I understand ICANN and Verisign along with third party organizations may want to review their position in a market but: On the receiving end the user sees a proposed increase of 7%, inflationary activity is currently evaluated at 2.3%, for a service they renew every year (reoccurring revenue) and no value added. Some registrants have many domains. An sudden increase such as this is challenging for smaller businesses, which really represent the majority of businesses. Reading through the proposed amendment provisions, which really publicizes an agreement between two organizations and third party agencies, but does not really state the conditions and weight or power of the agreement for the user. A number of questions come to mind: * How does one imagine and understand the grounds for price increases of .com domains, above and beyond current market inflationary activity. What is a price freezes, such as the one in 2012, if one seeks a significant price increase. It makes it look like there is intent to strategically hedge for the moratorium period? * It is very hard to identify evidence of structured initiatives that require additional financial resources - hence the increase. Increase in security is something any sustainable organization is invested in every day. It's part of the overhead of providing any kind of service on the internet. Businesses are constantly on the lookout to improve their practices. Yet they don't pass that on to their clients, it's inherent to the business model and the service offered. * "Stability of the internet", which no one or a small group of organizations are tasked with. Internet stability is vague and a loaded concept that deserves to be unpacked to be fully understood by all parties. The stability of the internet, aside from infrastructure, relies above all on users, registrants and people that browse the internet. * The only initiative to which was attached a dollar figure is the "Per-Registrar Transactions Report to record the usage of the "Consolidate/Sync Service" offered by Verisign as transactions." Although, the $0.25 "Consolidate/Sync Service" initiative is not something I'm aware of nor use, and so doesn't really serve our purposes. It is very difficult to conceive and justify the increase based on the evidence presented. Perhaps, ICANN and Verisign could consider a pricing for newly registered .com domains in the future. This would not affect current users but still support both organizations in their initiatives assuming we can track the dollar back to the service improvement. Ian