ICANN Board Unanimously Approves Controversial Org/Info/Biz Contracts

[mjreine]

Congrats Duke...good luck! Sounds like a great organization to have fighting for domain owners. We need something like that bad. Imagine a board sifting through all of our .net and .com names judging how much to charge for renewals on a domain by domain basis...

Touchring... Premium names are generic words and phrases, and one-, two-, and three-character .tv domain names that are registered at prices higher than the standard annual fee. I.e. they slap a huge renewal fee on to your good domain names...i.e. dictionary words renewal fees would skyrocket.

[Bill Roy]

Right ICANN and their backers want war! Then let us domainers give it to them.

1) Develop no more .org/.info/.biz domains.
2) Register a good ccTLD domain and develop that instead and have the .org/.info/.biz directed to it.
3) Post on each site that is developed why the redirection has occurred.
4) Put links on all sites owned to a site explaining how incidious ICANN's constitution and decision making is.

This is the first time I have ever used the mood icons, but although I have very few .org/.info domains and indeed no .biz I am furious that such a body can treat me and others with such cavalier disrespect that I actually looked for the closest to 'battle ready' that I could find!

[whitebark]

Makes me glad most of my pennies went to .ca investing instead.

[Duke]

I think the fact that ICANN is not in the ccTLD picture is definitely a huge plus for country codes (as long as the local governing body has reasonable policies). I've always felt there was a lot of value in industrial nation country codes like .de, co.uk, .ca, .us, etc. and ICANN's war against gTLD consumers makes the ccTLDs look even better today IMO.

The initial word we got was that the org/info/biz contracts were approved as published in October, however a Yahoo news report says a late clause added to the contracts is designed to prevent variable pricing for domain name registrations and renewals (charging different prices for different domain names).

The article says "Critics had worried that without such a provision, an operator could potentially raise prices when a company tries to renew an easy-to-remember or trademarked name. Friday's decision clarifies that the board opposes variable pricing and indicates that similar clauses are likely for other domains as contracts get renewed."

Opposition to variable pricing was an especially sore point of course, but critics were also adamant against the stiff price increases (up to 10% annually) allowed by the contracts at a time when the cost of providing registrar services is falling. Other qualified companies are willing to provide the same service at lower prices but were not allowed to compete with the current registries for the contracts.

[Banned: broe-foe]

Initially I thought to myself, "Well, there goes .biz." Without the guarantee of cheap renewal fees down the road, a piece-o'-crap, anemic TLD would probably suffer somewhat.

If the registries think they can hose domain speculators by setting arbitrary, individual renewal fees for each domain name, the registries holding the weaker TLD's will also feel some pain as thousands of name are dropped and not picked-up again.

Domain speculators fuel most of the name inflation anyway. If the registries think it's easy to sell decent names to end-users for inflated prices, let them go broke trying. If domainers boycott one registry, would it would hurt that registry very much? I'd be willing to try with .biz. That is, let all the names drop except a few of the very best.