Cheyne, do you know why it then increased again?
Honestly, I don't know why because registrars were never consulted on this process, but it was the same time that they brought .org.au, .id.au and .asn.au up to the same price as .com.au/.net.au.
Having said that, business operating conditions in 2009 were very different to that of 2014. We were riding the GFC out, the dollar had gone from above parity to sinking well below, and operating costs sky rocketed in many areas. That's not me crying poor, that's just how it was.
Re competition: As has been said there is no doubt there has been competition between registrars. This however is about registry competition.
There can only be one registry at a time, so I just don't understand why this is a talking point.
This is why there is a tender process that happened all bar one time (from memory) where they were given exclusive rights to renegotiate and continue.
Does anybody here actually believe that AusRegistry did a bad job? I can't think of any registrars that I know of who think this, and there are no major outages to point to and say "well, this happened". Change for the sake of change is always a bad idea and it just seems like this is what has taken place without proper consultation to contracted parties.
So the question that I am now asking is why the need to change? Did AusRegistry not move on price and that alone was the deciding factor? Because aside from that there really isn't much else that could have been improved on. And if it was, did Ned, Nicole and Tim all excuse themselves from the vote due to a very clear conflict of interest?