Price extortion on domain names, your domain name in danger

[Curt]

Basically ICANN is opening up a loop hole allowing various registrars the freedom of charging what they want per each domain on a per basis condition.

Let's say you get a domain called www.bobswebstuff.com and it becomes reasonably popular or perhaps very popular. When you originally buy the domain, it may have cost $8 to $25 depending on the registrar. Now that your registrar determines that your domain is worth a lot more to you, they decide to basically extort money out of you by charging a renewal fee of $10,000 per year. The domain registrar would be counting on you not wanting to lose the traffic you got to your site. ICANN's loophole could basically allow registrars to extort more money off of each site they determine has a valuable domain name.

Google.com had they not become their own registrar could have fallen victim to a registrar who might charge them $10,000,000 per year. As I said, ICANN is opening up a loophole potentially allowing extortion.

Of course, you would have to move to another registrar that wouldn't try to extort more money out of you.

Proposed contracts here

ICANN's statements in the CFIT litigation regarding pricing caps on May 26th:
link
link

Public comments can be sent using the email addresses here.
(be sure to send to all 3 email addresses for all 3 contracts, and also click the link in the email ICANN will send you to authenticate your email address, otherwise your comment doesn't get received)

Here's a comment posted at WMW thread:

An additional problem with the model of allowing unrestricted pricing is that it comes after companies and people have invested in a given gTLD as brand. As the proposal now stands, unrestricted pricing presents the opportunity to literally "price someone off their land".

This is a serious issue and the right people need to get involved

ICANN needs to get a flood of email sent to them quickly by all webmasters of this stupid decision making.

As another person puts it at WMW:

As stated ..comments are open at the ICANN til August 28th ..do not let this happen without expressing your opinion ..get in contact with your elected officials in your respective countries ..do the same with your media ..newspapers , radio and TV ..now ..pick up the phone and write emails ..post on fora ..any fora ..webmaster or tech ..whatever ..post on this item anywhere ..link back to here ..this thread ..and register your disapproval at the ICANN site and anywhere else you can ..explain it simply to your family and friends and anyone who'll listen ..in any language ..now ..before it's too late ...

That's this coming Monday!!! [Monday 08/28/06

Webmaster, site owners, etc., really need to get the word out fast. Send emails and post in as many forums as possible about this problem.

ICANN posted at: http://www.icann.org/announcements/a...-2-28jul06.htmthe following:
A public comment period will remain open until 5:00 PM PDT/California, 28 August 2006. At that time the comments will be submitted to the Board of Directors for the Board to consider at its meeting on 13 September 2006.

Doug, Hope you don't mind the URL's linked—thought this would be important to everyone and trying to make it easier for all site owners to be able to get to those urls faster.

If you want to read more of other comments people can visit these other forum threads:

• http://www.webmasterworld.com/domain_names/3059492.htm
  
• http://www.searchengineforums.com/apps/searchengine.forums/
  action::thread/forum::members-lounge/thread::1156652486/ (piece the url together in browser)