To pass some advice, if your registrar is not going to bat for you, I would recommend contacting the registry directly as they're the ones that created the issue to begin with. For .bond, that would be ShortDot.
That's good advice, but the industry isn't set up for it to be a viable solution for normal registrants. It may seem simple to someone in the industry, but figuring out who the registry operator is and how to ask for support is actually quite difficult for a normal registrant. I tried to contact the .help registry, but I didn't even get an auto-reply and still don't know if I picked the right contact methods because there aren't any clearly defined support contacts for a registrant to contact a registry.
If there's an expectation for registrants to contact registries directly, the contact info for doing that needs to be published somewhere on ICANNs site or the registrars need to be obligated to provide it to registrants.
I'll be honest, I think most of these issues are more technical mishaps than purposefully malicious.
In my opinion, "technical mishaps" can be caused by a lack of investment into areas of the product that don't generate revenue. There's not much downside to the registry if they accidentally change the pricing classification for a domain, so the registries have no incentive to invest in technology to avoid those "mishaps".
Plus, if pricing is so complex that it starts creating "technical mishaps", I think it makes all domains on those TLDs a bad product for registrants. I know there are a lot of domain resellers on this forum, but I'm a normal registrant that wants to build something on my domain(s) and complex pricing with no guarantees mean most gTLDs are too risky to build on for anything but hobbyist level projects.
The ICANN Business Constituency said the same thing [1] when .org price controls were being removed:
In the longer term, business registrants seek predictability about renewal costs for their domain name(s).
We recommend that whenever price caps are removed, it is important for contracted parties to responsibly keep prices at reasonable levels, to maintain consumer trust and to ensure price predictability for their existing and prospective registrants. It would negatively affect business registrants if contracted parties were to take undue advantage of this greater flexibility by substantially increasing renewal prices for an existing registrant who has significantly committed to its domain name.
In my opinion, those contracted parties, mainly the registries, have failed to heed that recommendation. For the good of the industry, registrants, registrars, and registries that aren't interested in price gouging, should all be lobbying to have price controls added back to the baseline registry agreement.
I think (most of) the registrars know this, so I'm probably preaching to the choir. However, I think it's important to have a record of incidents like this because it doesn't matter to registrants if predatory pricing is the result of policy decisions or incompetence. The risk is the same regardless, and having a record of these incidents could end up being useful if it starts to become a common issue that requires action from ICANN.
I think the precedent is important and that's why I'm pursuing it. It's a shame the registry agreement only forbids non-uniform pricing for renewals of domains. The way I read it, the registry might technically be allowed to reclassify my domain as premium, as long as the renewal price is kept identitcal to the non-premium renewal price. I don't think transfers are well defined if that's allowed to happen and it would be a disaster of complexity in my opinion.
Challenging the non-premium to premium reclassification is important because a non-premium classification gives registrants much simpler real-world outcomes when renewing or transferring a domain. For example, I can simply assume I'm getting charged the uniform, non-premium price instead of needing to discover that price and verify it's correct.
The registrars all sell premium domains, except maybe Cloudflare, right? I'd like to see a single registrar willing to write a blog post telling their customers that domains with premium renewal pricing are a good product. After reading the registry agreement, my opinion is the registrant is agreeing to
undefined, discriminatory pricing when they register a domain exempted from uniform renewal pricing (aka a premium domain).
In my opinion, both domains with premium renewal pricing and 3rd level domains (
in.net,
it.com, etc.) are bad products and it's fair to critisize all registrars for selling them. For the long term health of the domain industry, I think it would be beneficial for all the major registrars to quit offering both of those products. However, I, obviously, don't know what kind of an impact that would have on the registrars' bottom line and it may not be practical. I'll reiterate though, I think they're awful products that customers don't understand.
To be clear, it's domains with premium
renewal pricing I consider a bad product, not domains with premium
first year pricing. I actually think premium first year pricing improves the pool of good domains for normal registrants and I don't have a problem with it if the domain becomes non-premium for the duration of the registration period.
Specifically, .help moved from CentralNic to Tucows backend a few weeks ago and maybe is part of the issue here.
That's not what happened to mine. According to the logs I have, mine was reclassified on April 13, 2023.
1. mm.icann.org/pipermail/comments-org-renewal-18mar19/2019q2/003085.html
