[Comments-info-renewal-18mar19] Proposed Renewal of .info Registry Agreement

Ian Godfrey ian at iangodfrey.com
Fri Apr 26 03:06:55 UTC 2019


I am a .info registrant.

The ICANN website states that:

"ICANN was formed in 1998. It is a not-for-profit partnership of people from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet’s unique identifiers."

and that:

"ICANN doesn’t control content on the Internet. It cannot stop spam and it doesn’t deal with access to the Internet. But through its coordination role of the Internet’s naming system, it does have an important impact on the expansion and evolution of the Internet.”

Bearing this in mind, ICANN staff should not unilaterally impose URS in legacy TLDs when that issue is precisely what is being examined by the volunteer ICANN Working Group who has been mandated to review this issue. ICANN policy making is supposed to be a ‘bottom up, multi-stakeholder model’.

I believe that legacy gTLDs are fundamentally different from for-profit new gTLDs. Legacy TLDs are essentially a public trust, unlike new gTLDs which were created, bought and paid for by private interests. Registrants of legacy TLDs are entitled to price stability and predictability, and should not be subject to price increases with no maximums. Unlike new gTLDs, registrants of legacy TLDs registered their names and made their online presence on legacy TLDs on the basis that price caps would continue to exist.

Unrestrained price increases on the millions of .info registrants who are offering some ‘information’, and may well be not-for-profits or non-profits, would be unfair to them. Unchecked price increases have the potential to result in hundreds of millions of dollars being transferred from these organizations to one non-profit, the Internet Society, with .info registrants receiving little if any benefit in return. ICANN should not allow one non-profit to have virtually unlimited access to the funds of other non-profits or entities offering information.

ICANN appears to be entirely catering to registries by removing price caps. ICANN should stand up for the public interest and registrants!

One wonders whether ICANN have been offered ‘incentives’ by huge corporate players…

Kind regards

Ian Godfrey
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