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Namecheap loses attempt to bring back .org price caps
ICANN seems to have won a big victory in its ongoing tussle with Namecheap over price caps for .org and .info domains.
A California court ruled late last week that it cannot force ICANN into pricing talks with the registries for the two gTLDs, denying a motion that Namecheap filed back in April.
The dispute dates back to 2019, when ICANN removed price caps from Public Interest Registry’s .org registry contract, which had limited PIR to 10% annual increases.
Namecheap used ICANN’s own Independent Review Process accountability mechanism to challenge this decision and won, kinda, in 2022.
The IRP panel found ICANN had breached its bylaws and issued “recommendations” such as commissioning an economic report into price caps, deciding if price caps should return, and if so then talking to the registries about bringing them back.
When there’d been little action by early 2024, Namecheap sued to get the backing of the court for the IRP decision. It was successful, with the court ruling this February that the IRP findings were valid.
In the meantime, ICANN had obtained its economist’s report and passed a resolution stating that it should not bring price caps back to the two registry contracts.
But Namecheap had a final crack at getting the court to force ICANN into price cap. In a motion this April, it asked the court to instruct ICANN to “approach the registry operators for .ORG and .INFO to agree to some form of price control”.
The court didn’t buy its arguments, however, last week denying Namecheap’s requests on the grounds that ICANN had in fact considered the IRP panel’s recommendations:
Namecheap provides evidence that ICANN in fact did consider the Panel’s recommendations, and thus Plaintiff admits that ICANN did not reject any of the Panel’s findings, so as correctly stated by ICANN, “there is nothing for this Court to enforce.”
In the six years since the price caps were lifted, non-profit PIR has not raised .org prices, while for-profit Identity Digital has raised .info prices every year, from $10.84 in 2019 to $19 today.
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