[Comments-org-renewal-18mar19] I object to the changes to section 2.10, - price caps

[John Stoffel]

Hi,
As a long time owner of a .org registration for the stoffel.org
domain, I strongly object to the removal of price controls on the .org
domain because of the complete lack of competition in the .org
domain.  Only one registrar is allowed to register names, so if they
can jack up the price on my domain, my only option is to drop 23+
years of my domain and move to somewhere else, such as stoffel.info or
stoffel.top or some other useless top level domain.

Now if you were going to have multiple independent top level .org
registrars, who competed for my business, then I would be more than
happy to have you remove the price cap, but even then I would be
worried about a cartel being formed and the prices going up without
any limits.

Just because there are multiple top level domains, does not mean that
there is meaningful competition.

For example, what if verisign decided to raise the price of the
icann.org domain to $10 million per year?  What would stop them from
doing this?  They could simply say there are other cheaper top level
domains you could use, such as icann.top, or icann.info?  What is so
hard about moving to that new domain?  It's not like icann.org is
actually valuable because you can move to another top level domain
without any problems.

This is why ICANN needs to keep the price controls on the top level
.org domain in place for the foreseeable future.  Domains are known by
"name.tld", not just by "name".

Thank you for your consideration.
John Stoffel
john at stoffel.org