proposed contracts

["Wayne Haroutunian" <wayne@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

To the ICANN Board,

The proposed TLD Registry Renewal Contracts for .info, .biz, and .org domains 
have a seriously flawed component whereby a registrar will be able to set 
arbitrary rates without price caps at whatever the market will bear. This will 
create a financially devasting impact on the business models of millions of 
domain and web site owners worldwide.

The impact will be especially damaging to .org and .info domain owners and site 
operators who for the most part use .org and .info domains for non-profit, 
charitable organizations, and educational purposes.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested into the core domain name 
infrasctructure of the Internet with the secured expectation that acquiring, 
owning and maintaining domains would always be affordable and make economic 
sense for a long term investment.

To enable and facilitate a way for registrars to financially exploit and gouge 
the marketplace would not only be a business tragedy, but it goes against the 
grain of all the base principles upon which the Internet was conceived. It 
would certainly deter new entrepreneurs from considering venturing onto the Net 
if there is no certainty what their site's URL location will be costing them 
each year they renew. And the vast multitude of current domain owners and web 
site operators would close up shop if their costs of doing business skyrocketed 
on every domain they own.

Even more importantly, this flaw would give an unfair economic advantage to 
individuals and corporations who have substantial capital resources who could 
outbid less fortunate and startup entrepreneurs with limited capital.

And inevitably, there would be a tidal wave of costly and time consuming 
lawsuits and litigation that ICANN itself would have to deal with from the 
millions of impacted domain owners.

Thus, I respectfully request that you reconsider and reconstruct the contracts 
and remove this no price caps clause completely.