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

Henry Longmore henry at longmore.org
Thu Apr 25 20:46:37 UTC 2019


As a .org domain name registrant, I am concerned about the proposed
changes for the .org Registry Agreement. The proposed agreement would
remove the price cap provisions in the current agreement. Ostensibly,
this change is to "allow the .org renewal agreement to better conform
with the base registry agreement" as well as "[treat] the Registry
Operator equitably with registry operators of new gTLDs and other
legacy gTLDs utilizing the base registry agreement."

If we consider the current domain name usage for .com (hear me out,
this applies to .org) domains as described at
https://singaporedatacompany.com/blog/how-many-domain-names-are-unused,
we see that GoDaddy is by far the leader of .com domain name
registration, at 33%. The nearest individual competitor has
5.3%.Removing GoDaddy from the top ten, the other nine account for
32%, and the remaining 1,841 registrars account for 35%. If this data
can be extrapolated to .org domains, as the action of removing the
price cap would seem to indicate, it only serves to keep the dominant,
dominant, while the others, who try to remain competitive by keeping
the registration costs as low as possible, may well lose their
competitive edge, as they will be charged more and have margins and
volumes too low to support absorbing the cost themselves.

In my opinion it is a mistake to remove the price caps. Perhaps it
would be sufficient to treat the .org Registry Operator more
equitably, with a change in the structure or amount of the price caps?

Sincerely,
Henry Longmore



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