variable pricing = legalized organizational identity theft

["A. Jaques" <shoparama@xxxxxxxxx>]

I wish to express my strong opposition to the introduction of variable
pricing of domain names. Such a policy could devastate the kinds of
charitable and non-profit organizations that depend on .org domains to
carry out their missions.

A domain is, essentially, an organization's online identity. Its
offline equivalent is not an organization's address, but its name. Can
you imagine if, say, a new oil company decided it wanted to call
itself Red Cross Petrochemical Corp, and it could steal the name from
the real Red Cross just by bidding on it, forcing the real Red Cross
to change its name to something no one else wants?

This is precisely what could happen online, despite an organization's
having invested years and many thousands of donated dollars in
developing awareness of the domain. This could cripple the kinds of
small and charitable organizations that most need the web to do their
work, by allowing the equivalent of legal online identity theft.

It would be unconscionable to allow domains to be simply poached by
the highest bidder in this way. Indeed, it opens the door to a system
in which an even more insidious type of cyber-squatting becomes the
norm - where redcross.org is a spam site and the Red Cross is
relegated to sdlkjoirehrlkjds.org - the only name it can afford.

Please reject this proposal.

Thank you.