[Comments-com-amendment-3-03jan20] Proposed amendment 3 to the .com registry agreement

[Jack Yan]

Ladies and Gentlemen:

The price rises proposed in this amendment are 
deeply troubling. The internet was, when it was 
founded, a democratic medium, one where a small 
business with a great idea could shine as much as 
a big business could. Look at the companies that 
rose in that early era, such as Google—companies 
that started with low cost, including securing a 
dot-com domain name. The internet of the '90s was 
for the many, not the few, and this great 
equalizing effect produced innovation. Small- to 
medium-sized businesses no longer needed massive 
budgets to reach potential audiences.
    Part of this democratization is the ability 
for anyone to afford a domain name, to compete on 
a level playing field with larger, better financed organizations.
    Raising costs to a prohibitive level for some 
will harm innovation: for one, people will not be 
able to have the legitimacy that a unique domain 
name would give them. It would affect their 
efforts to give their creations a unique brand 
name that will help them market their ideas. It 
would also give an advantage to better-financed 
citizens, which to me flies in the face of the raison d'être of the medium.
    The United States is already being harmed 
immeasurably by its change in philosophy over 
monopolies: once considered harmful to 
innovation, giving rise to your antitrust 
legislation, they are now being tolerated in 
certain cases—one only needs to look online to 
see where this has got us. Internet giants 
dominating the landscape, making it far more 
difficult for competitors to stand out. And 
competition, I thought, was helpful to a country 
that so believes in a market economy. The fact 
that Google, Facebook and others offer "free 
stuff" is deceptive: people might not be parting 
with cash, but they are parting with their 
identity. My point is that there are already 
forces that work against individuals and small- 
to medium-sized enterprises, and ICANN is putting 
up one more if these substantial price increases go ahead.
    Raising domain name prices, especially in the 
dot-com space, therefore, stifles the economy in 
numerous ways. In my opinion, the negatives 
outweigh the positives, and I urge you to keep 
the dot-com TLD accessible to all individuals.

Yours very truly,

Jack Yan


Jack Yan, LL B, BCA (Hons.), MCA

CEO, Jack Yan & Associates <http://jya.net>
Publisher, Lucire <http://lucire.com> and Autocade <http://autocade.net>
Co-chair, Medinge Group <http://medinge.org>

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