I am writing to voice my opposition to the Proposed Amendment 3 to the .COM Registry Agreement. 

I am a fledgling entrepreneur who is preparing to open her own business this year.  As such, I have registered several “.com” web domains for my new business.  I am a one-woman online enterprise, and therefore need to keep my overhead costs low.  While I would love for my business to eventually expand, it will always be a small one.  It will therefore never be able to compete with the likes of the big name tech and retail giants, nor be able to afford to pay the same prices they can for branding and maintaining top-dollar domain name (i.e., “.com”) registration.

If the new, more expensive registration pricing were to take effect, I would likely have to buy new (non-.com) web domains, move my entire website, change all of my email addresses, and updated all of my printed and digital promotional materials accordingly, and so forth.  Additionally, upon losing my original .com domain registrations, it would be open to other entities purchasing them and taking advantage of any brand recognition that I had already built under their names.  This would likely lead to a lot of confusion and loss of customers, business contacts, revenue loss, etc.

In the end, the only ones who gain from this situation are Verisign and/or ICANN. Small businesses will be disproportionately affected, while the biggest firms will likely go untouched.  Please reconsider this proposal, as small businesses are the bread and butter of economies all around the world, and every penny counts greatly when keeping them in operation.

Sincerely,

Cheryl Sternberg