Hi all I have tried to stay away from this discussion, but I cannot help…. A couple of years ago I would have jumped in with at least a dozen points to point out - pun not intended. However, in the last years I have focused on the young generations. I have been fortunate enough to have been chosen as NextGen Mentor, and I have had the opportunity to listen to the newcomers - although institutionally, it should have been them to listen to me 🙃. Also, a few days ago I have attended EuroDIG, and again I was blessed with the opportunity to meet YOUthDIG participants. In particular as NextGen Mentor, I attended the presentations of the NextGen-ers. Actually, I have been doing this at ICANN meetings whenever my schedule allowed it ever since the NextGen programme was launched, I am planning to do this albeit remotely during ICANN87, and wholeheartedly invite you all to do the same, and also to take the opportunity to talk to NextGen-ers in person. All NextGen participants are asked to produce a presentation about a topic of their choice within the ICANN remit. One thing that is striking is that a tiny minority of the presentations that the newcomers are asked to do does address new TLDs. Actually once - if I remember correctly, it was in Prague - none of the newcomers even mentioned new TLDs. I am proud of what we, as old elephants, have done over these years - and surely folks like Karl and Barry, for whom I have immense respect, have contributed much more than I did. However, we all must acknowledge that for the vast majority of the plain Internet end users - the At-Large constituency - domain names as such are by and large irrelevant. Of course, we all know that the DNS is still important. And a lot of the young people are interested in DNS security and stability, DNS abuse, and more. What I noticed, is that they do not care about the "domain name market" as such. Why on earth the At-Large should be involved in matters like the one I found myself a few years ago - a series of meetings discussing whether the non-capital cities with more than 100K inhabitants should have their name reserved - is a mystery. Yes, it is an extreme case - at least I hope - but where do we draw the line? The question here is what is the vision that we have, as At-Large, about ICANN and our role in it. How do we imagine the future of the Internet, the role of ICANN in the “next” Internet, the needs and concerns of the end users? Cheers, Roberto On 06.06.2026, at 22:44, Karl Auerbach via At-Large <at-large@icann.org> wrote: I think we can end this discussion. Your point of view appears to be that the ALAC only represents people who buy domain names and that the ALAC should ignore everyone else. My point of view is that the domain industry, under ICANN's policies, is extracting at least a $Billion a year, much from the pockets of individuals and small businesses that buy domain names and that $billion cost propagates through normal economic flows not only to those domain name buyers but to the community in general. And that those bodies within ICANN that purport to speak for individuals ought to care about that. And if the ALAC won't protect the public, the community of internet users, then what is the use of an ALAC at all? --karl-- On 6/6/26 8:45 AM, Evan Leibovitch wrote: On Sat, Jun 6, 2026 at 5:43 AM Karl Auerbach <karl@cavebear.com<mailto:karl@cavebear.com>> wrote: There are far more than roughly two hundred million domain names registered. To how many different unique registrants? Do we have a situation in which the top 10% registrants possess more than half of the extant domains? How many domains are rented for purely defensive reasons? How many are part of speculative portfolios? How many are purchased by bots, thousands at a time, with malicious intent? Such statistics should be easily collected. Are they? Many of those are registered to individual or to small businesses (that are essentially the commercial extension of an individual or small group of individuals.) How many? Evidence, please. I assert that the impact is far less that is claimed. ICANN has had 30 years to collect the demographics of its tenants and certainly has the means to do so. Has it bothered? Or would the reality of how few people it actually impacts be too embarrassing? I know people in the US who find $25 to be the difference between eating and not eating at the end of the month. And those people have no reason to buy domains. Nor does the vast majority of the population, anywhere. How much more significant might that $25 cost be to the 95% of the world's population who do not live in the US? That 95% of the population has no need for domains. Indeed, far more than 99%. When I first got involved in ICANN I was confronted by the widespread belief that every person on earth was a potential registrant who simply hadn't been properly sold yet. I immediately drew the comparison, based on its internal self-image, between ICANN as the Once-ler and domains as Thneeds, This belief and the conceit it creates still underlies a lot of ICANN thinking, apparently. Anyone who has travelled the world -- as those who attend ICANN meetings have, at least a little -- should be looking around them to see how local populations access the Internet. One might see the popularity in some locations of the Meta Free Basics scheme, which provides free or subsidized service to more than 100 million people who access the Internet without using visible domains at all. And of course there are the ccTLDs, completely outside the remit of ICANN, who choose their own pricing and business models to suit local needs should the ICANN model be too onerous. And to think that business do not pass costs onto consumers - such as individual internet users - would be a flight of fancy. I prefer evidence. Got any? For companies, whether large or small, the impact of domain name costs may be small, but those costs are there in the financial calculations. And like those drops of rain and flakes of snow they accumulate and eventually business will raise their product prices - raises that will land, often only indirectly, onto individual users of the internet. This is laughable. Especially the assertion that prices of domains owned by speculators, not used for any purpose, have any impact on the costs to end-users. And I would just love to see any evidence that the targets of phishing and malware and other scams have had to pay extra ransom as a result of the millions of domains rented specifically to produce the scams having had their rates increased. Penny by penny, dollar by dollar, Euro by Euro, ICANN's allowance of unaudited and unquestioned registration fees adds up to well beyond a $Billion each year. And much of that comes, directly and indirectly, year after year, from the pockets of individual internet users. You keep saying that, without a whole lot of proof. This line of thought is starting to sound faith-based. One might say "the only ones affected are those individuals who acquire domain names". Not really. An individual who had to pay $25 for a domain name for which the underlying cost is a few cents is paying at least $24 too much. I tend to agree with Barry that domains are vastly underpriced. If the ultimate intent is to serve the interests of non-registrant end-users, high domain prices would deter speculative and abusive domain rentals, and would promote greater use of third-level domains and other innovations to keep the costs down for legitimate domain uses. The excess of revenue over cost could be then used to fund more-aggressive abuse mitigation regimes. But that won't happen because ICANN needs the money and the domain churn. But the impact at the source end - where the the monetary numbers are small (but the numbers of people paying is large) also deserves attention "Large" is not a useful metric. Some statistics on what proportion of domains are rented by individuals might make this point credible. One can argue that ICANN and its bodies formed of individuals ought not to worry about what are probably the better part of a $Billion being yanked out of the pockets of individuals. The one thing upon which we can apparently agree is that the rent-seeking model of ICANN domains extracts value from the Internet rather than adding value. But the world's answer to that appears to be the abandonment of the use of "memorable" domains in favour of other ways of accessing the Internet. And yet the gTLD space is expanding; more and more domains are being used by fewer and fewer people. Unlike so many of the other assertions being made in this thread, the trend away from typing domains has some research statistics to back it up. I await any research from the opposite direction. - Evan _______________________________________________ At-Large mailing list -- at-large@icann.org To unsubscribe send an email to at-large-leave@icann.org At-Large Official Site: http://atlarge.icann.org _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.