In a joint letter sent to ICANN on Monday, a group of non-profit organizations has opposed the removal of price caps in the .org Registry Agreement. The group which includes NPR, YMCA, C-SPAN, National Geographic Society, AARP, The Conservation Fund, Oceana, and National Trust for Historic Preservation says they are disappointed and concerned that ICANN has proposed removing price caps from the .org Agreement. What they say:

— Expectation of price remaining capped: “The reasonable expectation of .org registrants was, and continues to be, that prices would remain capped to ensure stable and reasonable domain name pricing for the millions of nonprofit organizations that have invested in a .org web presence. These organizations put their trust in ICANN as caretaker of the public interest in the .org name space.”

— Budgetary uncertainty: Removal of price caps, group warns will introduce budgetary uncertainty to samller non profits. “Every additional dollar earmarked for domain name registrations is a dollar that is not available to advance the public interest purpose of nonprofit registrants that use the .org name space.”

— Confirmity for ICANN’s sake: “ICANN has articulated no compelling policy basis for this proposed change. Instead, ICANN has represented that the intent is just to bring the .org Agreement into conformity with the base registry agreement used by ICANN with respect to other gTLDs not set aside for organizations that serve the public interest. This strikes us as conformity for its own sake. ICANN should not disregard the public interest in favor of administrative convenience.”