[ga] Afilias to increase .info price effective October 15, 2007

["Prophet Partners Inc." <Domains@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Afilias has notified ICANN of a price increase to $6.15 for new .info registrations and renewals. The price change will coincide with VeriSign's price increase for .com and .net effective October 15, 2007. In our opinion, this looks more like collusion and price fixing, than a competitive free market environment. We believe it is only a matter of time before similar unjustified price increases are announced by PIR for .org and NeuLevel for .biz.
http://icann.org/correspondence/laplante-to-twomey-13apr07.pdf

We believe it is outrageous that wholesale domain prices are rising, when the prices of technology products and services continue to plummet. This includes, but is not limited to computing power, memory, data storage and broadband. The monopolistic registries are making obscene profits at the expense of the registrant community, while ICANN continues to ignore the best interests of the public that it was entrusted to protect. Former ICANN Board member Karl Auerbach was recently interviewed for an article at Jay Westerdal's DomainTools blog titled "ex-ICANN Board member says .COM costs $0.14".
http://blog.domaintools.com/2007/04/ex-icann-board-member-says-com-costs-014/

VeriSign cited the growing number of daily DNS queries as being one reason that justified their price increases for .com and .net. They claimed that VeriSign's DNS received 1 billion daily queries in 2000 and 30 billion daily queries in 2007. http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_5602425

This increase is not only offset by the greater economies of scale from selling more .com and .net domain registrations, but the increased computing power of CPUs. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel is widely credited for Moore's Law, which states that "the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every two years". As stated on Intel's official Moore's Law page, "But Moore's Law also means decreasing costs. As silicon-based components and platform ingredients gain in performance, they become exponentially cheaper to produce, and therefore more plentiful, more powerful, and more seamlessly integrated into our daily lives." We would like to emphasize the phrase "exponentially cheaper".
http://www.intel.com/technology/mooreslaw/

We would also like to remind everyone that ICANN completely disregarded the near unanimous public opposition to the proposed .biz/.info/.org registry agreements, by unanimously approving the highly controversial contracts at the São Paulo, Brazil meeting on December 8, 2006.
http://forum.icann.org/lists/biz-tld-agreement
http://forum.icann.org/lists/info-tld-agreement
http://forum.icann.org/lists/org-tld-agreement
http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/ga/msg05299.html

Sincerely,
Ted
Prophet Partners Inc.
http://www.ProphetPartners.com
http://www.Premium-Domain-Names.com

CC: John M.R. Kneuer (Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information, U.S. Department of Commerce - NTIA)
    Vint Cerf (Chairman of the Board, ICANN)
    Anick Jesdanun (Associated Press)
    Arik Hesseldahl (BusinessWeek)
    Paul Sloan (Business 2.0)
    Scott Ard (c|net)
    Rachel Rosmarin (Forbes)
    Adam Gaffin (NetworkWorld)
    Brian Krebs (The Washington Post)
    CNN News Tips
    The N.Y. Times News Tips