January 2020 - comments-com-amendment-3-03jan20@icann.org

[Comments-com-amendment-3-03jan20] Price increases for .com domains are unjustifiable.
by Alex Lerman Jan. 17, 2020

Jan. 17, 2020

Dear ICANN, I am very concerned that ICANN appears to be rubber-stamping a major rise in .com prices. There does not appear to be any justification for raising prices. No economic study has been undertaken by ICANN to demonstrate that Verisign needs any more money or that there is some other public interest in raising prices. The price increase appears to be purely a money-grab by an already handsomely paid company. That means only its shareholders stand to benefit from the increased price, not the public. Moreover, the $20 million that Verisign is paying ICANN in exchange for a price increase worth billions is embarrassing. Not only is it a paltry sum compared to the windfall that ICANN is bestowing upon Verisign, but it appears to be a quid pro quo despite protestations otherwise. Such conduct makes ICANN look very bad and raises serious questions about whether ICANN can be trusted to look after the public interest. Sincerely, Alexander Lerman Domain Registrant

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[Comments-com-amendment-3-03jan20] Opposed to .com price increases
by Nat Cohen Jan. 17, 2020

Jan. 17, 2020

Dear Mr. Namazi, What is ICANN's justification for raising prices on millions of .com registrants? Why is Verisign entitled to make hundreds of millions of more dollars on top of the billion dollars it already makes from running .com? Why is ICANN allowing a company with market power to increase prices, without justification, and in the absence of meaningful competition that would restrain pricing? Does ICANN have any good answers to these questions? NTIA says it is ICANN's job to set prices on .com. ICANN says it is NTIA's job to set pricing. Who then is responsible for negotiating reasonable pricing on behalf of the public? Is NTIA wrong that it is ICANN's job to set prices? Was the DOJ wrong back in 2008 when it said that ICANN was failing to uphold its responsibility to constrain the market power of Verisign? NTIA did not mandate that ICANN increase .com prices, it merely set an upper limit beyond which prices should not go. ICANN retains the ability to freeze pricing while remaining consistent with NTIA guidance. It would be odd indeed if a U.S. Government agency was in favor of company raising prices on consumers without justification. At what point will ICANN start looking out for the public interest instead of only acting in the best interests of the registries? ICANN's preference for harming registrants to benefit registries highlights the fact that ICANN is unaccountable to the public, that its policy making structure provides no meaningful way for the public interest to be given any weight in developing policy, and that it lacks legitimacy. There is no justification for a price increase. Verisign is not facing higher costs that need to be passed along to customers. Verisign is already one of the most profitable companies in the world, enjoying extremely high profit margins and deriving enormous revenues per employee. ICANN's utter failure to protect the public from being ripped off by registries with market power setting ever higher prices is a sad reflection on ICANN. I urge ICANN to stop the needless transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars from registrants worldwide into the already overflowing pockets of Verisign by denying Verisign price increases. Regards, Nat Cohen President Telepathy, Inc.

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Re: [Comments-com-amendment-3-03jan20] Amendment 3
by Kate Buckley Jan. 15, 2020

