Uniregistry
OpenSRS changed its accusatory claims against Uniregistry within hours of publishing a corporate blog post, signed by Haley Midgette.
The original statement by OpenSRS asserted the following:
“We no longer support the TLDs that have the potential to be disruptive to your business.”
This far-fetched statement further asserted:
“What do we mean by “disruptive to your business”? The decision to discontinue support for these select TLDs was made to protect you and your customers from unknowingly overpaying in a price range well beyond $100 per year. “
The “business disruption” claim is completely baseless, as Uniregistry has already grandfathered all 9 of its gTLDs that receive the highest price increases for existing registrations.
In other words: all existing, grandfathered domains will continue to receive the same low pricing as before. So how is this being “disruptive to business”?
Within hours, OpenSRS retracted that statement, substituting it with the following copy:
“We will no longer support the TLDs with exponential price increase. The decision to discontinue support for these select TLDs was made to protect you and your customers from unknowingly overpaying in a price range well beyond $100 per year.”
That statement conveniently fails to state that all new registrations of domains, between now and September 8th, in Uniregistry gTLDs that are grandfathered will continue to enjoy the same, original renewal pricing after the September 8th price increase.
Furthermore, OpenSRS is opening the floodgates for all potential future price increases in any gTLD, by any Registry, such as Donuts, MMX and others; currently, there is no set limit to price increases for gTLDs, something that ICANN “conveniently” did not implement.
If OpenSRS were to stop providing support for such affected new gTLDs by other Registries, who would be the one “disrupting business” in that sense?
In our opinion, OpenSRS chose to issue this drama-laden statement as a means of dropping the ball to implementing the necessary code changes to its system, in order to facilitate price grandfathering.
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I think they are actually doing the right thing by bringing this out to the public. It maybe be the best thing ever for new gTLD’s.
It will give them credibility!
It is totally not acceptable that they can have no limit on their prices.
They need to be either telling people that truth or otherwise find a way to cap the price. It’s about time this is addressed across the board. These new gTLD’s are not supervised like com or .net or ccTLD’s!
They should not be sold as an alternative since most people are unaware that there is a very loose pricing model with very few limitations.
Snowflakes being snowflakes! OpenSRS hurt my feelings. 🙁 I’m going to complain, let’s see where that gets you? A participation trophy will soon be on it’s way!
Mo – I agree that there should be a provision in the ICANN gTLD contracts to cap prices. And that’s something that ICANN needs to address before allocating new gTLDs in a new round.
What ICANN asks for, is a 6 month “fair warning” to Registrars before a Registry increases their prices, hence the September 8th deadline.
It all comes down to the Registries using common sense in their pricing model. But Registrars can’t claim they didn’t know, or that it’s “disruptive to business” and blame the Registries instead.