Re: Let's try to be productive...

On January 6, 2014 at 17:49 [email protected] (John Levine) wrote:
 > >What has changed recently in the spam-o-verse?
 > >What is likely to change in the near future?
 > 
 > Seems like reasonable questions.
 > 
 > >1. ICANN is injecting over 1,000 new TLDs. Many have already been
 > >added to the DNS root but aren't in general use yet such as .CEO,
 > >.EMAIL, .HOUSE, etc.
 > 
 > I doubt we'll see many of them in spam.  About half are private
 > corporate vanity domains (one is a personal vanity domain), the rest
 > are all likely to cost two or three times as much as .com or .org.  I
 > can't tell how many of them will turn up in URLs; we can expect
 > companies with vanity TLDs to use them, but that's only a few hundred
 > of the millions of commercial domains.

I think it's too early to tell. Right now we only have about a dozen
gTLDs, even expanding that to 100 might have significant effects and I
think it's going to be a lot more than 100.

If nothing else it'll probably interact with a lot of anti-spam
software which thinks it knows something about domain names as a cheap
test, for example that TLDs "aren't longer than 4 chars" (pick a
number), already broken for .MUSEUM and .TRAVEL but who would
notice??? Particularly if it's just a scoring system like spamassassin
rather than outright blocking.

Where we'll probably see them is embedded in messages as just more
legitimate URLs to try to trick people into clicking, particularly
where they can be visually confusing or misleading.

I suppose we can sum that up as more degress of freedom, more
opportunities for mischief.

IF YOU WANT MY PERSONAL OPINION ON NEW gTLDs (consider the price :-):

<PERSONAL OPINION>

Outside of the vanity domains like .SONY which need no business model
really -- they'll just be treated as sunk marketing cost -- some of
these TLDs will probably be successful, and a lot of them will
flounder and fail.

It's the old 80/20 rule of startups: 80% will fail quickly like one or
two years, 80% of those remaining will fail in the following five
years, etc.

Or pick a percentage but it's probably very high.

As these hundreds of domains begin to fail registration prices will
drop. What else can someone who has sunk a coupla-few million ramping
one up and facing losses do?

Well, there are other choices, but lowering prices so long as they
remain above COGS is always a big one. And these are annuities so
their profit structure can be a little subtle.

Their marginal cost is probably about a buck or so per registration or
renewal particularly where the overhead has been farmed out to large
registries and registrars who already have infrastructure (e.g.,
GoDaddy reselling .HOUSE, little extra overhead to GoDaddy.)

Those that become economically distressed will become targets of the
less and less scrupulous.

For example, call a less popular registrar which charges $25/year for
a domain and tell them you have a need for 5,000/month what would the
price be?

If you're credible you'll get a much better price in most cases, MUCH
better.

And why not, you're probably paying cash, even offering to pay up
front, and it's just one account to deal with for thousands of domain
sales per month, and probably a sophisticated and educated account.

It's been a topic of discussion because the sort of person who can and
will pay for 5,000 domains/month (or more, or other deals like
thousands of one-day domains) is often not the most savory sort.

So sticker price can be misleading.

But, as is always the case with the future, we can only guess until it
begins to happen.

But it's something to keep an eye on since it's such a potentially
profound change to the internet.

</PERSONAL OPINION>

Again, it comes down to more degrees of freedom, which is not
necessarily a good thing even if the word "freedom" seems like a
superficially positive term.

  -b
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