Many believe this marks the beginning of the end for parking companies such as Sedo and Fabulous, who already enjoy partnerships with Google.  They feel that cutting out the middle man is an obvious way to increase their bottom line.  However, as things currently stand I’m not entirely convinced.

First of all, parking companies are able to negotiate higher payout percentages because they are able to harness a lot of traffic by uniting domainers.  Individually, the average domainer has no bargaining power and will have to gladly accept whatever Google is willing to hand him.

Secondly, Google’s parking platform is archaic at best.  There are no images, no ability to add custom-written copy, and no ability to add affiliate links.  Also, pointing your domain at Google’s parking platform isn’t as easy as modifying your nameservers, you have to set up CNAME and A records.  Some registrars don’t offer the ability to modify these for free like they do for nameservers, and even if they do, the process is sure to confuse a lot of domainers.  These shortcomings could be addressed as the program evolves, but as it stands the parking companies have an edge when it comes to value added services.

Only time will tell how this will all play out, but Adsense for domains’ success will likely boil down to only one factor: payouts.

Price controls have been removed for 2008 in favor of the transparent pricing model outlined above.

He also highlights Section 3.2.b) of the .com registry agreement:

ICANN shall not apply standards, policies, procedures or practices arbitrarily, unjustifiably, or inequitably and shall not single out Registry Operator for disparate treatment unless justified by substantial and reasonable cause.

Essentially the concern is that if new gTLDs do not have a price cap, Verisign and other operators of existing Generic Top-level Domains will be able to get their contracts amended to get the same treatment.  This would open up the door to variable pricing, whereby registrants of popular and/or high-earning domains would have to pay more for the same service, simply because they can afford it.

Everyone who owns a domain should express their concerns no later than December 8th by sending an email to gtld-transition@icann.org.