[Comments-org-renewal-18mar19] Do Not Approve the .Org Agreement Renewal

[Ian Allan]

To whom it may concern,

I am a .org registrant and run a not-for-profit website to benefit the public at my own expense supported only by donations. 

ICANN does not seem to recognize the difference between a legacy extension created with the support of the US government, that predates the existence of ICANN and that has millions of existing users and the brand new extensions that started off with a new set of rules, in particular no price controls, and no existing registrants. They have completely different characteristics, history, and ownership structure. It is not acceptable for ICANN to ignore these differences and to propose that they be treated the same.

Allowing the .org registry to charge any price it wants for renewing a domain name is a grave mistake. Why should you allow them to set a crazy high price? It is apparent that they will try to force the domain owners to pay a very high price each year to renew their domain name, and if the domain owner either won't or can't, then the .org registry could take away their domain name, set a high registration price on it, and then try to find someone else who is willing to pay a high price for it. 

This is not only very unfair to long time .org domain owners who may see their prices raised sky high for no reason, but is an unethicial and immoral step toward Internet tyranny. The registries are doing fine. They don't need any help as they are already being making plenty of unearned money (providing no appreciable benefit) in what is already a monopoly scheme.

Unrestrained price increases on the millions of .org registrants who are not-for-profits or non-profits would be unfair to them. Unchecked price increases have the potential to result in hundreds of millions of dollars being transferred from these organizations to one non-profit, the Internet Society, with .org registrants receiving no benefit in return. ICANN should not allow one non-profit nearly unlimited access to the funds of other non-profits.

ICANN appears to be entirely catering to registries by removing price caps. ICANN should stand up for the public interest and registrants!

Respectfully,

ian allan