As a personal holder of three .COM domains, and the responsible party for a fourth on behalf of a small business (three employees with minimal profits, he operates as much as a public service as he does as a business), I vehemently oppose this quid pro quo cash grab. 1. ICANN was created to operate in the PUBLIC interest. This "amendment" serves no one but ICANN and Verisign, who do not collectively constitute "the public". 2. Barring any extenuating circumstances, the entire point of an AGREEMENT is for both parties to be held to it; freely and privately amending it on a whim violates the spirit of an agreement. 3. The .COM TLD was not enforced as a commercial-only TLD, and as a consequence many individuals have registered and built sites upon .COM domains for their own personal or professional purposes prior to the proliferation and popularization of other TLDs. If it *were* enforced as a commercial-only TLD I could see the interest in raising prices as larger commercial entities do often profit wildly off their domains, and using such activity to help maintain the domain infrastructure could be considered in the public interest. This is not the case though, and as such price increases disproportionately affect individuals and small businesses. 4. The amendment does not specify how the payment to ICANN is to be spent, leaving the looming specter of largess and misuse. Had the amendment laid out strict guidelines for how the money would be used IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST, I might almost be able to forgive it; but it doesn't. If the .COM domain price structure were shifted to a tiered status, where individuals and small businesses paid a lesser fee for their domains while larger corporate entities who are profiting significantly off their domains paid more, I could appreciate this more; it would reinforce the concept that the fees are for the maintenance and improvement of the domain infrastructure since the larger entities of course put a greater load on the system in terms of DNS queries and such. Even better, base the tiers simply on root domain traffic; domains that have less than X queries to the root servers per year (a reasonable amount to be determined by ICANN based on current traffic) qualify the following year for "small user" status, and either lump everyone else into a "large user" group, or create further tiers (10*X, 1000*X, etc) to keep domains affordable for smaller businesses while larger businesses pay their fair share to maintain the infrastructure they profit from. Even if the agreement were better structured, such that the increases would be limited and reasonable, I could perhaps forgive this. Instead, the agreement gives Verisign broad leeway to pump prices as they see fit, giving ICANN a percentage of the forecasted profits in return. This is utterly unacceptable and completely AGAINST public interest, and must be stopped. Sincerely, Jessica Lee Jones Massachusetts, United States