Jan. 15, 2020

To Whom it May Concern: This letter is to state my opposition to Proposed Amendment 3 as there are clear issues with its implementation: To wit, there are clear potential financial gains to be had by raising the registration fee on .com domains. And yet, the global DNS registration system should be run primarily as a public concern. The two are incompatible. The only entities that stand to benefit from the proposed arrangement are Verisign itself—at the expense of the public. While price hikes such as this may not substantially impact the larger business concerns that buy in bulk, it will greatly negatively affect the millions of small, independent businesses and developers that rely on the system as it currently stands to make their livelihood. At worst, this could prove yet another point of pressure that convinces a small business to make their online presence exclusively within the walled garden of social media, eschewing the web itself. The web, and global DNS, were envisioned to be run for the public good, and they SHOULD be run for the public good. Deals such as this constitute a clear conflict—not to mention an abnegation of the public trust—and are an abdication of that mandate; short-sighted profit chasing at the expense of the greater good. Please do not adopt this proposal. Sincerely, Kate Buckley Dana Point, CA [photo] Kate Buckley, MFA, CPC CEO and Founder at Buckley Media Call or Text 1-760-808-1086 <tel:1-760-808-1086> Email kate(a)buckleymedia.com <mailto:kate@buckleymediagroup.com> Website BuckleyMedia.com<http://buckleymedia.com> Qq 2545867399 Skype K<http://buckleymedia.com/>ateBuckley74 BuckleyMedia.com/what-smart-founders-know-about-domain-names<https://www.buckleymedia.com/what-smart-founders-know-about-domain-names.ht…> [https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.wisestamp.com/social_icons/square/linkedin.…]<http://linkedin.com/in/katebuckley1> [https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.wisestamp.com/social_icons/square/twitter.p…] <http://twitter.com/katebuckley1> Opt out: If you would prefer not receiving further emails from BuckleyMedia.com<http://buckleymedia.com>, please reply to this email and state Opt out. This email contains confidential and privileged material for the sole use of the intended recipient. Any review or distribution by others is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient please contact the sender and delete all copies.

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[Comments-com-amendment-3-03jan20] Comment of the ICA on Proposed Amendment 3 to the .COM Registry Agreement
by Zak Muscovitch Jan. 15, 2020

