Comment on the .org agreement
To the ICANN Board, I am concerned at the proposed TLD Registry Renewal Contracts for the .info, .biz, and .org domains. Specifically, the issue that a given Registry can IF THEY SO CHOOSE set essentially arbitrary pricing for any given domain registration under their remit. It is unfortunately naive to believe that, presented with the opportunity to implement pricing changes implicitly or explicitly based on putative measures of domain value (through traffic and visitor pattern analysis, keyword/search term research tools, algorithmic analysis of the genericness and commercial viability of a given keyphrase composing a domain name, etc.), the respective Registries involved will somehow choose an artificial policy of restraint rather than the commercial path of maximizing their revenue freed from all but the most liberal constraints on their domain registration operations. A real-world example illustrates what happens when price controls on a monopoly commodity (only one Registry has the ability to manage the registration of domains under a given TLD extension). Specifically, the .tv domain name extension. As of August 28, 2006, the following pricing, displayed on the official .tv registry site, gives just a taste of what may be in store for .info/biz/org domain name owners and future registrants if price caps are removed. In the table below, the quoted price is the ANNUAL FEE required by the .tv registry to secure the registration of the domain name in question. creative.tv US$10,000 usa.tv US$100,000 power.tv US$30,000 cars.tv US$100,000 Since most if not all domains that could be considered "premium" under a similar system to the one used by the .tv registry to determine "theoretical" domain name value have already been registered in the .org/info/biz extensions, the removal of all price constraints represents an attempt to artifically "tax" those domain owners that had the foresight to register such domains years or decades ago. What happens to the small business owner, charity or individual who has built up a web business or web site around a domain name which - for traffic analysis, genericness or other reasons - is suddenly deemed to "cost" hundreds, thousands or even millions of dollars a year to maintain and renew? There's a particular irony that, at a time when more and more people are coming online, and when the cost of a web presence (hosting, bandwidth costs, server software, web development tools etc.) is plunging at a faster rate than perhaps at any previous time in the web's history, that ICANN should be willing to countenance a fundamental change in the domain name system that spits in the face of such progress. If this proposal is passed with the price cap removal clause intact, it is going to cause a thunderclap of repercussions around the world that will echo for many years to come, and may even go down in history as THE pivotal date on which the Web stopped being an empowering medium for individuals and companies to reach out to a global audience and became a wasteland of big business interests and the scattered remains of valuable, informative sites whose owners could no longer afford the usurious fees required to maintain them. Please make the right choice, and maintain the price caps as they currently are set (with a modest and realistic allowance for inflation) to protect the rights of tens of millions of existing domain name owners, and those of the hundreds of millions to come. Yours sincerely, Edwin Hayward |