What does the future hold for the IE namespace, the IEDR and their clients?
This year has seen a lot of movement in the world of domains, with .EU to launch shortly and a number of other fiascos and successes already destined to the history books.
Earlier this year we all thought that we would witness the launch of a dedicated namespace for “mature” content – .xxx – however this was “nipped in the bud” by a prudish US government administration.
Closer to home the Spanish registry relaunched with a much more relaxed set of rules, while the French registry continues to “open up”.
In Ireland things have been changing as well… Eddie Hobbs’ rants about “rip off Ireland” led some politically motivated providers to jump on the bandwagon in demanding lower prices for IE domains.
So what does 2006 hold for us all?
David Curtin, CEO of the IEDR, has promised price reductions, however the exact formula that will be used in giving these reductions is as yet undecided.
Curtin is aware that a price reduction is necessary, but he is also aware that those companies handling IE domain registrations in larger quantities require more than just a pure price break.
So what is required?
For an IE domain price drop to be of any real use to end users the resellers need to pass it on to their clients and not just their reseller clients. Only by passing on the price reduction to ALL clients will the overall perception of the IE namespace be changed.
However, in order for the price drop to be passed onto the end user other things need to change.
Although most companies handling large volumes of IE domains have done some work on automating parts of the process, there is still no official API available. This means that every minor modification to a contact detail or DNS has to be submitted manually and verifed by the IEDR staff before it is “accepted”.
Although most of us can appreciate the importance of retaining quality data in the IE zone a higher level of automation needs to be introduced.
If there were more automation then there would be a lower staff overhead on the management of IE domains, which could be passed onto the end user.
There are other issues that the IEDR may need to work on with regard to the overall quality of the reseller program. To date there has never been a clearly defined role of registry and registrar within IE namespace. Resellers are given better pricing based primarily on volume of sales with little or no technical competency criteria being required. The IEDR management may wish to disagree on this point, but I somehow doubt that the statistics would agree. The technical requirements for managing IE domains are hardly that stringent when compared to other ccTLDs, such as .de.
Another aspect that seems to cause no end of confusion with the smaller resellers is the actual criteria for domain registration ie. the rules and regulations. As so many of the smaller resellers seem to have issues with understanding the rules and regulations I can imagine that they are putting an unnecessary strain on the IEDR’s resources.
It would, therefore, seem plausible that the IEDR maybe forced to “raise the bar”.
Considering that they are probably going to be introducing a higher level of automation and lowering prices this would only seem reasonable.
However I am fairly confident that no matter what happens there will be those who will wish to moan and groan and make illfounded and possibly inaccurate statements if the status quo is changed in any way..
Only time will tell …
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