Would people be interested in registering personal IE domains if there was a special subdomain for it eg. name.ie or ainm.ie (or some other semantically logical derivative) ?
We get requests for IE domains every single day. In most cases they are from either registered businesses or similar, but we are seeing an increasing demand for personal domains. Unfortunately the IEDR's naming policies do not allow you to register something like micheleneylon.ie unless your business or activity is known by that name. So, for example, a published author can register their name, as can a politician or other public figure, however a private citizen cannot.
This does lead to issues, as people look at other cctlds, such as co.uk and see that they can register whatever they want, whereas with .ie not only are they more restricted by the naming schema, and are reduced to registering mjn1.ie or similar if they don't register a business name with the CRO
I can understand the IEDR's current rules in most instances, however maybe it is time that they introduced a new "section". Other countries have designated part of the namespace for specific areas, so .ac.uk is reserved for academic institutions and various other "areas" exist within other national registries. To date the Irish namespace has been flat. There is no differenciation between private businesses, government departments, education or personal space.
Would a change be of benefit or would it merely cause more problems that it solved?
The IEDR is not the organisation it used to be.
Earlier this year they reported profits, while they also made a move towards creating some form of "after market" in "secondhand" domains.
From a technical perspective there have been some significant changes, although most of them would not be visible to the end user but would be of great interest to companies such as ourselves that register domains on behalf of our clients.
Of course one of the obvious arguments against a move like this would be the current size of the cctld. I stress current, as a move like this could help to grow it significantly. However, for that to happen, these domains could not be priced at the existing level, which varies from €40 to over €100, depending on the reseller. If an individual could get their own domain for a price similar to that of a .com it would surely be attractive, however the IEDR may be able to argue against that pricing also.
On what grounds you may ask?
Well the IEDR is not like .com. It is not a fully automated system. Each and every registration and modification request has to be manually reviewed by the IEDR staff, who work from Monday to Friday. If you want to make a simple DNS change on a Friday evening, for example, you will have to wait until the following Monday morning before it can be enacted.
What can be done to address this situation?
The obvious answer would be to introduce a greater level of automation. If, for example, a system similar to Nominet's automaton was put in place then requests could be processed almost automatically. Needless to say there would have to be some level of verification, but surely a DNS change does not require a hostmaster's intervention? Surely the onus lies on the reseller or their client to know if they have setup their DNS correctly or not, as it will not be processed until it passes the DNS check in either case.
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This page contains a single entry by Michele Neylon published on June 19, 2005 4:23 PM.
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Shades of Mike Fagan's thinking about personal domains within .ie? To give Fagan credit where it is due, he did have a clue about marketing the .ie cctld.
A more highly automated service would really pave the way for the reduction of IEDR to merely being a registry rather than pseudo-registry with a pile of other hosters?
With the advent of .eu, I think that time is running out for IEDR to make a decision on this.
John
.eu may be of interest to business, but a personal .ie is a very different animal.
Michele
True Michele,
But the pricing of a personal domain is going to be critical. IEDR have to position it in the market so that it is a viable alternative to the cheap .com or .eu. The recent stealth opening up of .ie to foreign businesses with links to Ireland as tenuous as an invoice to an Irish company has diluted that whole "uniqueness" of .ie as a selling point. So how would you make the marketing argument for a personal domain if you were IEDR? :)
John
The entire point I was trying to make was based around 3 basic tenets:
- automation
- price
- separation
The three go hand in hand.
If you increase the level of automation, if only for this type of registration, then you do away with some of your costs. By extension this would allow for the IEDR to offer the domains (for this category) at a lower price, which should be reflected by the resellers.
One of the reasons why IE domains are still costing as much as they do, or rather selling at such a high price, is the lack of automation.
If you are managing less than 500 IE domains you might be able to try and win the market with pricing on IE domains, but ultimately the management and maintenance involved will oblige you to increase your sale price.
Introduce some form of API, even if only for personal domains, and the management overhead for the reseller is reduced or removed.
The IEDR have dropped the price on IE domains twice in the last 2 years, however only a very small number of IE resellers have reflected that in their own pricing. Maybe it is time for them to take action and not the IEDR?
As for the marketing argument ... it is not really needed, as the demand already exists.
The demand for a personal .ie has always existed. Indeed the .ie really started out as a personal cctld with a lot of personal .ie domains. Though when the current IEDR people took over the registry, all marketing clues disappeared. When the deregulation of .com took place and prices for a .com dropped from $70 a year to abou around $6 wholesale, the .com became the personal domain of choice.
Automation is essential. It is even more important with a potentially high traffic system.
The IEDR price reductions were a joke. A 50% reduction would drag the .ie into the real world and would be news. Maybe then the savings could be passed on.
Price - .ie should be at least 50% less with a two year minimum sign up perhaps?
Automation - IEDR should be automated. The registry should be run by the industry and with a common API.
Separation - There is a major problem if the personal .ie domains end up polluting the "business" quality of .ie cctld. The business quality and verification aspect is important.
On the separation point I would be in favour of splitting up the IE namespace so that this "dilution" wouldn't happen.
The problem with automation, although I believe it is surmountable, is the managed aspect of the registry. If you automate it completely you have to open it completely ie. do away with the rules etc. Some kind of middle ground is needed, where you can increase automation without ending up with a "free for all"