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If you spend a lot of time on the net — sooner or later you will end up having your own domain and your own website. (Domains are the “addresses” you type in the address bar of your borwser: whatever dot com, dot org and so on. I also happen to own several domains. One of them is this where you are now (http://www.transycan.net), more exactly you are on a subdomain of it — “myprairiegazette”. Domain names have to be unique, so if your name is John Smith and you would like a domain www.johnsmith.com but it was already taken by another John Smith… you have to choose something else.

To own a domain you have to register it with a company or agency that is authorized to do that, and you pay an annual fee for it. The fee can run from a few bucks ($1.99 if you buy bulk) up to $35-40. In addition, many hosting companies offer a free domain if you buy a hosting package from them for your intended website.

I paid about $20 (USD) for my transycan domain about five years ago. Last year I’ve registered another domain for a friend of mine for $7.95 (USD). Since then I registered domains even for $4.00 (USD).

Recently I started to get mail from an organization called Domain Registry of Canada. No, it is not e-mail, it is nice regular “snail-mail”. Two colour printed letter on a sheet of paper that has a lot of small print in hardly legible grey on the other side. For those who don’t know: there are so-called whois lookup services where you can check who the owner of a domain is (with full name, address etc.) — unless they paid an additional fee to keep this information private. That’s how DRoC found me.
What they offer: to renew my domain name registration with them for $40(CAD) per year.

While writing the above paragraph I went to oanda.com and checked the conversion rates for today:
40 Canadian Dollar = 34.88970 US Dollar.

For a while I couldn’t understand why would the Canadian registration be so expensive? And what would be the gain for me - besides the “patriotic” feeling for doing business with a Canadian corporation? Then I realized how does it work. Somebody has to browse the Internet to find Canadian domain owners. Or, even if they buy the data, it still costs money. Having all the names and addresses together with the domain names owned by us, DRoC will order thousands (ten thousands? hundreds of thousands?) printed paper with their Terms and Conditions. Then they print those letters to make them “personalized”: my name, my address, my domain… If you have a whatever.com domain, they will even check if the whatever.net and whatever.org are available and will suggest to register those, too! When all the printing is done, somebody has to fold the letters then put them in an envelope, plus they will send you a return envelope already addressed to DRoC; and finally they have to pay for the postage. Add all that up and with the overhead to run the business — of course, you are at $40.

By the way: in the very same place where they found my name and my postal address they could see my email (listed twice — I was too cheap to pay that “privacy” fee). DRoC could have saved all the money by sending me an email. Or better yet, they might visit my other domain — thebloghotel.com — and if they buy a hosting package from me I’ll give them a free domain name.

Isn’t quite stupid to send paper mail for internet things…? When I got the second letter from them it went directly to the garbage.