Please rework the proposed contract
Dear ICANN Board of Directors, Dr. Paul Twomey, and Afilias Limited- The proposed agreement for the .INFO registry is flawed and should be reworked. It is irresponsible for ICANN to agree to a perpetually renewing contract when ICANN is charged with fostering competition in the domain name system. ICANN must be permitted to solicit competing bids from other potential registry operators and be free to award the contract to whomever it deems most suitable to operate the registry. The proposed agreement provides only for termination in the event Afilias breaches the agreement and does not resolve the breach after arbitration. This form of renewal affords Afilias perpetual monopoly status over the .INFO gtld provided it honors the terms of the proposed agreement. The existence of other gtld's (no matter how many there are now or may be in the future) does not provide sufficient competition, as each domain name is unique within its respective gtld and newer gtld's are not well recognized or well regarded worldwide. Increasing the number of gtlds only increases the costs to businesses that wish to protect their intellectual property in all tld's, it does not drive down the prices of existing gtld's (the prices of .com, .net, and .org domain names have not fallen since the introduction of the .biz, .info namespaces). Further, ICANN's lack of price control over the monopoly created by the proposed agreement is troubling. For ICANN to award Afilias the unlimited right to set prices would be an abdication of its responsibility to all its stakeholders. In recent years we have seen prices for Internet access and telephone service fall in the United States. Additionally, retail prices for domain names have fallen as more registrars have entered the marketplace. Lower prices and greater competition are better for consumers and have not resulted in a less-stable telephone, Internet, or domain name infrastructure. Instead they have lead to unprecedented growth in consumption of telecommunications and related services. ICANN must work to keep operation of the .INFO registry open to competition and as transparent as possible while maintaining or lowering the prices of .INFO domain names to foster competition and increase consumption and public acceptance of the gtld. Thank you for considering my comments. Sincerely, Russ Goodwin President The Tidewinds Group, Inc. |