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<p>I oppose Amendment 3 to the .COM Registry Agreement. I
believe that allowing wholesale prices for .com domains to
rise 72% over 12 years, which is far more than the rate of
inflation and also far more than Verisign's underlying costs
of maintaining the registry could possibly increase by, will
dramatically hurt the internet ecosystem. It will especially
hurt small website operators, like myself, and will discourage
internet users from creating blogs and personal pages, with
the end result of reducing democratization of the internet.</p>
<p>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. It's simply not right to allow them to
raise prices at this time.</p>
<p>Tobias<br>
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