Ron Jackson ran a cover story this month in DNJournal and a big focus of that was an interview where he talked with your CEO about DDN. This is what Dan Warner said:
"The goal of the DDN system is to be the perfect enabler. Even the 2% commission that the DDN takes as part of any transaction is designed to be part of the market balance. The costs of development, management, technical resources, and ongoing effort of the DDN are roughly in balance with the expected earnings from the endeavour. A higher commission would have attracted hyper-competitors who would bid to control a system which should be inherently an open platform for global distribution."
I've reread that article and there is not one mention in the interview of high commission fees (quite the opposite in fact), yet you say in one of your posts: "the higher commission percentage you assign on a domain the more it shows across the network, I believe 20% is recommended for maximum exposure".
So what went wrong? Did the greed factor get in the way? What about Warner's comment that the 2% commission fee would be the "perfect enabler", that higher commission fees would undermine the system by attracting "hyper competitors who would bid to control" the system.
This system initially sounded good, the way Warner spelt it out. Now it smacks of yet another money-making venture on the part of the registrars. I suspect there were good intentions in the first instance but then the likes of Parsons & co bucked at the prospect of taking only 2% of the action.
I will say one thing, in case Warner or Parsons is listening. Domain name sales and renewals are a licence to print money and you guys have had it on your own to date, but sooner or later others will start to want part of the action. If the registrars had introduced this system and stuck to the 2% commission they would probably have the sub-$5000 aftermarket to themselves. Now, by implementing the scheme with commissions of 20-40 per cent, they've made sure there will be other players in the aftermarket. They've left the door open to big players like News Corp and Microsoft to enter the aftermarket ... after becoming registries in their own right.
Bad move, Mr Fabulous.
..