[Comments-com-amendment-3-03jan20] Proposed Amendment 3 to the .COM Registry Agreement

[Anne Baanen]

As owner of several domain names, I strongly oppose the proposed 
amendments. ICANN has repeatedly implied that new TLDs allow for 
deregulation of the domain registration system, since customers are 
supposed to move to a new operator if they don't like the policies (e.g. 
pricing) of their current TLD operator. This argument does not hold 
water, even granting the assumption that the free market behaves 
according to the public interest, since the market in question certainly 
is not free. The simple fact is that one cannot change a domain name: 
one can only delete their old domain name and start at zero from a new 
one. This implies that the market is not free at all: each TLD operator 
is a monopolist in their own namespaces. Deregulation of this non-free 
market cannot be in the public interest, so I urge the ICANN to 
reconsider their current destructive course of action.