Jan. 15, 2020

Dear Mr. Namazi, Please see the Internet Commerce Association's attached Comment in connection with the Proposed Amendment 3 to the .COM Registry Agreement. We are also appending below, a plain text version of our Comment without footnotes. Yours truly, Zak Muscovitch General Counsel, ICA InternetCommerce.org January15, 2020 ICANN Global Domains Division 12025 Waterfront Drive, Suite 300 Los Angeles, California 90094-2536, USA Attn: Cyrus Namazi Dear Mr. Namazi: Re: Proposed Amendment 3 to the .COM Registry Agreement We are writing to you in response to your request for public comments ("Public Comments") on the above-noted proposal (the "Proposed Amendment"). Introduction 1. We trust that you can appreciated that your request for Public Comments must be viewed with considerable skepticism considering that the last time that you requested feedback from the public on an amendment to a registry agreement, public comment resulted in exactly zero changes to the .org Registry Agreement despite near universal opposition and condemnation from stakeholders. Your failure to pay more than lip service to the multi-stakeholder model resulted in what is now widely considered to be the ".Org Fiasco". This has called into question whether ICANN is actually capable of representing the public interest. In the future, should ICANN genuinely seek public comment on something as crucial as a multi-billion dollar service agreement that involves crucial policy questions, it would seem to make sense to request such feedback, or even engage a policy development process, before "reaching a proposed agreement", which is not the case now. In fact, on January 3, 2020, you announced that you had already "reached a proposed agreement", whereas it would make far more sense and be far more credible, if you sought community input before reaching any proposed agreement. Otherwise, ICANN's position is already firmly entrenched and its direction already established, thereby putting the cart before the horse. Nevertheless, in case there is someone with a decision-making capacity at ICANN Org or on the ICANN Board of Directors who is prepared to actually receive public comments with a view to possibly reconsidering the Proposed Amendment, we are submitting our comments herein. ICANN is Under No Legal Obligation to Permit Verisign to Raise its Prices to the Maximum or At All 2. ICANN has expressly claimed that the Proposed Amendment "fulfills commitments that ICANN and Verisign made in 2016 when they previously amended the .COM RA". This is false. ICANN never committed to raising the Maximum Price that Verisign was permitted to charge for .com registrations. All that ICANN committed to in the First Amendment to the 2016 .COM Registration Agreement, was to "cooperate and negotiate in good faith to amend the terms of the Agreement "as may be necessary for consistency with changes to...the Cooperative Agreement". Amendment 35 to the Cooperative Agreement merely stated that "the yearly price for the registration and renewal of domain names in the .com registry may be changed" [emphasis added], and that" ICANN may agree to amend" the Maximum Price [emphasis added]. NTIA's Statement[1] on Amendment 35 expressly stated that Amendment 35, under the heading of "Pricing Flexibility", merely "permits Verisign to pursue with ICANN an up to 7 percent increase in the prices of .com domain names" [emphasis added]. It is therefore clear from the .COM Registry Agreement, Amendment 35, and NTIA's Statement, that NTIA did not require or impose a 7% increase in price and that it remains up to ICANN whether to agree to give Verisign any increase at all, or if an increase is to be granted, whether it should be within the maximum of 7% instead of at the maximum. Since Amendment 35 requires no increase in price whatsoever, and at most provides "flexibility" of up to a maximum 7% annual increase in 4 out of 6 years, it would be consistent with Amendment 35 if no changes at all were made to the .COM Registry Agreement. At most, all that ICANN is required to do pursuant to its .COM Registry Agreement obligations is to consider whether allowing Verisign to charge more, is justifiable. It is not. It is an extraordinarily serious concern that ICANN would apparently assume that it "has no choice" but to give Verisign permission to raise its prices, when there is no such legal obligation. If ICANN has been led to believe that its hands are tied by the existing terms of the .COM Registry Agreement or that NTIA required ICANN to permit Verisign to raise its prices all the way to the permitted Maximum, it is nothing short of a multi-billion dollar error. We previously highlighted to you the absence of any obligation to permit Verisign to raise prices in our letter dated November 16, 2018. We are once again reiterating this crucial understanding of ICANN's legal obligations, and in light of this it is incumbent upon you to reconsider your options and proceed pursuant to your actual legal obligations instead of pursuant to your misapprehended ones. You should also cease misrepresenting to stakeholders that the Proposed Amendment is in any sense "required" of you under a mistaken notion of "consistency", as opposed to it being an entirely gratuitous concession to your contracted .COM registry service provider. There is No Factual Justification for Permitting Verisign to Raise its Prices 3. At the outset, it should be clear to you that no one other than Verisign (and perhaps other contracted registry operators) want increases in .COM prices. There is obviously no stakeholder outcry to increase prices on registrants. Registrants themselves obviously don't want to pay more. So who does the proposed price increase stand to benefit? Only Verisign. It stands to reap billions of dollars more, all paid for by registrants, and for no genuine reason whatsoever. Verisign is entitled to a reasonable fee for running the registry on behalf of ICANN. Verisign currently charges $7.85 per .com domain name per year. The cost to operate the registry, after taking into account the expensive infrastructure necessary to provide reliable and secure operations and high overhead, has been estimated at $1.00[2] to $3.50 per domain name per year. If the proposed fee increases go into effect, by the end of the six-year agreement term, the fee for each .com domain name will increase to $10.29 per year, a 30% jump from current levels. Even conservatively assuming that in six years' time there are only 140 million .com domain name registrants, that increase of $2.44 per year, per domain name, would result in $341,000,000 more revenue for Verisign per year. Bear in mind, that without any price increase and as things already stand now, Verisign, has a market capitalization of nearly $25 billion dollars and had net income in 2017 of US $457 million on revenue of $1.14 billion. Making things even more remarkable is that Verisign enjoys an incredible operating margin of around 60%.