[Comments-org-renewal-18mar19] Objection against renewal limit increase.

[Thomas Kerber]

It strikes me as absurd that an insitution charged with managing one of
the central parts of the infrastructure of the web would decide that
this should effectively handed over to a third party once more.

The .org TLD is a public good, having existed for longer than your
organisation, and yet you are -- quite literally -- proposing about the
power to extort from domain owners any arbitrary fees.

A domain is not a fungible good. I have references to my .org domain
strewn in hundreds of places. A domain cannot easily be replaced. And
yet, with this proposal, I do not know if I can afford to keep mine.

As the DNS infrastructure has matured and become cheaper, I am forced to
conclude that the prices of domains is entirely artificial. To some
degree this is justified -- some lower bound to entry must be set.
However, your organisation has no mandate to enable profiteering, and I
must strongly encourage you to rethink this position.

Justifying this approach as "better conforming with the base agreement",
and "treating the registry operator quitably" is ignoring the fact that
is obvious to anyone with even a cursary knowledge of domain names: .org
domain names are well established and the TLD seens as a "public good",
while newer TLDs are seen as owned by a specific company.

I cannot fathom how any employee at your organisation could have though
this to be a reasonable change, let alone enough of them to have it
reach this stage.

I strongly suggest one of the following, in order of preference:

 1. Strengthen the price increase limit to be in-line with global inflation.
 2. Re-instate the old price increase limits into the new agreement.
 3. Add a "grandfathering" clause, ensuring that already registered
    domains do not increase in price beyond the old limit *indefinitely*.

Do not be another knife in the free and open internet's back.

- Thomas Kerber