Domain registration pricing
To the ICANN Board, It's been brought to our attention that there are no caps to the potential price increases in the .org registry contract and that this has the potential to allow registries to increase prices on domains according to the perceived value of individual domains. If this method of domain pricing were to take effect in the .org registry, we're afraid that within time it could be implemented within the two main registries ie- .com and .net, and if this were to happen I'm not sure we could maintain our online business as we have for the past 10 years. We wouldn't know what our domain renewal expenses would be from year to year. This is not a business model we presently have. Some possible scenarios of a sliding scale registration pricing might be- -If we were to spend a great deal of money developing and promoting a site only to find the annual registration fee were going up based on the "value" of the domain, we could not and it would not be wise for us to plan on developing the site further. The more we put into making the site successful, the more it would cost us in registration fees, and we would have no guarantee where the cap would be. Also, we would question who would be in-charge of determining what our domain was worth and would there be any options for discussion? Simply put, it would not be feasible for us to spend money without knowing our expenses. -Or on another note, if we were to simple park our domain at a Pay Per Click provider, spend zero dollars in development would the registration fee drop because of little value in the domain? -Another possibility of continually raising registration fees would be the potential 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. I'm sure the bigger online company's like Google.com, Amazon.com, Priceline.com would be very upset if their annual domain registration fees were in the tens of thousands of dollars based on the success of their hard work and expense. This being said, I respectfully request that you reconsider and reconstruct the contracts and remove this no price caps clause completely. Regards, Digital Income, Inc. per- Thomas Gibson CEO |