I appreciate what has been done so far with making changes to the fees policy
and can see why the proposed fees are angled the way they are. In essence they
should remain the same for existing registrars which they appear to do. My
concerns however are with the advent of new gTLD's whereby some of the New gTLD's
will have domains registered in their thousands a year against other gTLD's which
will register domains in their millions. Each registrar will have to pay ICANN
$500 a year to register a certain gTLD when they may not actually register $500 worth
of domain names in that gTLD type in a year. Whilst paying $500 to ICANN for
a gTLD you register thousands of domains in is not such a hardship. I appreciate
that some sort of fee should be levied but if you make it the same cost for all gTLD
types it does not match closely the level of domain revenues achieveable.
What
I propose is that each domain that is registered through a registry, a certain portion
of the registry fee must be paid to ICANN. This could be 0.001% or what ever
figure is agreed upon. The registry would then in essence pay ICANN the fees
it had accumulated each month. We could then abolish the yearly ICANN fees
(keep the application fee) and then the registrar would only be paying for domains
he/she knows has made them some money. This way the registrar, the registry,
and ICANN benefit. Of course this might mean that the registry fee goes up
by a v small amount but I am sure the market could bear the cost here.
Lastly the
proposed solution would be difficult to administer as ICANN may have to rely on the
word of the registrar that they only sell certain gTLD types which is flawed.
There would need to be some sort of compliance program which in itself would cost
money.
Mr. Miesha Vukasinovic.
CEO Total Registrations.