Changes in .PL registry: pre-paid goes live in Q3/Q4 of 2009

NASK, .PL Registry with almost 1.4 million domains registered and 70% growth in 2008, plans to introduce important changes to the registration model. Changes are going to take place in Q3/Q4 of 2009. The official announcement of the new Agreement will take place during Future Business Trends in the Domain Industry conference organized by NASK in Warsaw on April 16th.

As announced during the ICANN Conference in Mexico, we plan to change our existing post-paid model, implementing pre-paid model for Registry-Registrar relationship. Thanks to the pre-paid model, NASK makes the process of signing agreements with the new Partners much easier, without any further need for security deposits, penalty fees etc. Thanks to such changes, we expect more new registrars to sign the agreement in 2010 and the signing process to become shorter and cheaper for both parties (NASK and Registrars).

Pre-paid is not the only change to our systems. We change the registration process, implementing small fees (0,10 PLN) for each unsuccessful registration attempt. As of today, we have many requests to our Registry system for the expired domain names. You might be surprised, but the dropcatching market in Poland is very matured due to many services provided by NASK in the recent years. We have:

The above mentioned services facilitated competition in the dropcatching, resulting in extreme competition between Partners. Competition means race who is the first to get a domain name. The race without rules… Most of the requests come even before domain becomes available for registration. As the result we observe the heavy load to our infrastructure which interfere with all other requests. Due to competetive dropcatching market plus availability of the aftermarket dedicated services offered by NASK (see below), some drop-catchers created even few companies (especially in Delaware state…) each, just to have better access to the Registry system to register expired names. This may become even a bigger problem whan pre-paid model is implemented allowing much more companies to sign contract with NASK. This makes the competition unhealthy, requiring more and more unfounded investments from dropcatchers and NASK’s side, the same time not expanding a market. Instead of investing in the aftermarket expansion, companies have to pay more for the same market share. That’s why NASK decided to implement direct economical factor in this competition to make sure that the resources are not spend on (more) lawyers, (more) administration and (more) new servers/infrastructure, but on the core business.

For the details of the proposed changes, please take a look at from presentations from ICANN conference  and Future Business Trends in the Domain Industry conference.

You can also find information about .PL services offered by NASK (Domain Name Tasting, expiration time/date in WHOIS, Wait List Service, NX domains list, expired names list) here.