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

[Graham Cobb]

I am a personal, individual, not-for-profit .org registrant. I use a
.org domain as my family email domain. Changing this name would involve
my family and friends in a lot of hassle and would significantly disrupt
my social network, so I have a strong incentive to keep the name. On the
other hand, as an ordinary person I have limited funds to spend on a
domain name. I need confidence that the name I use will not increase
dramatically in price. .org is the only option that gives me that
confidence today.

The legacy TLDs, particularly .org, are completely different from the
for-profit new TLDs and should be treated differently. These are not
commercial assets but form the backbone of the Internet as we know it
today. In particular, ICANN has a responsibility to take into account
public benefit for ordinary people and not-for-profit organisations to
enable their effective use of the Internet. That includes having a
naming option with price predictability & stability.

ICANN need to make sure the .org contract includes effective protections
for ordinary domain registrants, all around the world.

Graham Cobb