I can't tell if ICANN is trying to publicly clear their own name of any wrongdoing, or if all the added attention has woken them up to how seriously flawed this whole ordeal was (which either by policy or procedure they managed to miss) or both. None of those answers are satisfying. Here's hoping they do the right thing and kill the sale... but even then, I'd be concerned they'd restructure the deal and try again.
I thought ICANN was supposed to be the good guys? You know, the responsible managers of the Internet and providing solid governance which serves as the best argument against any kind of government intrusion? I'm hoping they didn't just grow bored with it and decide to get rid of it. As though it was some sort of dearly loved Google service with mild profitability and little-to-no opportunity for internal career development. ;)
This is the old "announce an inquiry" ploy. This should be familiar to anyone who has watched "Yes, Minister" - or has paid any attention at all to anything ever made in public.
Basically, someone "blows the whistle" and suddenly something that should have gone relatively under the radar blows up on your face. People start asking a lot of difficult questions and making a lot of noise.
So what do you do? You announce a private inquiry (or, to put it in ICANN's terms "We will thoughtfully and thoroughly evaluate the proposed acquisition to ensure that the .ORG registry remains secure, reliable, and stable.").
The point of the inquiry isn't to find out any new facts or correct any problems - it's to stall until this goes out of the public eye (people have short attention spans, and we are in the Holiday season which always helps with "forgetting"), to clear up their names of any wrongdoing (because they reviewed everything thoroughly and found no cause for concern) and to bury the evidence (because some of it will be "accidentally" misplaced into a shredder).
In a month or so, a report will come out saying that there is some cause for concern, but that the danger is either overblown or that their hands are tied so nothing can be done due to this or that circumstance (legal, financial, etc). It will come with a stern paragraph warning that internal guidelines (you know, the ones the public can't see) must be reviewed sometime in the near future (i.e., around the year 2050) to prevent this from happening again, but it will conclude that everyone did their due diligence properly and we were all just victims of circumstances.
In short, better luck next time.
Why yes, people have called me a cynic, why do you ask?
It reads to me like they are trying to kill the deal, but stay within their strict rules.
The line: "The Registry Agreement requires a standard of reasonableness for ICANN’s determination." reads like they are gearing up for a way out.
I have to admit that the last 2 paragraphs do sound like they are trying to weasel out of responsibility though.
> I thought ICANN was supposed to be the good guys?
Through the lens of ultra-capitalism, "the good guys" are a market imbalance to be exploited. A variation on "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain"
In hindsight, the fragility of overall Internet governance was incredibly obvious. Even if this .org sale goes ahead, the governance is still fragile because there are many other aspects to the Web / Internet that are still run by "the good guys" and therefore likely to already be in the sights of the morally bankrupt.
The question is, what can we do about it?
How do we react to the .org sale to ensure that inevitable future shenanigans will be met by increasingly profit-negating blowback?
The long term fragmentation effects this may have on the web are... difficult to predict.
>I thought ICANN was supposed to be the good guys?
You could say that about every government, yet there's widespread corruption in most (or all) countries[1]. There's even corruption in democratic governments that are directly accountable to their citizens every few years (via elections). Given the way the ICANN board is appointed is... indirect at best, thinking that ICANN are the "good guys" is wishful thinking at best.
If you don't know anyone in an organization that holds your interests then you cannot expect for your interests to be considered.
It is very unreasonable to expect any set of people in any setting at any time, whose views you don't know, to hold your interests or expectations.
"Good people" would be very different to you and a self interested opportunist.
If the rules have changed such that it is broken and the sale goes through then great. If that is what it takes to bring awareness to prevent the next. Sitting and hoping that your interests are considered never ever works.
If ISOC hadn't removed the .org price restrictions, I feel like this could have been defensible. Farm out the management but hold the new stewards under a strict leash, fine. (Of course it wouldn't have gone for $1B+ in that case.) But coupling it with the unrestricted price increases is just indefensibly corrupt and hopefully illegal given that ISOC was never intended to profit from .org in the first place.
The people behind this deal are ICANN insiders who know the rules intimately; in some cases they may have written the rules. It's hard to imagine that ICANN won't approve the deal.
