Hi folks, ICANN posted two more garbage press releases masquerading as independent economic reports about new gTLDs, see: http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-06jun09-en.htm Of course, to no one's surprise, the reports simply justified their original papers. They ignored and dismissed the significant concerns raised by the community, once again. ICANN never even posted a summary or analysis of the original comments that were submitted: http://forum.icann.org/lists/competition-pricing-prelim/ The author completely ignored the issue of tiered pricing, and did not investigate the magnitude of switching costs (e.g. for a company to switch from Cars.com or Hotels.com to NewCo.cars or NewBiz.hotels if the registry operator for .com was allowed to charge different prices for each domain name, which would be the monopolist's optimal strategy if price caps were eliminated). Indeed, Dr. Carlton's entire report is based on the false assumption that the all would be charged identical prices. Paragraph 69 states: "Ex ante competition serves to protect both uninformed consumers, which face greater risk of opportunistic price increases, as well as better informed consumers BECAUSE BOTH SETS OF CONSUMERS PAY THE SAME PRICES." (emphasis added) In our original comments, we challenged the author, and ICANN itself, to disclose their own switching costs, by accepting/rejecting direct offers to purchase their domain names: http://forum.icann.org/lists/competition-pricing-prelim/msg00000.html Of course, they ignored this, and simply wave their hands and pretend that switching costs are insignificant or are exaggerated. It appears ICANN is prepared to say anything in order to justify new gTLDs. Sincerely, George Kirikos 416-588-0269 http://www.leap.com/