[ih] the .ORG nonsense machine rises from the dead, patents and public stewardship

[John Levine]

Sigh.  The smoke just gets smoggier.

It appears that Bill Woodcock via Internet-history <woody at pch.net> said:
>> On Feb 5, 2024, at 04:07, John Levine via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> The contract change was at ICANN's request
>
>Specifically, Fadi.

I doubt it, but I wasn't privy to ICANN's internal operations. 

For anyone who hasn't been following along, they got rid of the price
cap on .PRO in 2015, and on .INFO and .BIZ in 2019, the same time as
.ORG. This was consistent with their stated plan to make all of the
registry agreements as consistent as possible. 

The only remaining price caps are on .COM, required by Verisign's
agreement with DoC, and .NET and .NAME, I think because it's not worth
it to Verisign to argue about them while .COM is still capped.

>> It happened long before anyone approached ISOC about selling PIR.
>
>I’m not sure what kind of rhetorical loophole you’re trying to construct here, but you appear to be arguing against your own point.  It didn’t
>happen before ISOC was receiving offers for the .ORG contract, but it did happen before the ridiculously high offers. ...

I don't understand what you're claiming, and honestly, I don't really care.

The wholesale price for .ORG domains was and is a little over $10.
Under the old price cap, the limit in 2019 would have been $14.62, and
today it would be $23.54. The price cap was a complete red herring.

As to assertions that the plan was to raise the price to $100 or
$1000, some things are just too dumb to be worth refuting.

R's,
John