Dear Dan Anderson,
ICANN is about to renew the .org, .biz, and .info registry contracts
with a HUGE loophole to allow each registry to charge different
scaled pricing on a per-domain basis and to provide each registry
with a presumptive perpetual monopoly. This means your best domains
may very soon cost you thousands (or more) per year in renewal fees.
We need your help to halt the approval of these contract proposals.
Everyone who owns a domain and cares about its value should post a
comment TODAY to:
http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-2-28jul06.htm
Its easy: Just email your comments to each of the three following
email addresses:
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected]
and then approve the email links they respond with.
The comment period will remain open until 5:00 PM PDT, August 28,
2006. THAT'S TODAY! The comments will be submitted to the ICANN Board
of Directors for the Board to consider at its meeting on September 13,
2006.
If Registries can set "market prices" for each .biz, .info, .org
domain name (ie. $500 or $1 million per year for cars.org or
Google.org etc.. ), then ICANN will have to provide Verisign the same
terms for .com and .net in 2012. ALL of your businesses could be in
serious jeopardy. So we all have a vested interest in this not
happening.
If you CHOOSE to remain silent the fallout will jeopardize all of our
futures. We need your help. Please take a moment to read the comments
others have posted, then create one of your own and mail it off.
http://forum.icann.org/lists/biz-tld-agreement
http://forum.icann.org/lists/info-tld-agreement
http://forum.icann.org/lists/org-tld-agreement
Below are sample letters that were forwarded to us. They give some
good ideas and the consequences of staying silent. Please remember
that the deadline is 5pm today.
THANK YOU!!
The Parked.com Team
Sample #1
To the ICANN Board,
The proposed TLD Registry Renewal Contracts for .info, .biz, and .org
domains have a seriously flawed component whereby a Registry will be
able to set arbitrary rates without price caps at whatever the market
will bear. This will create a financially devastating impact on the
business models of millions of domain and web site owners worldwide.
The impact will be especially damaging to .org and .info domain
owners and site operators who for the most part use .org and .info
domains for non-profit, charitable organizations, and educational
purposes.
Hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested into the core
domain name infrastructure of the Internet with the secured
expectation that acquiring, owning and maintaining domains would
always be affordable and make economic sense for a long term
investment.
To enable and facilitate a way for registry's to financially exploit
and gouge the marketplace would not only be a business tragedy, but
it goes against the grain of all the base principles upon which the
Internet was conceived. It would certainly deter new entrepreneurs
from considering venturing onto the Net if there is no certainty what
their site's URL location will be costing them each year they renew.
And the vast multitude of current domain owners and web site
operators would close up shop if their costs of doing business
skyrocketed on every domain they own.
Even more importantly, this flaw would give an unfair economic
advantage to individuals and corporations who have substantial
capital resources who could outbid less fortunate and startup
entrepreneurs with limited capital.
And inevitably, there would be a tidal wave of costly and time
consuming lawsuits and litigation that ICANN itself would have to
deal with from the millions of impacted domain owners.
Thus, I respectfully request that you reconsider and reconstruct the
contracts and remove this no price caps clause completely.
Sample #2
I wish to express my profound concern that the proposed registry
agreements for .org, .biz and .info do not prohibit predatory price
rises by the registries. ICANN was entirely right to object to
Verisign's SiteFinder service, and for all the right reasons, but
appears not to have learned the obvious lesson: that registries can
be motivated to do things that are not in registrants' interests.
Given that reality, removal of price caps is likely to result in
anticompetitive practices that seriously impact internet
stakeholders. I hope that you will reconsider this aspect of the
agreements.
Sample #3
In permitting even the theoretical hiking of fees for domain name
renewals, ICANN is threatening nothing less than the democratic
nature of the Internet. As an individual, I have been using a .org
domain for some years for a political and social blog website. The
relatively low cost of renewing my domain name and hosting the site
is extremely important to me. Operating such a site now feels like an
extension of my free speech rights! I am counting on you not to do
anything to erode that. Thank you.
Sample #4
As a small business operator, with substantial goodwill invested in
our domain names, I wish to express my strong opposition to the
lifting of price controls. One of ICANN's core principles is the
encouragement of competition at both the registry and registrar
levels. Such competition is incompatible with the kind of
unrestricted monopoly that these proposed agreements would create. I
therefore urge the board to reject the agreements.
