[governance] PIR Case/or the .org sell

[Norbert Bollow]

On Thu, 28 Nov 2019 10:10:30 +0100
Bill Woodcock <woody at pch.net> wrote:

> Yep, .org does not have a monopoly, just a brand.  There are plenty
> of other TLDs, more all the time, and if there are organizations that
> really can’t afford $12/year or $15/year for a domain, they can use a
> domain from one of the free TLDs (not the
> surveillance-economy-subsidized ones, but the actual free ccTLDs). 

What's your source for the assumption that a price hike would only
increase the price to $12/year or $15/year?

Vint Cerf has been quoted [0] with the statement, “Hard to imagine that
$60/year would be a deal breaker for even small non-profits.”
[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/26/org_selloff_internet/

A related question is whether there is anything in the rules that would
prevent price differentiation with “value based pricing” where the
registry would charge organizations in accordance to the value that
(as unilaterally decided by the newly profit-oriented registry) the
registrant organization derives from its continued ability to use the
domain, so that if the registry believes that your organization can
afford that, it might charge say $1000/year or $10000/year or even more?

The cost of changing your domain name (without also keeping the old
domain name and setting up redirects) includes loss of all incoming
links which you are not able to get updated.

If you have a lot of incoming links, and you care about not breaking
them, the cost of not renewing your domain name (because it has become
either more expensive than what you think you can afford, or because
a prince hike is in your view abusive in the sense that it and/or its
circumstances make you angry and the decision to not renew the domain
name is made for such a reason) needs to be calculated to include to
cost of the hours (either provided by volunteers or by paid staff) that
will be required for working on addressing the issue of incoming links.

That is the perspective of the concerned organization.

We should also consider the perspective of the general public, who will
get annoyed by lots of broken links to non-profit orgs and to content
provided by them.

Do we really want to live in a world where a price hike is allowed to
break all links to content at archive.org and intgovforum.org etc etc?

Greetings,
Norbert