Times Internet has announced that it has acquired ICANN accreditation as a domain registrar. With this Times Internet Ltd. can directly offer domain registration services to their customers without having to resell other accredited registrars’ systems. This essentially means Time Internet costs of registering a domain on behalf of a registrant would come down.
The move doesn’t seem the best idea, and actually doesn’t have much impact anywhere because domains are a low margin business. Most registrars worldwide run on margins as small as a few cents and some even offer domains at a loss as a bait to sell other web services with better margins. And this is reflected in the prices Times Internet has listed on the website – domains.indiatimes.com. It is comparatively higher than Net4, Rediff, Directi, etc.What exactly is the value therefore that Times Internet adds with this accreditation is not entirely evident.
Again, this accreditation is only for Generic TLDs which come under the administration of ICANN (.com, .net, .info, etc.). From what I see Times Internet hasn’t become accreddited for other ccTLDs. For instance, they still seem to be resellers of Signdomains for offering domain registration for .in and it’s other third level domain names. This is the reason you won’t see a box to register a .co.in domain on the new site and are instead redirected to their Meramail website.
Whether, Times Internet plans to become accredited as a registrar for these TLDs as well is not known as of now, and their relationship with Signdomains in this regard is also not entirely clear. Signdomains seemed to have been there preferred partner for domains before this accreditation because indiatimes.com was registered through them.
The money in web services clearly isn’t in the domains game, you need to show a sufficient amount of technical and monetary bandwidth to become an accredited registrar. While Times group might have this in plenty, it seems a needless expenditure for such a low margin and high competition game.
More so when you have an ad that shows a site selling domains for half the price you quote just under your press release. Also, when I tried to register a domain through their site, it gave me a Connection Timed Out error. Not a bad start, however I sincerely hope Rishi Khiani has a nice plan for how they want to pitch and use this service in their business interest.
