[Comments-org-renewal-18mar19] Submission on proposed renewal of .org registry agreement

[Nate Cull]

To whom it may concern:

I am writing to express my concern about the proposed changes to the
global .org registry agreement to be made after June 2019, as described
on the ICANN website at
https://www.icann.org/public-comments/org-renewal-2019-03-18-en 


Specifically, I am very concerned about the proposed change to the
Pricing for Domain Name Registrations and Registry Services (Section
2.10). This proposed change would remove the existing price cap on .org
registrations. 

I oppose this change.

Removing the price cap will lead to immediate and potentially large
price rises rises for critical domain infrastructure which will have an
extremely negative impact for charities, community groups and
non-governmental organisations. 

I personally manage toplevel .org domains for myself, and for a local
church in New Zealand. My brother who has been working in international
disaster relief and community development also manages several
toplevel .org domains. I have witnessed firsthand how many community and
aid groups get by on shoestring budgets, and web sites are an essential
requirement for such groups. Any rise in the cost for domain
registrations will have a huge damaging effect for these groups. 

There has been a trend in the last ten years for community groups and
nonprofits to increasingly use Facebook and other large, centralised,
proprietary social networks. We are now starting to see the very great
danger of this trend.

I live in Christchurch, New Zealand, where on March 15, 2019, a white
supremacist terrorist attack was conducted against Islamic people at
prayer and Facebook was used as the mechanism for distributing a live
stream of this attack.

As a result of this attack, and Facebook's completely inadequate safety
protocols, the community sector in New Zealand is now much more aware of
the dangers of relying on centralised, proprietary social media
services, and much more interested in using their own website domains
again. 

One reason why individual organisations managing their own domain name
is essential, is that it is the only reliable way to solve the problem
of 'fake news'. Only information published on an organisation's own
website can be seen as authoritative. 

The Internet and the World Wide Web, and the Domain Name Service on
which they rely, were born from this vision of decentralised servers
where every organisation has the right to manage their own server.
Despite the move to centralisation and corporate ownership over the last
decade, decentralised domain ownership remains key to the open nature of
the Web.

But ICANN is proposing to deny nonprofit groups this right, and to
make .org domains less accessible for small community groups at the very
time when the world has become aware of how dangerous centralised,
proprietary data services are. ICANN is in great danger of positioning
itself on the wrong side of history with this move.

Please do not make this change. Please do not throw the nonprofit and
community sector away. Please do not make .org domains less accessible
at the very time in history when we are all becoming aware of how
important it is to have control of our own servers and our own domain
names.

Regards, Nate Cull