To Whom It May Concern,

"ICANN org is not a price regulator and will defer to the expertise of relevant competition authorities."

If you have been limiting wholesale registrar's prices and are now allowing higher prices, then you are, by definition, a price regulator or price fixer.

"to support ICANN’s initiatives to preserve and enhance the security, stability and resiliency of the DNS"

Was that already part of your mission or is that mission creep beyond basic name assignment?  In either case, you should clarify what exactly requires more money and how it will be spent, if you want public support. It wouldn't be bad for ICANN to stop regulating prices if the result would be a properly competitive free market that naturally seeks lower prices for independent services, but the market is basically a monopoly at your level and Verisign is paying you to let them raise prices on other people. As an aside, I have a friend whose self-named domain: stephaniewohar.com was hijacked or drop caught by Chengdu west.cn for unrelated spam purposes, and it would have cost her upper hundreds or thousands of dollars to recover, so I'm not particularly impressed with the cost effectiveness or current structure of your monopoly. Kevin Edwards