<div dir="ltr"><span class="gmail-commtext gmail-c00"><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>- Neo</p></span></div>