[Comments-com-amendment-3-03jan20] My thoughts on the proposal

[Josh Pitts]

I oppose Amendment 3 to the .COM Registry Agreement.

Allowing wholesale prices for .com domains to rise 72% over 12 years will dramatically hurt the internet ecosystem. It will especially hurt small website operators, like me, and will discourage internet users from creating blogs and personal pages, with the end result of reducing internet availability and access to the poorest and most marginalized already.

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 [1]. It's simply not right to allow them to raise prices at this time.



Josh

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