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

[Mc Kiernan Daniel Kian]

I watch with alarm as various barriers-to-entry are being raised on 
the Internet.  I can enumerate various of these if necessary, but I 
believe that they are fairly obvious.  An increase in the wholesale 
price of registering a .COM domain, which increase will largely be 
passed-on to registrants, would be yet one more.

As an economist, I look upon the present structure of registration as 
a product of bad economic theory.  In real terms (that is to say, 
adjusting for more general changes in prices), the cost of wholesale 
provision ought to be declining even in the face of an increase in 
funding for ICANN.  If Verisign's inflation-adjusted costs are 
increasing, those increases result from the X-inefficiency of a 
monopoly, which monopoly should be phased-out of existence.