[Comments-org-renewal-18mar19] Opposition to the proposed renewal of .org Registry Agreement

[Mike Kienenberger]

I am writing in regard to the org gTLD renewal proposal, specifically
with regard to the proposal to remove the fee cap.

I am the holder of an org domain registered in 1995, gamenet.ORG.
But more importantly, I am the end-user of hundreds, if not thousands,
of .org domains provided for the public benefit.

I oppose the removal of the fee cap.  Since the org domain registry is
non-competitive, and the actual service provided is trivial, removing
the cap simply allows the registry provider to select an arbitrary
profit margin in providing a service to a captive market.  The fee cap
should only be removed if market competition is in place throughout
the entire service stack - that is, it is made possible to register a
domain in the org gTLD via an alternate registry - or if ICANN moves
the org gTLD registry service to the lowest-cost provider on a regular
basis.

If my personal use domain is eventually priced outside of my ability
to hold it, it's a small personal loss of trivial consequence.
If that were to happen to the thousands of other public-benefit .org
holders, it would be a major catastrophe.

Every action ICANN takes should fulfill its mission statement of being
"a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with
participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet
secure, stable and interoperable," and this proposal fails to meet
that criteria.

Sincerely,
Mike Kienenberger