A couple of reasons the settlement shouldn't be signed

["Keldon" <services@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm disappointed to hear of the proposed settlement, it will implicate more
than most would imagine.  Domain reselling has created tens of thousands of
jobs world-wide to date, many of which will be lost if the proposed
settlement is signed, and many to-be resellers will not become resellers due
to increased cost prices and more resulting competitiveness and not enough
demand left to accommodate them due to price increases.

I've owned about 15 domains personally and am reselling an increasing number
of domains every month, primarily due to the low price I can sell them at
(something I would like to keep the same).  7% is also quite a knock for
people who hold many domains - to avoid an increase one would have to
forfeit 1 in 14 of their domains every year.

At the current price, it's easy to convince a small business, musician,
artist, etc. to buy a domain and put up a website for themselves to sell on
or promote themselves (this results in extra business for web designers
too), and everyone wants a .com as opposed to .co.uk, org, etc.. Increased
prices will make it harder to attain business from such customers, the
entirety of my customers.

Also please bear in mind the admin you'll cause everyone - tens of thousands
of domain sellers having to remember to raise their prices every year, redo
their advertising and work on their websites again - I'm sure the total
man-hours wasted will be notable (not to mention the odd domain seller that
will forget to raise their prices one year and may run into losses).  This
practice may be acceptable in every day trade business where wars change the
price of oil, currencies change, etc. and hence price changes are
unavoidable - but for a huge international organization that doesn't have
tight cost prices and barely survivable profits based on these variants, is
there really a need to increase prices other than greed for higher profits?
Is it absolutely necessary as it is in a real life scenario whereby your
costs fluctuate closely behind profit margins?  If you had been doing this
from the start, do you think the internet would be what it is today?  A 7%
increase 5 years ago would have resulted in more than 7% of domains
registered today not being registered, hence a hold back in global internet
development.

Domains on the market are getting cheaper and more competitive (even large
commercial sites like godaddy), yet you are considering increasing the
prices at the source.  Our customers will look at our increased prices and
think we are simply putting our prices up and we are to blame, another way
we'll loose business (I'm sure none of my customers have even heard of
ICANN).

I am strongly against the settlement due to the aforementioned reasons (just
a few that crossed my mind).  I strongly urge you not to sign the
settlement.

Regards
Keldon
SheerHosting