The reason that most Registrars charge more for .biz and .info than they do for .com, is that the heavy pricing competition is in .com, so if you want to play the pricing game, you have to be agressive with .com.

Many Registrars are losing money on .com registrations, and making it up on their other TLDs, or other services they sell. We do regular pricing comparisons, and it's fascinating to see a Registrar who beats us on .com by half, but charges twice or three times as much for .biz, .us, or .info and obviously tries to make up for their lack of profit on the more obscure domains.

It's an interesting business model, but not one that we care to follow. Our objective is to provide a solid service at reasonable prices for all our domains. We will never be the cheapest, but we'll never rip anyone off either.

As for who can register a .ws domain, the country of Western Samoa owns the rights to this ccTLD and they don't require you to be a resident in order to register a domain. Each country gets to make their own rules for their ccTLD.

As for .biz and .info keeping up with .com - no, not even close. I have not looked at the statistics in a while, but at one point .com outsold everything else on our site by a combined 100 to 1. The rest of the TLDs are picking up, but .com is still the leader by a long shot.

It's hard to tell how .us registrations will do after the pre-registration period is over, but pre-registrations have been very heavy, and this generally bodes well for follow-on registrations. The .us Registry is not even advertising yet. They are planning a very large campaign starting next week when the Registry goes live for real time registrations. It will be interesting to see if that kick starts the real time registrations.

Thanks for the kudos on "myOstrich." I have had a passion for the bird for many years . I hope to retire to an ostrich farm someday, as crazy as that may sound.

-t