Morning Tim, We registrars have a higher duty of care for names-that-are-marks. We don't have a mandated floor price above the base registry price that allows us to recover the cost that higher duty of care imposes. This is independent of ICANN mark-up or thread-rental or whatever else may provide passing distraction. A few weeks ago when Google rolled out their gmail product, someone wrote on the economics of store -- something on the order of $2/GB/yr was the cost factor. Quite a few domain registrations will "fit" inside of one GB, so there is something wildly different about the registry-side of the real business of maintaining accessable state and publication bandwidth, and the same technical fundamentals that drive the content industry. In a nutshell, the per-domain-year registry cost is pennies, not dollars. This too is independent of ICANN mark-up or thread-rental or whatever else may provide passing distraction. Ignoring everything else (for the moment), there is a cost differential to be recovered -- a "mark-up" to make a modest pun, and a protected margin to be recovered. If these can't be addressed, that is, if the interests of the registrars is insufficient to cause true cost, in the case of marks and marks-associated duties, and true margin, in the case of the annual per-domain registry fee, to be reflected in the ICANN pricing structure, then we don't have much to work from. Eric