GNR's Claims invalid - RE: [registrars] GNR/PersonalNames Invitation to Teleconference and Background Information

["Bhavin Turakhia" <bhavin.t@directi.com>]

Hi,

I would have written this earlier (and god alone knows I have discussed
it with various .name representatives). 

* Firstly I think it is entirely incorrect and inappropriate for .NAME
to use as a reason that "we think you Registrars are not doing a GOOD
job at selling our names and so we wanna sell them ourselves". Most of
the reasons given below for our ineffectiveness are inaccurate and
incorrect. And this is obvious from the fact that Registrars are clearly
businesses with a profit motive. If a product is SELLABLE and PROFITABLE
there is no reason for Registrars to refuse additional profit to
essentially a similar audience for a similar product line.

The true reasons for the failure of .NAME have been mentioned OVER and
OVER again to GNR (atleast by me and I am presuming by others too). I
will highlight them below once again - and I am entirely against this
line of reasoning where GNR wants to bulldoze into our market on the
reason that "WE ARE UNDERPERFORMING". dotUS, dotINFO and dotBIZ have no
complaints with Registrars, and Registrars have nothing against GNR to
not peddle the product GNR is offering. The issue is .NAME as a product
initself fails in several respects - which could have been rectified by
GNR but have not been from over an year -

* Firstly the .NAME proposition was inordinately expensive. Listen to
yourselves below Charles. On one hand you state that .NAME is targetted
to individuals. On the other hand you price it on the same level as a
.COM. That does not make any sense. An individual will always have
lesser money than an Organisation. An individual thinks ten times before
spending a buck online (especially considering sub-domains, dyndns etc
are available free thru so many sources). For .NAME to be sold to an
individual in volumes it should be priced at less than $1-2 per year to
us so it may be sold at less than $4-5 per year to an individual. And I
do not see why GNR cannot do that. Considering that individual websites
will get lesser hits (and more geographically centric hits) than a
commercial website - it would mean lesser DNS requests on the Registry
servers and therefore lesser costs to GNR and therefore GNR can easily
extend a lower selling price.

* Ok I know what you are going to say. GNR has already lowered the
pricing. But that's completely incorrect too. The domain name still
costs the same. The domain name itself should cost less than 1-2
dollars. Noone wants the combo package. The email address is something
that will never really sell (more on this later). If you reduced the
combo price, you should actually reduce the pricing of the individual
underlying too which was not done. So you want to sell products to
individuals at the same yearly cost as you would to commercial companies
which can never happen

* Now lets turn our focus to your EMAIL ADDRESSES. They are a failure as
a product. And not because we as registrars have been unable to sell
them, but because they are a harmful product in the industry. Before you
point fingers at us you should realise that we registrars have been
selling email addresses and email forwarding solutions way before GNR
EVER came up. We are not bad at selling them, the .NAME email address
product initself is a wrong product. Most people do not want to buy a
.NAME email address because that directly puts them in a targettable
SPAM list for spammers worldwide. Think of the implications if mass
adoption of .NAME email addresses was to happen. Everyone could simply
send an email to millions of email addresses by simply combining
combinations of firstname and lastname from a TELEPHONE book. As it is
the issue of SPAM is so widespread. Now if you make the discovery of
email addresses so easy, obviously you cannot expect Customers to fall
for it. I myself would NEVER want a .NAME email address. Everyone would
immediately know how to contact me. I would get inordinate amounts of
SPAM. Spare me ..... Id rather go in for an email address that cannot be
automatically discovered which I would give out to those who I need to
communicate with me. When the industry is already moving towards White
lists approach for mailing, you cannot sell a solution that gives out
your email address to the world.

* Now next lets turn our focus to your DOMAIN NAME itself. That itself
is a failure product because the product is incomplete. Once again lets
repeat your statement - about wanting to target .NAME domains to
Individuals. Since you guys have been on the net as long as we have you
should realise that individuals DO NOT PURCHASE WEBSPACE. They generally
put up tiny websites on tripod, geocities etc. Now individuals would
like to buy domain names to point to these websites, however for this
they need DNS or Domain Forwarding services. That adds to the already
expensive cost. Considering that individuals do not expect a dramatic
number of hits to their website, the amount of money they are willing to
spend on these solutions is far lower than commercial websites. They
want a package deal where they could pick up a domain, and domain
forwarding for under $5 an year or so. Several websites give them sub
domains free so they would rather go in for a sub domain (which is also
a 3rd level name) instead of a .NAME (where total cost is likely to be
arnd $10 per year). We have been requesting domain forwarding free with
.NAME domains from the beginning. Without that there are only
speculators who will pick up michael.douglas.name ......

In short - it would help you tremendously if you conducted a round of
feedback and test marketing from Registrars before you jump in with a
"Registrars sales models have been inadequate" picture. We sell wateva
we can sell and wherever we can make money - there is no reason why we
should skimp out on .NAME.

We paid for .NAME TLD over a year ago and have not yet added it to our
interfaces - do you know why? Because each time we ask a question to our
resellers (we work on a reseller model) as to whether they want .NAME
added as the next product or something else (.us, .tv, .cc, domain
fwding, web hosting etc) they have always asked for the "something
else". This is because they do not percieve a great demand for .NAME as
the current product stands, unless significant differences and changes
are brought about.