[3] Despite benefiting from the economies of scale from operating the largest domain name registry together with the .net registry, Verisign already charges far more for its registry services than other registry operators. For instance, as reported by Domain Name Wire, a recent bid to manage the registry for India's .in domain name was made by Neustar at just 70 cents per domain name per year, and registry operator Afilias offered to run it for $1.65 per domain name per year. Afilias runs the much smaller .org registry, with its 10 million domain names under management for approximately $1.80 per domain name per year. Accordingly, by any reasonable estimation, Verisign is not suffering for lack of revenue nor is it deserving of increased revenue. The current rate of $7.85 is already far in excess of market rates as determined through competitive bidding processes elsewhere. Simply put, there is no justification for increasing prices, whatsoever. If ICANN is to be trusted as the steward of the .COM Registry on behalf of the global public interest, ICANN must ask itself why it would effectively hand over billions of dollars in registrant money to its contracted service provider? Verisign is merely your manager of the .COM Registry - it has no business dictating the price, particularly when it is already handsomely paid and others could do it for far less. As we saw with the .Org Fiasco, bad things happen when a registry operator treats the registry as an asset that belongs to it, rather than acting as a mere contracted manager. The Refrain That ICANN Is Not a Regulator is a Dangerous and Misguided Red Herring ICANN repeatedly and apparently reflexively, repeats the mantra, that "ICANN is not a price regulator", as if it makes any sense. It does not. The latest reflexive utterance of this misguided mantra regrettably appears in the background info on the Public Comments Page.[4] First, no matter how many times this mantra is repeated, doesn't make it any more meaningful or truthful. Second, at most it is a statement of a purported policy, not of a fact. Third, ICANN has been setting prices for years. It sets prices every time it enters into a contract with a service provider and has consistently set prices for legacy TLDs. Fourth, ICANN as the steward of the .COM Registry, is of course entitled to determine what its service provider, Verisign, can charge in respect of a public resource that ICANN is supposed to manage in the public interest. Fifth, if there was ever any hope that the new gTLDs would present such effective competition to .COM that prices would naturally be constrained by market forces, the results are in and it didn't happen. The Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice specifically determined in 2008 that Verisign possesses significant market power as the operator of the .COM Registry because many registrants do not perceive .com and other gTLDs and ccTLDS to be substitutes. That has not changed. Verisign still has market power due to the unique market position of .COM. This market power means that Verisign is not constrained by competitive forces from raising prices on its captive base of .COM registrants especially given the prohibitive switching costs for registrants. Further, as there is no genuinely adequate substitute TLD for .COM, Verisign is the only source for new registrants wishing to enjoy the distinct benefits of branding on a .COM domain name. Because of Verisign's market power, and in the absence of putting the .COM Registry out for bid, price caps are necessary to protect the public from Verisign's ability to abuse its market power by raising prices far above levels that would exist in a market where there was effective competition. Verisign's prices already far exceed market levels. Any further increases are unjustified. Sixth, to the extent that being a "regulator" by definition entails being a government agency, then of course ICANN is not a "price regulator" per se. But ICANN needn't be a price regulator to negotiate with its supplier a reasonable price on .COM domain names, as ICANN was entrusted with the DNS to operate it for the public benefit. Seventh, if ICANN is not a price regulator, then who is? The Department of Commerce does not set prices for the .COM Registry. Rather, it leaves it up to ICANN. And if neither the DOC nor ICANN sets prices, then who gets to set prices? Verisign, the service provider with market power? That is an absurd situation which if allowed to occur, would surely cause untold damage to the public interest. Eighth, setting prices is a policy matter when it comes to the .COM Registry. If ICANN intended to adopt such a radical policy of permitting Verisign to set its own prices, that is a matter for stakeholders to determine, and there has never been any such policy development nor agreement amongst stakeholders. Ninth, to the extent that ICANN took a hands-off approach to pricing when it came to new gTLDs, that is an entirely different situation than with legacy registries. New gTLDs were, for better or worse, 'bought and paid for' by new gTLD applicants who were determined as a matter of consensus policy, to be able to charge what they wanted. But as we have seen with the .Org Fiasco, when it comes to long-established legacy TLDs, stakeholders and registrants in particular want price stability and certainty. They want prices that are as low as possible while maintaining reliable DNS services. Lastly, fair, stable, and certain pricing when it comes to legacy TLDs, is a core mission of ICANN despite what you may have been told or have come to believe. In ICANN's Announcement regarding the Proposed Amendment, ICANN expressly acknowledged, in the very same statement wherein ICANN stated that "it is not a price regulator", that "pricing certainty [will be achieved] by limiting the potential maximum wholesale price for .COM domain names". ICANN goes on to state, "the .COM TLD is an important part of global commerce, making its continued secure, stable and resilient operation a top priority for both ICANN and Verisign". Accordingly, by its own admission, ICANN itself implicitly acknowledges that it has a crucial role to play in maintaining stable pricing in order to ensure .COM's important place in the public interest. Yours truly, INTERNET COMMERCE ASSOCIATION "Zak Muscovitch" Per: Zak A. Muscovitch ZM/cm ________________________________ [1] See: NTIA Statement on Amendment 35 (https://www.ntia.doc.gov/press-release/2018/ntia-statement-amendment-35-coo…) [2] See; https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/02/dotcom_domains_pricing/ [3] Ibid. [4] See https://www.icann.org/public-comments/com-amendment-3-2020-01-03-en

