18(c) What operating rules will you adopt to eliminate or minimize social costs?

Prototypical answer:

MULTIPLE APPLICATIONS FOR ONE PARTICULAR DOMAIN NAME
One operating rule to eliminate social costs has been to assign domains on a first-come first-serve basis in the case of multiple applications for one particular domain name. The reason is that TaxiPay GmbH introduces the “.taxi” gTLD in order to benefit interested parties especially with taxi-focused background. This way, all relevant parties are granted with a fair and transparent opportunity to register their preferred domain name.
Otherwise by choosing to resolve multiple applications for a domain by conducting an auction, potentially only privileged registrants would be provided with their preferred domain name. As TaxiPay GmbH intends to avoid such a situation, a decision has been made in favour of a first-come first-serve allocation.

COST BENEFITS FOR REGISTRANTS
Moreover, TaxiPay GmbH commits itself to follow a pricing policy that sets reasonable prices, balancing prices on behalf of the registrants as members of the community, but to be able to finance registry services. Albeit the prices will be based on the registry business in which TaxiPay GmbH only has little control of the prices registrars are passing on to the registrants. TaxiPay GmbH has also decided against a landrush phase at the start-up of the gTLD-operation, due to the nature of the taxi community. As already described in question 18(a), the overall objective of the gTLD .taxi is to foster the further growth and the long-term sustainability of the taxi community, as well as facilitate the establishment of online presences even for small players of the industry in order to lead the rather traditional industry to an innovative future. Hence, the focus of the gTLD-operation is not at all on generating notable revenues, but rather to living up to the just described mission statement for the greater success of the community itself – high prices during a landrush phase might endanger smaller taxi businesses and must therefore be strictly averted.

MAGNITUDE OF PRICE ESCALATIONS
Regarding anticipated increases of prices of domain registrations, TaxiPay GmbH cannot make any binding commitment today that no price increases will occur over the following ten years while running the registry services for the gTLD .taxi. Nevertheless, TaxiPay GmbH will commit itself to stable prices over the first three years of operation of the gTLD .taxi, as well as guarantee that beyond that, prices will only increase prices if necessary to follow economic or currency developments that necessitate price changes. They will not occur in order to maximize profit. However if price increases occur, TaxiPay GmbH will inform all registrars as well as ICANN following the Registry Agreement requiring written notice in advance of price increases. Further details on minimizing possible negative effects on consumers⁄registrants will be described in the answers to question 28 and 29.

Similar gTLD applications: (0)