At the same time, they will be wiping out what made .pro 'different'.
"Different" meant hardly anybody regged it, hardly anybody had heard of it, the registry lost money, registrants were paying $99, you didn't have to be professionally qualified to register because Encirca had a Pro Forwarding service, and professional use restrictions were never enforced anyway, I'm thinking Babe.pro and Babes.pro.
Every step we taken away from this "differentness" has benefited everybody involved in .pro. Reg fees have come down 80%, more of an aftermarket has developed, more people are trying to catch .pros on Snapnames, 6 times as many .pros are registered, RegistryPro is closer to a business model that makes money, more people have heard about .pro, and more .pros are developed.
Granted, extensions that are full of restrictions have never been popular. Yet it becomes more difficult to justify the raison d'รชtre for .pro. It will become just another alternative extension along .biz.
Times have changed, there is no need to "justify" your existence as a gTLD by accepting a bum business model. ICANN are selling gTLD's to the highest bidders, the key is to have the most brandable and appealing extension for business, market it effectively, and grab market share.
Also .pro will have to face competition from a bunch of new extensions to be released soon. It's harder to stand out from the crowd as it gets denser.
Same argument applies to all non .com gTLD's. .pro will always be more aged than gTLD's to be released and will theoretically have an SEO advantage because of that. It's more brandable than the 2001 gTLD's that came before it like .info and .biz, and even though I have have invested $50,000 in .info, I think .pro will eventually usurp .biz and .info as the 4th most popular gTLD. If I was running RegistryPro, I can say with 100% certainty that it would.
Things could be a tad different, had registrypro not procrastinated for years. I think the window of opportunity was 2002, not now or next year.
RegistryPro hasn't procrastinated, to get the extension up and running it had to play the restrictions card. As a result of that it has been lumbered with a dud business model since launch in 2004. Lobbying ICANN to change contract terms takes time and money.
Today .pro stands as another 'developer' TLD, it's like when you see a nice keyword in .cc or .ws to set up a minisite, but you know you will have a hard time selling it.
The difference between .cc and .ws is that .pro is a gTLD and businesses brand themselves offline with the suffix Pro, that doesn't happen with cc or ws. .pro is potentially a rival for .com, .cc and .ws will never be a rival to .com because they don't say anything or add any value to the keyword. Whatever keyword you have, adding Pro to it make it sounds more credible and impressive. .pro is a sleeping giant held back by restriction, .cc and .ws will alway be minnows, a throwback to when any combination of letters satisfied domainer demand for keyword availability.
Also, the fact that
domainers may be holding a large portion of the extension is not a good sign. I actually wonder how many end users (non-domainers) register .pro every day.
One of the biggest strengths of .pro is that premium keywords are tightly held by a handful of people. It makes everything that comes on to the market that bit more desirable, that's why if you look at the ten $1,000+ keyword sales in October, the thing that strikes you is that most of them aren't top keywords.
I disagree that restricting supply is not a "good sign". De Beers bought diamonds produced by other miners to reduce supply and push up prices. That didn't stop diamonds being used in jewellery. When OPEC fail to control the supply of oil, the oil price falls and everybody involved in the oil industry suffers. If the market for any domain extension is awash with premium keywords, it kills development and investment. People are more likely to build on a plot of land deemed to be desirable and less likely to graze goats on it.
