A major domain registrar, Namecheap, sued ICANN. The suit was filed in the California Supreme Court, Nemecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall said on the social network X (formerly Twitter). Registrar is seeking ICANN to conduct an independent economic analysis of the feasibility of eliminating price increases in generic .ORG and .INFO.
Until 2018, ICANN's accreditation agreement with the Public Interest Registry (PIR), which manages the .ORG, provided for the possibility of increasing prices in the domain zone by no more than 10% per year. However, then ICANN prepared a single standardized accreditation agreement for the .ORG, .INFO and .BIZ domain zones, and the clause on the price ceiling was no longer in it. The agreement was adopted despite the violent indignation expressed by many representatives of the domain community during the public discussion.
As the Domain Incite reminds, Namecheap turned out to be the most zealous opponent of the lifting of restrictions. It initiated an Independent Review Process (IRP) of ICANN's decision. This very slow process ended in December 2022 with a partial victory for Namecheap. The panel of independent experts acknowledged that some of ICANN's regulations and instructions were violated by the corporation when making the decision to abolish price restrictions and indicated the need to hire an independent economist to analyze the validity of this decision.
The ICANN Board initially responded by stating that the IRP's decision was advisory in nature and not binding. However, in June 2023, it still agreed that conducting an independent economic analysis would be the right step. However, six months have passed since this moment, and more than a year has passed since the IRP decision was made, and ICANN has not taken any practical steps in this direction. And now Namecheap’s lawyers intend to force ICANN to comply with the IRP decisions through the court.
