ICANN and Verisign Proposed Settlement

["Neil Boreland" <neil.boreland@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

 

I would like to take this opportunity to express my dismay at the proposed
settlement between Verisign & ICANN, as the owner of E-merce Services
Limited who are a relatively small domains registration & hosting business
myself,  my colleagues and my customers believe any settlement that allows
Versign to effectively "double" the price of domain names, contains a
"perpetual presumptive renewal clause" which in effect gives Verisign a
monopoly over the .com tld and pushes up prices would be bad for my business
& bad for the Internet community as a whole.

 

The stance ICANN are taking in proposing a settlement will in effect kill
off the smaller registrars who already find it difficult to compete with the
larger domain providers who use domain registration as a loss leader in
order to gain the much more profitable hosting business - the settlement if
agreed, would increase this pricing gap which in turn force out the smaller
business.  

 

Please remember that Verisign were set up to oversee the "public" .com
domain space and have been handsomely rewarded for their efforts and ICANN
has already indicated in the past that they would most likely win their
lawsuit against Verisign - even in the worst case settlement, no jury would
award the kind of judgement ICANN is offering on a silver platter to
Verisign.

 

The Internet is a worldwide community & should not be controlled by a single
country let alone a single company - ICANN was set up to protect the
interests of the Internet Community not sell them out and wreck thousands of
small businesses in its wake.  The whole deal smells of corruption and yet
again we find large corporations putting profits before people.

 

Regards

Neil Boreland