Blair Harrison wrote:
The wholesale pricing for which registrars can buy domains is set by NZRS (www.nzrs.net.nz), which is currently $1.50 per month. Registrars are going to charge you 12 * $1.50 + some amount of margin per year for you to register a domain.
The fee is actually set by InternetNZ - see http://dnc.org.nz/story/30278-29-1.html for more detail. People should remember that that .nz is a relatively small domain with just over 300,000 names. Compare that with millions of registrations in the gTLDs the original mail compared .nz with. Verisign's website notes that they manage over 50 million digital identities ( http://www.verisign.com/information-services/naming-services/index.html) and it doesn't take a genius to work out that economies of scale are at work here. I also have to say that this question surfaces every now and then and yet the .nz space keeps growing at a pace that shows no sign of abating at present.