The controversy surrounding the timing of the sale of PIR, managers of .ORG, is ongoing.
Time will tell whether there was an underlying agenda in how the acquisition of PIR by fresh corp Ethos Capital followed the uncapping of .ORG prices, with the blessings of ICANN.
For now, it seems that renewal fees are of little consequence to buyers of quality .ORG domains, because even at $100 /year a non-profit would be paying about a month’s worth of phone services. Oh, and the domain renewal fee itself is a tax expense too.
Take for example Brasil.org, that was auctioned yesterday – a dropped domain name – at DropCatch.
The auction of Brazil’s native name in Portuguese (Brasil) fetched a nice $4,240 dollars. A dozen years ago, Mexico.org sold for $21,000 dollars – back in the day, PPC was healthy and arbitrage ruled supreme.
If you have quality .ORG domains, don’t be rushed to ditch them under pressure from an unconfirmed future price increase in renewal fees. And if that happens, dot .COM will surely follow suit.
Ah yes, the old phone bill argument.
Yes, if the renewal fee was $1,000, registrants would just have to forego one flight a year. Hardly much of a sacrifice is it? Plus, it’s better on the environment, No carbon emissions and such.
If the fee was $50,000 a year, nonprofits would just need to let go of one employee a year to pay for the domain. They could easily replace that employee with an intern or volunteer.
Let’s all just keep on justifying unjustifiable price hikes.
Todd – I don’t see much of an argument in your exaggerations.
ICANN is coming under increasing pressure over this deal. It certainly wouldn’t be a good thing to drop quality .ORGs at the moment as the whole situation is in flux. The problem isn’t as much with renewals as with the perceived quality of .ORG and if that’s affected by the deal, then the value of those premiums will drop as .ORG is currently better than .COM in terms of trust and quality. (The New York Times article is just propaganda to discredit the arguments over the quality of .ORG.).