At the workshop last Friday, Cigdem Sengul suggested a novel new way of determining rent prices: by measuring registration period. We would set a target registration period - say, 2 years - and use negative feedback to adjust the prices to target that. As a result, registrations for short periods would reduce the cost-per-year for a domain, while registrations for long periods would raise it.
Implemented well, this seems like it will provide a good, authority-independent means of setting rent price. Thereās a few properties that seem desirable:
- Repeatedly extending a domainās registration should have equivalent effect to extending it once to the same total length. Eg, 10 extensions by 1 year should have equivalent effect on the price to 1 extension by 10 years.
- The effect on the price should be order-independent: The price after a 10 year extension followed by a 1 year extension should be the same as the price after a 1 year extension followed by a 10 year extension.
- Registering domains for short periods in order to reduce the price should be unaffordable.
At a glance, #1 can likely be implemented by either subtracting the effect of the remaining duration from the price before adding the new duration, or by treating the price as the area under the curve between the current expiry date and the new expiry date, and integrating.
Does this seem like a good mechanism? Any thoughts on other desiderata, or how this can be structured mathematically?