Namecheap says it won legal fight over .org price caps
Namecheap claims to have won a fight against ICANN over the lifting of contractual price caps in .org and .info back in 2019.
The two parties have been battling it out for almost three years in an Independent Review Process case over ICANN’s decision to allow the .info and .org registries to increase their prices by as much as they want.
Namecheap now claims the decision has been delivered and “the IRP panel decided that ICANN had, indeed, violated its Bylaws and Articles of Incorporation and that ICANN’s decision to remove the price caps was invalid.”
The registrar also says it failed in its attempt to have a similar ruling with regrds the .biz TLD, but it’s not clear why.
Neither party has yet published the decision in full (ICANN is likely redacting it for publication as I type), and ICANN has yet to make a statement, so we only have Namecheap’s interpretation to go on.
It seems the IRP panel disagreed with ICANN that it was within its staff’s delegated powers to renegotiate the price provisions of the contracts without input from the board of directors.
Rather, there should be a open and transparent process, involving other stakeholders, for making such changes, the panel said according to Namecheap.
What the panel does not appear to have said is that the price caps can be unilaterally restored to the contracts. Rather, it seems to suggest a combination of voluntary reinstatements, expert competition reviews, and bilateral renegotiations.
The decision also seems to say that price controls are more important in .org than .info, due to its not-for-profit nature, which flies in the face of ICANN’s long-term push to standardize its contracts to the greatest extent possible.
The row over .org pricing emerged shortly before the ultimately unsuccessful takeover attempt of Public Interest Registry by for-profit private equity firm Ethos Capital was announced. Ethos had planned to raise prices, but PIR, still a non-profit owned by the Internet Society, to date has not.
Namecheap’s IRP claims related to ICANN’s handling of that acquisition attempt were thrown out in 2021.
.info was an Afilias TLD when the IRP was filed but is now Ethos-owned Identity Digital’s biggest gTLD following consolidation.
I’ll have more on this story after the full decision is made public.
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