Registry Renewal Contracts comments

["Gniewko Lubecki" <gniewko@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

To the ICANN Board,

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

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested into the core domain
name infrastructure 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 registry's 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.

Gniewko Lubecki