<div dir="ltr"><span class="gmail-commtext gmail-c00"><p>I oppose Amendment 3 to the .COM Registry
Agreement. I believe that allowing wholesale prices for .com domains to
rise more than 70% over 12 years will dramatically hurt the internet
ecosystem. This rate of increase is far more than the rate of inflation and
also far more than Verisign's underlying costs of maintaining the
registry could possibly increase by. It will especially hurt small website operators like
myself - and will discourage internet users from creating blogs and
personal pages.<br></p><p>Verisign reported a 69.4% operating margin in Q1 2019,
so they clearly do not need the extra revenue from this price hike.
ICANN has granted a monopoly over .com to Verisign and ICANN has a duty
to every internet user to carefully regulate this monopoly
to prevent abuse by Verisign. <br></p><p>A policy that allows price increases tracking the rate of inflation
(but no higher) may make sense in the future. However, right now, Verisign is
already collecting far more from their .com monopoly than any company
would be able to in a competitive market [1]. It's simply not right to
allow them to raise prices at this time.</p><p><br></p><p>Mike.....<br></p><p>[1] For
example, Alphabet, a highly successful player in a very high-margin
industry, has an operating margin of around 25%. Verisign's operating
margin is over 2.75 times that. <br></p></span><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><span><a href="http://michaelscepaniak.com" target="_blank">http://michaelscepaniak.com</a><br></span></div></div></div></div>