[ALAC] Proposed Renewal of .NET Registry Agreement

Mon May 8 08:04:56 UTC 2017

Yep, Maureen ‘made the call’ but I had scanned through the document and agreed with her.

Seeing the message you pointed us to, Alan, I have to confess that was not something that triggered me. Not sure what to think of it. The line of reasoning sounds plausible, however I cannot judge its merits:

- ‘My company is opposed to the proposed contract’: is that leap.com? Do they have an agenda here?

- ‘There should be regular tender processes for operation of the registry for a fixed term, as is standard procedure for procurement contracts’: is that the case, is it applicable here? If so, what is be the reason there is no ’tender process’ for the renewal of the .NET contract?

- What does he mean with ‘the sweetheart deal that ICANN (pretending to negotiate in the public interest) has bestowed upon Verisign’? I assume it’s the existing agreement - what is so ’sweet’ about it?

- ‘Where the price used to be $4.95/yr, and has skyrocketed to $8.20/yr, a whopping increase of 65.66% during the 6 year term of the prior contract’ - Ok. How does that compare to other gtld registrar fees per domain name? ‘Under competition (…), the annual registry fees would be much lower, perhaps $2/yr or even less’. Is that so? Is there a list available somewhere? For .com it’s the same as for .NET, at least it was with the price increase in 2012 when it went to $7.85/yr. A 35cts price increase in 5 years time is not quite as dramatic as the author is framing it to be IMO

- Is it fair to assume the price will increase by 10% per year? 

regards,
Bastiaan

> On 8 May 2017, at 07:52, Maureen Hilyard <maureen.hilyard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Ah... Ok.  By "we:, you have to mean the lawyers we have on the ALAC and within At-Large who may also have ploughed through 133 pages of the actual agreement, but with a lot more understanding than I had.  But noone got back to us, I'm afraid. Bastiaan may have gotten more out of it, but I made the call.
> 
> I was only looking for anything that might have been of interest to end-users who don't really have any say about how much a gtld is going to cost them. Is commenting on a document that  ICANN's million dollar lawyers have developed, really going to make any difference?  
> 
> M 
> 
> 
> On Mon, May 8, 2017 at 5:01 PM, Alan Greenberg <alan.greenberg at mcgill.ca> wrote:
> No, I wouldn't. That's why we are here.
> 
> In any case, all I was doing was pointing out that there was once comment posted about pricing and was wondering if people thought that this was something we should comment on as well.
> 
> As the CCT-RT has pointed out, it is difficult to know whether this is an outrageous annual increase outstripping cost-of-living increases or a TLD that is in-demand and due to ICANN price restrictions that are not on other TLDs, is still under-priced and the 10% is only catch-up.
> 
> Alan
> 
> 
> At 08/05/2017 12:23 AM, Maureen Hilyard wrote:
>> But really Alan, would we be expecting the ordinary end-user to be analysing these costs and other sections of the document in a similar way, without any prior expert knowledge about the ICANN contractual bidding process, previous contracts and other details you have outlined? Its outside of our scope.
>> 
>> On Mon, May 8, 2017 at 3:32 PM, Alan Greenberg <alan.greenberg at mcgill.ca > wrote:
>> Maureen and Bastiaan have review the .NET Registry Agreement revisions and are not recommending and ALAC statement.
>> 
>> There is one comment already pointing out that there the contract (both the current one and the revised one) allow for a 10$ increase in the price to the registrar per year. Note that for New gTLDs, pricing is out of scope of ICANN registry agreements. Based on the 2011 price of $4.65 and the 2017 price of 8.20, it would appear that they have used the full 10% over the term of the last current agreement. The 10% rate is the same as that in the current .ORG agreement. .COM presumably due to the size of the registrant base is price-capped.
>> 
>> The comment also says the contract should not be renewed, but rather put out for competitive bidding - something that is not within ICANN's ability to decide (and confirmed by the statement calling upon government anti-trust action). See https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/comments-net-renewal-20apr17/2017-April/000000.html .
>> 
>> Alan
>> 
>> 
>> 
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