There is a possibility that domain registration on the Internet will be free for all, though not in the short term, says Arthur Chang, managing director, Asia Pacific, of Network Solutions Inc, the world's largest domain registration company.
A domain name is the address of a website on the Internet identified by a suffix dot com, dot net, dot org or dot edu. Network Solutions (NS) registers these names for individuals and communities directly or through its channel partners. While NS currently earns a bulk of its revenues from a fee for every domain address that is registered, the company is consciously moving away from this model to earning from value-added services.
"Even now in some countries, NS channel partners provide domain name registration for free. But that is because they have an alternative revenue model which helps them subsidise the fee. They still pay us for the registrations," Chang said.
The trend is changing, though gradually. More and more clients are availing of other services from Network Solutions. At the last count, "Fifteen per cent of our clients, who registered their domain names with us, also availed of our value-added services," Chang told Business Standard in an interview.
One such value-added service is the Dotcomdirectory. Dotcomdirectory.com records the address of every website that has been registered by Network Solutions in the United States for free and acts as an effective `find' engine for Net surfers. "We plan to launch this service for Indian websites registering with us by the end of the year," Chang said. Other services include the ImageCafe. "This helps small and medium enterprises to launch their websites. These are typically for a small number of pages. They just have to click and pick what they want on the web," he said.
And the company is working on more such value additions, though Chang said he could not disclose details.
"When people get domain names they need web hosting, web design, promotions of their websites and advertising traffic, also e-commerce transaction capabilities and payment support. This is the general direction in value-added services that we are looking at," he said.