> The people behind this deal are ICANN insiders who know the rules intimately; in some cases they may have written the rules. It's hard to imagine that ICANN won't approve the deal.
If that's the case, maybe the US government needs to reclaim authority over ICANN, which it had until a few years ago, and assert that authority to reverse this decision. There needs to be some kind of effective oversight.
Then why didn't they just approve and get it over with. Seems they want to wait a while, see how their stakeholders feel about it in a few months and then either approve or not. Or they want to send the message to ethos that they want their cut as well, of course.
The only sane outcome is clawing back .org from PIR, regardless of what they intend to do with it now. They've shown themselves to be bad stewards that view it as purely monetizable asset.
I doubt the will would be there even if it were legal. But one can dream.
They've been held to... bank account. This is being done by ICANN insiders and there is no accountability mechanisms at ICANN. The organization is captured. The .ORG contract renewal wasn't even looked at by the board, it was handled by staff. It was pointed out letting staff do it avoids oversight mechanisms (coincidence? probably not). The board oversight group also all had to recuse themselves to the point there wasn't enough people to perform any actual oversight. ICANN is a captured and corrupt organization. Very few people who aren't being compensated to be there spend any time it seems, thus registry interests win.
"Public announcements by PIR, ISOC and Ethos Capital contain relevant facts that were not required in the request for approval."
What facts?
Why were those facts not required?
Sounds like under the system in place there is little due diligence expected to be done by ICANN before a decision is made -- none of these public facts were "required", let alone anything non-public.
At least we know someone is reading the public announcements.
1. Create a non-profit to buy `.or` as a new gTLD. Legally carter it so that the stakeholders are distributed and it can never be taken private.
2. Pre-reserve `.or` domains for all existing `.org` domains.
Optional:
3. Give free lifetime registration to any org stakeholder that redirects their domain to the `.or` version and/or displays a banner about PIR's malfeasance.
4. Any new `.org` registrants are barred from registering a `.or`
5. Buy back `.org` when it becomes worthless and give it back to the stakeholders.
"On 14 November 2019, PIR formally notified ICANN of the proposed transaction. Under the .ORG Registry Agreement, PIR must obtain ICANN’s prior approval before any transaction that would result in a change of control of the registry operator. Typically, similar requests to ICANN are confidential; we asked PIR for permission to publish the notification and they declined our request."
Unbelievable. The brazenness of this heist continues out in the open.
Has anyone looked at PIR's 990 Forms and has knowledge of business operations in the sector. It looks like from their expense sheet PIR contracts all of the actual management of the their TLDs to Afilias. What is the breakdown of responsibility here? What does PIR actually do?
PIR chooses and supervises the contractor that runs the TLD. I don't know if maybe, once upon a time, PIR ran the TLD itself, and then decided to contract it out.
It's not an unreasonable thing to contract out. Afilias runs multiple TLDs, and there are many operational things that would have a cost benefit from sharing; for example, running the anycast network of authoritative servers in as many points of presence as possible --- each PoP requires capital investment and time investment to setup and run, but servicing additional load may be possible at a much smaller marginal cost.
We should have a peer-to-peer DNS driven by some consensus system like blockchain. Why do we allow critical pieces of internet infrastructure to be centralized?
[+] [-] jmccorm|6 years ago|reply
I thought ICANN was supposed to be the good guys? You know, the responsible managers of the Internet and providing solid governance which serves as the best argument against any kind of government intrusion? I'm hoping they didn't just grow bored with it and decide to get rid of it. As though it was some sort of dearly loved Google service with mild profitability and little-to-no opportunity for internal career development. ;)
[+] [-] AsusFan|6 years ago|reply
Basically, someone "blows the whistle" and suddenly something that should have gone relatively under the radar blows up on your face. People start asking a lot of difficult questions and making a lot of noise.
So what do you do? You announce a private inquiry (or, to put it in ICANN's terms "We will thoughtfully and thoroughly evaluate the proposed acquisition to ensure that the .ORG registry remains secure, reliable, and stable.").
The point of the inquiry isn't to find out any new facts or correct any problems - it's to stall until this goes out of the public eye (people have short attention spans, and we are in the Holiday season which always helps with "forgetting"), to clear up their names of any wrongdoing (because they reviewed everything thoroughly and found no cause for concern) and to bury the evidence (because some of it will be "accidentally" misplaced into a shredder).
