[Comments-com-amendment-3-03jan20] Unwanted changes: ICANN and Verisign contract

Sohrab - سهراب sohrab372 at gmail.com
Tue Feb 11 03:09:37 UTC 2020


To whom it may concern,

I have been recently made aware that ICANN and Verisign made changes
without consulting or incorporating feedback from the ICANN community or
Internet users. As an owner and user, I can admantly say that the changes
proposed in their contract are outrageous and will have a massive negative
impact on the Internet as a whole.

For starters, the ten year annual 7% price increase is absurd. Moreover,
the contract allows for other price increases for certain extraordinary
situations. This is completely unacceptable, as this has the potential to
skyrocket the price. This lack of regulation, places too much power in the
hands of these two parties, with no real benefit to the community or
Internet users around the world.

Moving on, the contract also references Verisign agreeing to pay ICANN an
additional $20 million dollars over five years to support ICANN’s
initiatives regarding the security and stability of the domain name system.
Why is Verisign doing this? How will ICANN spend the all this money? And
who will ensure that the funds are properly spent? Again, this is
completely unregulated and it needs to be corrected to the negative impact
this will create.

This nex tpoint  is about how the new contract will allow Verisign to
operate its own registrar, except for selling .COM domain names. But to
circumvent this, Verisign is allowed to act as a reseller of .COM domains,
through another registrar. Effectively, the company that controls 80% of
domain names will also compete with domain registers and maximizing their
control of domain name pricing to the detriment of other competing
registrars. This might result in lower prices to consumers, but having
fewer registrars will harm competition, choice, and domain name services.
Verisign’s registrar could also use its position to charge higher prices to
consumers, and at the same time raise registrar prices. Once again, this
needs to be regulated before the industry is monopolized.

Lastly, as detailed on "Standing Up to ICANN to Keep Domain Prices in
Check" and "pricecaps.org," over 3,500 comments were submitted in support
of price controls for the .ORG, .INFO, and .BIZ TLDs. Only six comments
supported removing price controls. ICANN discounted the comments that were
in favor of maintaining price caps. A number of the comments were submitted
using an online tool, which caused the comments to be discounted as “spam”
by the ICANN Ombudsman. ICANN removed the price caps, primarily relying
upon a biased preliminary analysis from 2009 by an economics professor that
did not reference any data. This unethical behavior behavior is in direct
retaliation of those looking to keep the price caps, which only further
evidences the need to regulate the actions of this party.

The changes in the contract between ICANN and Verisign is appalling and
insulting to the entire internet community. This agreement is completely
out of line and needs to be corrected. Otherwise, this will cause harm to
the Internet as a whole.

Regards,

Sohrab
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