The more I read the proposed new .COM Registry Agreement, the less I like it...or even understand why ICANN believes this might be a good thing for the Internet community (as opposed to a good thing for ICANN, the corporation). In a public conference call with registrars last week, ICANN's Vice-President of Business Operations, Kurt Pritz, claimed that he hadn't heard anything from domain name registrants about the proposed .COM agreement. Here are a handful of things that registrants should consider discussing with Mr. Pritz:

1. The Price for .COM names will rise. Virtually every mass market Internet service I can think of (like broadband access, VOIP, and hosting, to name just a few) has seen consumer prices decline over time. ICANN is allowing Verisign to move the registration of .COM names in the opposite direction, permitting the registry to raise the $6 base price of .COM registrations by 7% annually.

2. Verisign will operate .COM in perpetuity...without having to earn the right to do so. I'm sure that at some time in my lifetime, a new addressing scheme will come along to replace domain names. Until that happens, however, Verisign will be selling .COM services, in a virtual monopoly, without ever having to engage in a competive bidding process for the right to do so. With no competition, or even the threat of competition, Verisign can raise prices, year after year, regardless of its costs, regardless of past performance, and without raising its service levels.

3. The new agreement gives Verisign a perpetual commercial interest in the .COM zone metadata, at no cost. Specifically, the agreement gives Verisign the right to leverage the .COM zone TLD servers it operates to "mak[e] commercial use of, or collect, traffic data regarding domain names or non-existent domain names" for any purpose. I can imagine dozens of uses for this data, from increasing the accuracy of search engines, which could weight some sites higher than others based on the number of queries to the TLD servers for a given domain name, to more accurately gauging the resale value of a deleting domain name. If the data is Verisign's to sell, as opposed to public data available to anyone, you can imagine the bidding war that could start among Google, Yahoo! and other search engines. And yet, with this completely new source of revenue, Verisign can still raise it's price. If anything, Verisign ought to be paying us for this data. What do you want to bet that Google would volunteer to run the .COM registry, for free, in exchange for the .COM zone metadata?

4. No checks on ICANN's growth.  Perhaps most importantly, the new .COM agreement will allow ICANN to fund itself easily and predictably, forever, by taking a 50 cent bite out of every .COM registration. ICANN also gets a $1,250,000 payment up front for the cost of "implementing" the new .COM agreement. In the past, ICANN has had to get approval from registrars for its annual budget. The new agreements allow ICANN to bypass the registrars, get funding directly from the .COM registry (which can and will pass the cost back to the registrars), and completely skip the approval process. In past years, the budget approval process has been an important check on ICANN's growth. I can understand why ICANN likes this, but a large, powerful ICANN is not necessarily in the best interests of the Internet community.

5. Verisign is rewarded for a dubious record of past performance. Having been rebuked first by the Internet community and then ICANN for initiating several new registry services, like Sitefinder, with no advance notice, Verisign filed a lawsuit against ICANN last year making allegations of antitrust, unlawful interference with its business, and other claims. ICANN successfully kicked out the antitrust claims and  then countersued, claiming, correctly, that Verisign was in material breach of the .COM and .NET registry agreements. But now, incredibly, the settlement of that lawsuit puts Verisign in a materially better position than it was previously and, more incredibly, allows Verisign to continue to litigate similar issues in a separate lawsuit filed by Snapnames.

The theme running through all of these is that ICANN and Verisign are treating the .COM registry as a private resource. It's not. The root servers and TLD servers are public resources. We should treat them like that.

I'm sure there are more reasons to be concerned. We're putting together a list of concerns in the At Large Advisory Committee to forward to ICANN. More comments are welcome in the comment space below (and send them to the ICANN public comment board,  settlement-comments@icann.org, as well).