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The controversial proposed sale of the .org internet registry to an unknown private equity firm will hit a critical decision point this week, and all the organizations in charge are refusing to talk about it.
On December 9, DNS overseer ICANN put a temporary halt on the sale by sending a letter to the organization that runs the .org registry, PIR, as well as its parent company, ISOC aka the Internet Society, demanding greater transparency over the sale to Ethos Capital as well as answers to a series of questions asked by the wider internet community.
That response is due this week and a response has apparently been sent but no one – not ICANN, ISOC, PIR or Ethos – will talk about it. We still don't even have a list of the questions ICANN claims it asked.
"PIR has submitted responses to ICANN's request for additional information pertaining to the transaction with Ethos Capital, LLC," ISOC told us, having asked PIR on our behalf. "PIR is working with ICANN to release its original notice regarding the contemplated change of control and information it provided in response to ICANN's subsequent request. This information will be released in the coming days pursuant to the principles set forth in ICANN's Documentary Information Disclosure Policy."
We approached ICANN, pointing out that this response clearly indicates active discussions between the organizations as well as decisions being made on the basis of ICANN policies, and asked for comment. ICANN told us a day later that it wouldn't comment.
In the meantime, a group of internet pioneers and former ICANNers – including its first chair Esther Dyson and former CEO Mike Roberts – have said they are setting up a new non-profit organization that they propose take over the .org registry in order to continue to run it as a non-profit, rather than convert to a for-profit corporation, as the Ethos Capital deal indicated.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @04:18PM (1 child)
That's the thing, now isn't it? The process of tracking and assigning domain names shouldn't be a huge business. It should be more like the post office assigning and tracking postal addresses. Yes, there is expense there, but it's not something that people should be making a lot of money off of. Prices should be there to cover the cost of tracking changes, providing a set of DNS servers that are independent of the local ISPs and any additional cost just to discourage people from going through and registering dozens of domain names with the intention to flip them for profit.
In other words, this should be seen and treated as a utility.
This kind of behavior is just going to push to alternative means of indexing sites. With IPv6 incoming, fixed addresses aren't an issue and there are plenty of ways in which you could have an alternative method of making IP addressing memorable to humans.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @06:45PM
fuck these stupid assholes. we need something like: https://handshake.org/ [handshake.org]