I've changed the subject line to reflect the forking of the conversation. There seem to be several points in this conversation: 1. That the existing registry fees for legacy TLDs (particularly .com, .org, and .net) are not anchored to actual registry costs and thus represent an ICANN-protected form of monopoly rent. And the lack of any actual inquiry/audit into the costs experienced by those registries makes it impossible to hold an objective conversation about those registry fees. However, my back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that ICANN's fiat and protected registry fee structure for legacy TLDs amounts to an yearly internet tax - largely paid into the coffers of Verisign and, to a much lesser extent, PIR, in excess of a $Billion USD each year. 2. That some people want the end (registry+registrar) pricing of domains to be so high as to discourage either speculation or rapid changes (i.e. to help scammers hide.) 3. That domain name registrants are a distinct class of people (to a degree an overlapping class) with internet users and that thus one must not let the former "stakeholders'" interests replace the latter "stakeholders'" interests. With regard to each of these points: 1. Many of us (myself included) are effectively trapped into the legacy TLDs. The cost of changing to a new TLD is high, and ICANN's arbitrary ten year limit on registrations, coupled with weak limits on price increases, means that even if we change we would remain unprotected against predatory pricing. To start this conversation, ICANN ought to initiate a review of the actual costs incurred by legacy TLDs, clearly differentiating the actual costs from the costs of corporate imaging (such as fortress data centers - secure against tanks but not necessary safe from cyber attacks) or "research" groups. 2. Speculators get a bad name - but we all do it. Many of us have retirement savings plans tied to speculative assets such as stocks or real estate. I've met a lot of domain name speculators and have sold some domain names myself. I have not observed them to be particularly ill natured or predatory. (I have observed, however, that there are underclasses who are less blessed - by this I mean people who snap up names that someone forgot to renew or that have been abandoned and then use them to capture - and capitalize upon - traffic that still comes to those names. My own company has learned to never relinquish a no-longer needed name because of the risk of those names falling into the hands of those who find it useful to tarnish our corporate reputation. So we bear a cost - probably for the life of the company - to retain those names.) If we are worried about scammers (and I count myself among those who are concerned) who use and then abandon names rapidly and bear little cost for doing so, let me suggest that we begin with an easier proposition: Change the five minute name server update time that came into existence under ICANN to something more like the prior 24 hours, or something in the middle, like 6 hours. Those of us who do name maintenance have long learned to tune down the TTLs on names in advance of making changes and then tuning up the TTLs once the change has been made and tested. And we should encourage DNSSEC to help fight the rogue DNS server problem. (I'm guilty here, I've got DNSSEC enabled on only a few of my names.) It also does not help that so many TLS (think HTTPS) certificates these days all run to the same authority, Lets Encrypt. That weakens the ability to use certificate chains as a means of increasing our confidence that https and other certificate base communications are actually hooked to the proper peer. 3. As I've made clear over the years, I find the "stakeholder" model to be quite contrary to the notion of bottom-up governance. And here is a case in point. If a particular person is to be pre-designated as a "domain name registrant" or "user" or "small business" or "intellectual property user" then that pre-designation distorts the distillation of views and, thus, outcomes. In political terms here in the US we use the term "Gerrymandering" for that kind of shaping of the interests. I've long said that the atomic unit of interest is the individual human being. By allowing only individual humans to be recognized, or rather, to be counted, when measuring a proposal we push the resolution of conflicts into each person as he/she resolves his/her own various interests. Thus if we measured an ICANN proposal by the count of opinions of people - rather than by pushing those interests into "stakeholder" groups - then people could look to their several interests when they develop their point of view on a matter. (I would go so far as to deny corporations to have countable opinions - if a corporate entity can't prevail upon its employees or owners to express support for the corporate interest then why should we undertake to do so? Of course, a corporate interest, as should any, interest, be allowed to provide information and express its point of view. But that should be merely information that gains weight only as it is accepted by individual humans.) When I was on the ICANN board I found it a difficult task to reconcile the fact that I was a representative with the fact that I am also an individual with strong opinions. I tried to resolve that dissonance by trying to openly interact with people and interest groups - a practice that irked several of the other board members at the time - and to always consider that my own opinion could be wrong and ought to be changed. I remain convinced that, as the title of my note expresses: Stakeholderism - The Wrong Road For Internet Governance - https://www.cavebear.com/archive/rw/igf-democracy-in-internet-governance.pdf --karl--