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

Rhett Trickett rjtrickett at gmail.com
Tue Feb 11 02:05:42 UTC 2020


I oppose Amendment 3 to the .COM Registry Agreement. I believe that allowing wholesale prices for .com domains to rise 72% over 12 years, which 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, will dramatically hurt the internet ecosystem. It will especially hurt small website operators, like myself, and will discourage internet users from creating blogs and personal pages, with the end result of reducing democratization of the internet.
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 on the planet to carefully regulate this monopoly to prevent abuse by Verisign. The only conscionable thing to do right now is to freeze wholesale .com prices and re-evaluate 5-10 years from now. A policy that allows price increases tracking the rate of inflation (but no higher) may make sense in the future, but right now Verisign is already collecting far more from their .com monopoly than any company would be able to in a competitive market. It's simply not right to allow them to raise prices at this time.

Rhett

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