In a month or so, a report will come out saying that there is some cause for concern, but that the danger is either overblown or that their hands are tied so nothing can be done due to this or that circumstance (legal, financial, etc). It will come with a stern paragraph warning that internal guidelines (you know, the ones the public can't see) must be reviewed sometime in the near future (i.e., around the year 2050) to prevent this from happening again, but it will conclude that everyone did their due diligence properly and we were all just victims of circumstances.
In short, better luck next time.
Why yes, people have called me a cynic, why do you ask?
[+] [-] anfilt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rocqua|6 years ago|reply
I have to admit that the last 2 paragraphs do sound like they are trying to weasel out of responsibility though.
[+] [-] BLKNSLVR|6 years ago|reply
Through the lens of ultra-capitalism, "the good guys" are a market imbalance to be exploited. A variation on "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain"
In hindsight, the fragility of overall Internet governance was incredibly obvious. Even if this .org sale goes ahead, the governance is still fragile because there are many other aspects to the Web / Internet that are still run by "the good guys" and therefore likely to already be in the sights of the morally bankrupt.
The question is, what can we do about it? How do we react to the .org sale to ensure that inevitable future shenanigans will be met by increasingly profit-negating blowback?
The long term fragmentation effects this may have on the web are... difficult to predict.
[+] [-] gruez|6 years ago|reply
You could say that about every government, yet there's widespread corruption in most (or all) countries[1]. There's even corruption in democratic governments that are directly accountable to their citizens every few years (via elections). Given the way the ICANN board is appointed is... indirect at best, thinking that ICANN are the "good guys" is wishful thinking at best.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
[+] [-] excerionsforte|6 years ago|reply
It is very unreasonable to expect any set of people in any setting at any time, whose views you don't know, to hold your interests or expectations.
"Good people" would be very different to you and a self interested opportunist.
If the rules have changed such that it is broken and the sale goes through then great. If that is what it takes to bring awareness to prevent the next. Sitting and hoping that your interests are considered never ever works.
[+] [-] jzl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ardy42|6 years ago|reply
If that's the case, maybe the US government needs to reclaim authority over ICANN, which it had until a few years ago, and assert that authority to reverse this decision. There needs to be some kind of effective oversight.
[+] [-] timwaagh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kresten|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reitzensteinm|6 years ago|reply
I doubt the will would be there even if it were legal. But one can dream.
[+] [-] jdkee|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ohashi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3xblah|6 years ago|reply
What facts?
Why were those facts not required?
Sounds like under the system in place there is little due diligence expected to be done by ICANN before a decision is made -- none of these public facts were "required", let alone anything non-public.
At least we know someone is reading the public announcements.
[+] [-] echelon|6 years ago|reply
1. Create a non-profit to buy `.or` as a new gTLD. Legally carter it so that the stakeholders are distributed and it can never be taken private.
2. Pre-reserve `.or` domains for all existing `.org` domains.
Optional:
3. Give free lifetime registration to any org stakeholder that redirects their domain to the `.or` version and/or displays a banner about PIR's malfeasance.
4. Any new `.org` registrants are barred from registering a `.or`
5. Buy back `.org` when it becomes worthless and give it back to the stakeholders.
[+] [-] ReverseCold|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshuaellinger|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glitcher|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jzl|6 years ago|reply
Unbelievable. The brazenness of this heist continues out in the open.
[+] [-] will_pseudonym|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ohashi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vt240|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toast0|6 years ago|reply
It's not an unreasonable thing to contract out. Afilias runs multiple TLDs, and there are many operational things that would have a cost benefit from sharing; for example, running the anycast network of authoritative servers in as many points of presence as possible --- each PoP requires capital investment and time investment to setup and run, but servicing additional load may be possible at a much smaller marginal cost.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jumelles|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fierarul|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aib|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mobilemidget|6 years ago|reply
I do hear from contacts .org are more often not renewed when prompted for yearly fee, I did not either for my shelved .org domains.
[+] [-] floor_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbuder|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] PunksATawnyFill|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] BucketSort|6 years ago|reply