[Comments-com-amendment-3-03jan20] ICANN Verisign 10 year agreement

[Tony Addison]

Good morning

I would like to register our opposition to the agreement with Verisign.

Domain name rule and price changes affect businesses in every country in the world and as such any agreement should be transparent, fair and aimed at promoting use of the Internet. Closed agreements work directly against this.

In this case the work is being sub-contracted (we would have hoped ICAN had the resources and skills to manage this key role themselves) which automatically brings additional costs to the end users. This agreement will see an increase in .COM domain costs to end users of at least 60% over the ten years, assuming registrars opt to just pass on the Verisign rises.

To then allow Verisign to operate its own registrar (virtual and reseller) will diminish the competition as other registrars, particularly smaller ones, cannot compete. This flies directly in the face of the whole reason ICANN and the system was set up in the first place.

In the UK we have already seen a reduction in registrars as one particular US company acquires smaller UK businesses and I must admit that the customer service since then in those companies has plummeted.

Keeping competition alive, prices down and consistent and avoiding out-sourcing to organisations looking to profit as much as possible from a captive audience is a raison d'etre of ICANN, but this move is contrary to that aim.

Please, if not yet signed, reconsider, build the resources and skills in ICANN itself and cut out the profiteering of a commercial middleman.

Thanks you for reading

Kind regards

Tony Addison

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