[Comments-org-renewal-18mar19] Deep concerns about lifting .org registration price cap.

[Lech Perczak]

Hello,

As current board member of Wrocław Hackerspace, I have to express a deep 
concern on the proposed change.
hswro.org was the "home" of our organization since the very beginning, 
on which all our infrastructure and reputation relies.

By giving up the price constraints on .org domains, renewal prices may 
rise sharply, as .org registry (PIR) is de facto a monopoly, and can 
dictate the prices.
As NGOs typically have limited budget (like our local hackerspace), they 
may effectively be forced to change the domain, which contrary to your idea,
isn't painless process, as domain name is a very important part of the 
organization's reputation. Rebranding is a very painful process.

You suggested that Red Cross might migrate from "redcross.org" to 
"redcross.info". The effort invested into current domain is enormous, 
and migrating into another TLD would mean a huge campain to make people 
know the new location.
This includes rebuilding reputation in search engines from scratch. Many 
non-profit organizations hosted in .org simply do not have money to do 
that, and sharp price increase is likely to hit their budgets, given 
that trustee maintaining the prices has given up, totally failing its 
function. This is a very real concern, since each gTLD registry is 
effectively a monopoly, and can dictate the prices. You cannot register 
a domain in one TLD by means of other registry, you have to adhere to 
their rules, or register your domain in another TLD.

Even the organizations who have maxed out their domains validity in time 
will be hit by this change in the future, as they will eventually have 
to renew the domain.

Being an non-profit organization yourself, I hope you can put yourselves 
in the shoes of smaller organizations, and maintain the trustee function 
of legacy TLDs.

With kind regards,
Lech

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