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[Comments-com-amendment-3-03jan20] Please do not grant Verisign more revenue
by David Muir Sharnoff Jan. 15, 2020

Jan. 15, 2020

The .com registration service that Verisign has captured is not a competitive market. If it were competitive, then I could choose a different provider that was more to my liking even it it cost me more. That's not an option if I want to use a .com domain. Verisign did not gain control of the .com registry for any reason that should allow them to milk it for more money per domain. Given that the number of domains keeps going up and the costs to run a registry keep going down (unless the people involved are not competent) there is no reason other than greed for them to even ask for more money.

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[Comments-com-amendment-3-03jan20] amendment 3
by Randall Cooper Jan. 15, 2020

Jan. 15, 2020

Veto Amendment 3 for price changes. .Com domains are already high enough. If they continue to climb then registers of domains have 0 profits. -- Kind Regards, Randall Cooper

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[Comments-com-amendment-3-03jan20] Reject Proposed Amendment 3
by Bollom, Kevin [AUTOSOL/FMP/EDEN] Jan. 14, 2020

Jan. 14, 2020

Please reject Proposed Amendment 3, or alternatively limit the price increases to 2% per year.

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[Comments-com-amendment-3-03jan20] Public Comments
by Leigh Bateman Jan. 13, 2020

Jan. 13, 2020

ICANN must put .com out for competitive tender. The $20M donation is a pittance compared to the monopoly profits made by Verisign who has a 65% operating margin, and could open the board up to bribery allegations.

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[Comments-com-amendment-3-03jan20] Comment
by Michael White Jan. 13, 2020

Jan. 13, 2020

Verisign is the exclusive operator of .com and ICANN decides who gets that role. Verisign is bribing ICANN to ensure that situation doesn't change and they are also allowed to make more free money. How you can not see this is absurd. It is pure corruption out in the open. You are bribing a non profit, and they are seemingly going along with it. So the US gave up control for this to happen? Within 2 years we already have open corruption and money changing hands between icann and Verisign. This is a god damn shit show of epic proportions. Listen to this line of junk you are trying to feed us..you are telling us this deal is to help increases security? LOL do you even hear yourself. You are so corrupt you don't even care anymore. You list a bunch of generic shit that matters to no one and is already figured out. So yea more greasing of the palms. Fucking pitiful. Nice non profit you got there.

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[Comments-com-amendment-3-03jan20] Against the proposed .COM price increase
by Perry Harrington Jan. 13, 2020

Jan. 13, 2020

Hello, If you fastforward to the bottom of this message, you will see just 3 of the domains that I own. Over the years it has been an onerous annual task to renew each of my domains. Each renewal I am assaulted with many cleverly designed interstitial up-sell pages, just so I can pay an excessive fee for a root DNS entry. I run my own DNS server, in my opinion the cost of a domain entry far exceeds the actual cost or value provided by the registrar. The registrar does everything they can to monetize me and only provides a service that was once free to me, subsidized by federal grants. I was the first employee of Web Communications (webcom.com) and I remember quite well when domain registrations were privatized and monetized. ICANN should NOT allow Verisign to increase domain registration fees, it's nothing more than a money grab that does not bring additional value to .com domain owners. Verisign is the digital equivalent of an oil monopoly, they provide little value in return for the price they charge, they should not be given more. ICANN should remove Verisign's exclusive control of the .com TLD and allow competition to thrive, not continue to line Verisign's pockets. Thank you, --Perry -- Perry Harrington W0NKE http://www.apsoft.com/ http://www.dainst.com/ http://www.eformance.com/ Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin

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