I have personally spoken on various occassions about the above aspects
to people at GNR - with responses like "yea we are considering it", and
"yea we should be doing this" etc but its been over an year and the
product remains the same.

Eventually, it doesn't matter to me. I am all for business and free
competition. However I would only leave you with saying that - either
you could choose to blame us for shortfalls (without having done any
thing abt our constructive feedback) and go ahead and sell your names
yourselves (alienating us), or you could actually stand up and say you
will do something about the places where .NAME as a product fails and
help us make those sales instead.

Best Regards
Bhavin Turakhia
Founder, CEO & Chairman
Directi
----------------------------
Tel: 91-22-26370256 (4 lines)
Fax: 91-22-26370255
http://www.directi.com
----------------------------


> 
>             January 30, 2003
> Dear .NAME Registrar:
> The Global Name Registry Ltd operates the dot name registry. 
> We has received some inquiries regarding the upcoming launch 
> of Personal Names Limited, a registrar that is wholly-owned 
> by our parent company GNR Limited.  Personal Names Limited 
> was accredited by ICANN on  23 December 2002.  This note is 
> intended to provide the rationale behind the launch of the 
> new registrar. The Board of GNR Limited has been disappointed 
> with the results posted by Global Name Registry.  In the 9 
> month period ended 30 September 2002, Global Name Registry 
> sold only 85,633 registrations.  NAME registrations now trail 
> other new gTLDs by a dramatic amount.  On the same date BIZ 
> enjoyed 768,857 registrations and INFO enjoyed 951,018 
> registrations. [State of the Domain report Q3 2002] Of 
> course, Global Name Registry does not sell directly to the 
> public.  It sells to registrars, who resell the service the 
> public.  The registrar community has simply not delivered 
> NAME sales the way that they have delivered, and continue to 
> deliver, COM, NET, ORG, BIZ, INFO and US sales. Why? We 
> believe NAME is not selling at the same levels as the other 
> gTLDs for the following reasons:
> 1.      Most registrars sell domain names to businesses and 
> organizations, with a particular focus on small to medium 
> enterprises.  The NAME product is targeted at consumers.  
> Many registrars do not know how to communicate with or sell 
> to consumers, and have little consumer traffic to their web sites.
> 2.      The primary feature of interest to consumers is the 
> personalized email capability offered by the NAME product, 
> which guarantees consumers their last names, and provides 
> them with name portability and permanence.  Many registrars 
> have not tried to sell these features, instead focusing on 
> the domain name aspects of the product, which are of less 
> interest to the average consumer. 
> 3.      The NAME product is somewhat more complex than other 
> gTLDs, with three levels instead of two.  Many registrars 
> have not designed simple, easy to use registration and 
> modification tools for the consumer.
> 4.      Until recently, the NAME product cost considerably 
> more on a bundled basis (personalized email plus personalized 
> domain name) than other domain names.  Global Name Registry 
> charged registrars $13.25 for a one year registration bundle, 
> while other registries charge approximately $6.00 for a one 
> year domain name registration.  Responding to registrar 
> encouragement, Global Name Registry announced on 14 January 
> 2003 that it would be reducing its bundled one-year 
> registration price to $7.00 effective 15 February 2003. 
> Our research suggests that the market for personalized 
> consumer email is enormous.  There are 200 million online 
> users in North America, and 600 million worldwide.  The 
> primary application used by the vast majority of these 
> individuals is email.  A significant percentage of those 
> users do not enjoy email addresses that are easy to remember. 
>  But the registrar community has not even captured 2/100ths 
> of 1% of the global market opportunity.
> At GNR, we have come to the conclusion that we do not have a 
> sustainable business model if we continue to rely on the 
> current approach to NAME.   We need, but are not getting, 
> aggressive, creative techniques for reaching the consumer, 
> for promoting personalized-portable-permanent email, or for 
> creating registration engines that are consumer friendly.  In 
> fact, few registrars even give NAME placement on their home pages.
> So we have decided to create a registrar that is tailored  to 
> the NAME space, and focused on developing the kind of 
> marketing program designed to appeal to individual consumers. 
> Our new registrar, Personal Names Limited, will become a 
> development site for testing new strategies and tools for 
> marketing NAME.  Our intent is to share the best practices 
> that we develop with interested registrars.  Our hope is that 
> Personal Names Limited becomes a model for the industry to 
> follow.  It is in the best interest of Global Name Registry 
> for EVERY registrar that is accredited to sell NAME services 
> to enjoy success. Global Names Registry understands the 
> importance of our obligations as an ICANN -accredited 
> registry, including our obligation to provide equal access 
> for all registrars, and to maintain separation from Personal 
> Names Limited. We intend to uphold these obligations. 
> We hope this clarifies the questions surrounding the 
> registrar launch.  If you have any additional questions, 
> please feel free to address them to me or Francis Coleman, 
> our VP Law & Policy and General Counsel, during a conference 
> call at 12:00 Noon ET tomorrow - Friday, January 3. The 
> conference call number for those in the US is 1-334-323-6203, 
> and for those outside the US it is +44-207-162-0125. The 
> password is "Chuck Mancini".  For best results, you may wish 
> to call in 7 or 8 minutes before Noon. 
> Very truly yours,
> R. Charles Mancini
> CEO - GNR Limited
>