Proposed Renewal Contracts

[John Santoro <ljsantoro@xxxxxxxxx>]

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.
   
  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 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.