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Here is my letter sent to my local congressmen and senators earlier today, in reaction to ICANN moving up their next meeting date when this issue will presumably be discussed. Not that I think the US congress should seek legislative solutions to force saneness on the part of ICANN, but the mere threat of action to pressure the commerce Dept. should help to compel ICANN to include language that people are more comfortable with. The main goal should be to find reasonable ways to allow registries to profit without putting the users if the system at such a high level of risk.

Read on to see the text of the letters. More to the point, if you agree please write to your congresspersons. You can do so at http://www.congress.org/congressorg/issues/alert/?alertid=9002726&content_dir=ua_congressorg

Dear Sir,

Please consider taking action to prevent ICANN from revising registry contracts so that domain renewal pricing will be at the sole discretion of the registry.

As a small technology business owner in your district let me assure you that domain names make the Internet work to the tremendous benefit of the business community. Language proposed for inclusion in upcoming contracts would allow these registry operators to set arbitrary renewal prices for individual domains on a case by case basis. This would be harmful to business, as it would cause instability by making it impossible to predict future operating costs, and provide a disincentive to businesses from investing in branding their online sites. Even worse, by removing the ability for the market to set prices, registries would be empowered to quash free speech on the Internet by raising renewal prices for specific sites with certain kinds of political content to millions of dollars per year.

Do you think it would be fair for your campaign website domain name renewal fee to become one million dollars next year because you voted a certain way on a bill that the registry operator felt strongly about?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 6th, 2006 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Internet governance, ICANN, gTLD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.