Copacetic

Michele crystallises the IEDR problem nicely,

 ”…Of course the main issue at present is that there is no formal policy development process.”

Ok, I did it, against all my better judgement I went an registered PutPlace.ie today. What did it cost?

€54.45!

You are having a laugh? Shurely, shome mishtake?

For comparision:

PutPlace.tv : €28.07

PutPlace.co.uk: €14.07 (for two years!)

PutPlace.mobi: €14.02

PutPlace.us : €5.60

But lets look at a comparable sized nation like Belgium.

PutPlace.be : €12.27

The only other country with a pricing policy as cracked as the IEDR seems to be Denmark, where the domains cost upwards of €40 euro.

And for what? The spurious value of having a “valid” .ie domain. Unfortunately not a single person outside of the staff at the IEDR and the poor saps like me who register domains have any clue that a .ie domain is any more “valid” or “genuine” than any other domain you might register. So the whole effort is wasted except that it fills the IEDR coffers with cash.

I would love to hear from anybody who has chosen to pay or not pay for a service based on the fact that the domain had .ie at the end of it?

Update: looks like Blacknight may be adding to the heat here,  Stephen McCarron of Hosting365 comments,

1. Stephen McCarron Says:
   October 25th, 2007 at 3:55 pm eHey Joe,

   I think you went to the wrong shop - we charge just €25.95 per year (ex VAT).

   www.register365.com

So IEDR whacks you with their exhorbitant fees,  but when push comes to shove, they bail out and try and shove the responsibility for domain squatting back on the CRO.

The CRO is of course absolutely right,

“We spoke to the CRO and asked them what conditions they apply to awarding an RBN. They must have a business address in Ireland and this condition appears to have been met. The CRO’s official position is that it is a matter for the patent holder or trademark holder and the remedy is the civil courts. There is also the option of dispute resolution adjudicated by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO),” Curtin said.

So, if its the responsibility of the civil courts, why is the IEDR charging for service that it is not responsible for and cannot enforce?

The IEDR continues to convince itself and nobody else of its value with its latest hint that it will “allow personal names”. The people who run IEDR continue to delude themselves that they are running a valuable service by tripling the price of .ie domain registration (compared to domains like .be and .dk)  along with the imposition of punitive controls over the allocation of elements of the namespace.

Do they not realise that nobody outside a tiny clique of geeks has any comprehension of the value they add. The idea that the man in the street (whether its O’Connell St or Wall St) is going to suddenly trust a domain because it has a .ie domain is utterly staggering in its naivety.

As for squatting, their efforts to prevent it have intrinsically limited the applicability of the .ie domain. Why would you bother registering when the expense and effort together make the overall transaction to high.

My advice, fire everybody at the IEDR, license the rights to godaddy.com for 12 months and keep and eye out just in case the Internet stops spinning on its access. If the Internet hasn’t collapsed in 12 months pat yourself on the back and go register <myname>.ie.

More sanctimonious rubbish from our moral guardians at the IEDR.

Dev would be proud.

I recently gave a dig out to somebody by registering a .ie domain for them. Total time from initial application to finally getting the domain up and running (e.g. getting the IEDR to update the nameservers) was 40 days!! Even I can’t believe it when I count it up.

Even if I generously lop of ten days to allow for some delays on my part in responding, this really is atrocious, and we pay a premium price of €95.59 for this service.

They farcically recommend you use a reseller, but when I tried to register initially via hostireland, I got bounced straight back to the IEDR, who required me to fax (yes fax, not email) in a justification.

My advice, stick to godaddy.com and register any kind of domain you want for $9.95, in seconds.

Michele exposes the IEDR in a excellent post. I register domain names pretty regularily (well once every six months or so). On GoDaddy I can whip up a name in next to no time, no questions asked. But for our IEDR no amount of bogosity is a bridge too far.

Their attempts to police the Internet for Ireland have meant that I only ever register a .ie domain when there is absolutely no other alternative (and there is usually an alternative).

The IEDR policy is a classic example of optimising the process to handle the exceptions rather than the common case. So everybody has to jump through the same mind numbing justification process to register names that in any other jurisidiction would be a click away.

How many Irish specific services have .com names just because its cheaper and easier to do it that way?