At-Large Workspace: Proposed Renewal of .asia Registry Agreement
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Comments
Reposting comment (wiki issue had deleted):
From Maureen Hilyard:
Comments from the CPWG 10 April - which veered onto the pricing of domains being charged by registries. Jonathan suggested that this might require another session as time during this meeting did not allow for further discussion on this issue.
George Kirikos: They don't come back to ICANN.
George Kirikos: The fees between the registry operator and ICANN are unchanged.
George Kirikos: It's only revenue for the registry operator, pure profit for them.
George Kirikos: Plus, ICANN shouldn't see registrants as people to be taxed.
George Kirikos: It's not about "cents", it's about many dollars per domain per year.
John Laprise (ALAC): What I was trying to communicate is that If Registries are charging more, so should ICANN.
Jonathan Zuck: there's a fundamental question whether ICANN should be a price regulator. a cost+ model is a dangerous place to start down that road. I don't think we'll resolve this on this call.
John Laprise (ALAC): Agree Jonathan...unfortunately, there's no one else
Alan Greenberg: George is right from a theoretical point if view, but that is not where we are now. This is a business, pure and simple.
Alan Greenberg: But our perspective should be from a user point if view (and in this case the user is the registrant.
Jonathan Zuck: we've expected them to act like businesses. when they ask for marketing support, we tell them to do it themselves, etc.
Alan Greenberg: We have granted monopolies in each TLD. It is (perhaps sadly) to late to change that.
The point I made about the current pricing is that at present, according to Article 6 (page 16), the fees to be paid by the Registry are fixed numbers that were decided when the contract was initially signed. For .ASIA it is US$6250 per quarter and $0.25 per transaction.
At present, this number can continue in perpetuity, irrespective of inflation. When the contract was initially signed, $1 bought you more than $1 buys you today. As a result, ICANN's costs, even if it kept exactly the same size and number of activities, meetings etc., naturally continue to rise, due to salaries continuing to rise as well as costs continuing to rise due to inflation. Yet, the income of ICANN is not rising. That essentially means that ICANN will be more and more inclined to reduce its activities and its support of its communities.
It is only natural that the fees to be paid by Registries need to rise according to inflation, just like any other service out there.
Greg pointed me to Section 6.5 of the agreement
Adjustments to Fees. Notwithstanding any of the fee limitations set forth in this Article 6, commencing upon the expiration of the first year of this Agreement, and upon the expiration of each year thereafter during the Term, the then-current fees set forth in Section 6.1 and Section 6.3 may be adjusted, at ICANN’s discretion, by a percentage equal to the percentage change, if any, in (i) the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, U.S. City Average (1982-1984 = 100) published by the United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, or any successor index (the “CPI”) for the month which is one (1) month prior to the commencement of the applicable year, over (ii) the CPI published for the month which is one (1) month prior to the commencement of the immediatelyprior year. In the event of any such increase, ICANN shall provide notice to Registry Operator specifying the amount of such adjustment. Any fee adjustment under this Section 6.5 shall be effective as of the first day of the first calendar quarter following at least thirty (30) days after ICANN’s delivery to Registry Operator of such fee adjustment notice.
The point I am making is that this is "at ICANN's discretion" and what we would like is for inflation to be taken into account in all cases as we have concerns that ICANN might not have the actual resolve to impose this rise, if it is "at ICANN's discretion".
I find the wording in the response for .org .biz and .info to be rather good for inclusion here:
(III) Fees to be paid to ICANN org
In respect of Section 6.1 of the 3 proposed renewal Agreements, the ALAC counsels for both the registry fixed fee (presently proposed at $6,250 per calendar quarter) and the registry- level transaction fee (presently proposed at $0.25 for each annual increment of an initial or renewal domain name registration) to be adjusted for inflation on an annual basis. This adjustment ought to also be adopted in the base
Registry Agreement.
Recommend the addition of Universal Acceptance (UA) into the DotAsia RA.
DotAsia already promotes UA within Asia and is a lead participant in the UASG, supported by the DotAsia Board. Following ICANN64 and the interest that was raised during the meeting, the ICANN Board Chair has also encouraged community support for this effort.
During the Kobe meeting, the At-Large community discussed Universal Acceptance and formed two areas of consensus. First, the interests of Internet end users, particularly those using non-Latin scripts, are being undermined by a lack of Universal Acceptance around the world. Second, there was enthusiasm to experiment with At-Large community mobilization on the issue of Universal Acceptance.
It is also recommended that the New gTLD Subsequent Procedures Working Group looks into including UA into the requirements for the next round, just as IPV6 and DNSSEC were included during the 2012 round.