries. It’s simple, every registrar that would offer it would do the “check if domain is available for WLSback” command, whenever anyone does a search on their site. Since right now on our site if somebody does a search for a word, we show them if the .com, .net and .org are available or not. With the WLS, we would also check to see if the “WLSback” is available for the .com and .net. So at least from our site you will get a 66% increase in lookups of some type.
I was talking to one of our customers yesterday about the WLS system, because I respect his opinion since he owns a few domains. I told him that I didn’t like what we would have to charge him if the current pricing scheme stays the same. When I told him the price he was overjoyed that it was so expensive. His quote was “It will keep all of the normal people out of the business!” He went on to say that Verisign should charge $5000.00, so that only 3 or 4 people would be able to buy domains. I know that I don’t have the money to “blow” on a domain that I might not even get and I am sure 99% of our customers are the same way.
Trust me nobody on the conference call had anything good to say about the WLS system except for myself. Even the Verisign representative decided not to comment on any of the proposals. I like the concept of the WLS, but not the current implementation! IMHO, there is no reason for Snapnames to be involved with this system. There is no need for their “technology”; it’s a very simple process. Without their technology, Verisign would still have to create another registry/company, since ICANN won’t allow Verisign to sell domains to registrars for more than $6.00. So they could funnel the deleted domains through the other company and do it that way. This is why we have a “technology partner” with this proposal.
I say Verisign should just buy Snapnames and get this all over with!
Donny
-----Original Message-----
Rather than respond to individual response documents and e-mail posts, please find attached aconcise document, in PDF format.
Cheers, Ron
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