Also don't forget that having a .nz name provides funding to InternetNZ to do its broad range of work in promoting and protecting the Internet, including its sponsorship of the NZNOG conference, and the forthcoming Best Practices programme for the NZNOG community. InternetNZ has successfully batted for a better Internet for NZ in a huge number of ways over the years, including improvements in law, self regulation, outreach, technical betterment etc etc. WHat has Verisign (the registry for .com) done for NZ, apart from a) increasing the prices for .com and .net names, and b) higher returns to shareholders? Earlier in the thread there was reference to the economies of scale, of 300,000 names in .nz vs 50,000,000 names in .com. I would think if .nz only 3% of the .com numbers, it would probably offer similar prices to current .com prices. .nz has a history of reducing the price to registrars, whereas .com has a recent history of increasing prices, and has (under its agreement with ICANN) the right to increase prices every year by about 7%. Also worth noting is the competition for names in the .com space, where a number of registrars are able to use their connection to the registry as an advantage to pick up potentially useful expiring .com names and establish a reseller service to sell these names for huge amounts of money - essentially denying every day users from accessing the cute names at registry prices. Furthermore some .com registrars are able to use the 5 days tasting service, and keep rolling over names every 5 days to test their value for monetising those names through serving click through adverts - again denying millions of domain names coming available to the market. Through these sorts of activities and additional monetisation processes, they can offer regular domain name registry services for less than their cost of dealing with the .com registry. .nz has policies that current discourage registrars from participating in such practices, and as a result (along with the fact that the .nz space is relatively uncrowded) there is little cybersquatting or secondary market for domain names in NZ, meaning everyone gets a fair "suck of the sav" I think the fact that there is incredible diversity in pricing from .nz registrars, I guess ranging from $20 per year through to $180 per year is sufficient to give people real choice. I would also think that for most, the difference in price is not usually going to be a compelling reason to change registrars, as the domain name price when taken into account as part of their overall Internet bill would be a tiny proportion. If budget constraints are so critical, why not host a free Yahoo website and run your email through a free hotmail service? As with everything in life, it is worthwhile shopping around, but the differentiation should be a balance of a number of factors rather than merely the price? Keith Martin Kealey wrote:
Don't forget that the $30 buys not only DNS delegation, but also an entry in a title registry that doesn't subject you to a US-style "anyone with enough money to buy a lawyer can DRP you and steal your domain", but rather gives you a single, real person (Debbie Monahan) to talk to about such problems without spending any lawyer-money at all.