* Posts by Canva

1 publicly visible post • joined 21 Nov 2019

Internet world despairs as non-profit .org sold for $$$$ to private equity firm, price caps axed

Canva

Who is profiting from overcharging nonprofits?

Boom! Excellent article. First one to put all the pieces together.

Every point in this article could be expanded into a 10 page article in its own right.

The farcical justifications offered by ICANN to support their disastrous policy decisions do not speak well to ICANN's competence or understanding of the issues.

NO - .com and .org, with their 30 year histories and established base of registrants are not the same as brand new extensions with no existing registrants, and they don't belong on contracts with terms that make sense only for name spaces that are being created from scratch where any new registrants are aware that prices can be raised on them at will.

NO - ICANN cannot get out of price regulation, because it is not the regulator, it is the OWNER of .org, and that ownership was entrusted to it by the US Government when it empowered ICANN to manage the DNS. If ICANN does not want to be a price regulator, then it should allow the market to determine prices - by opening up the .org registry to COMPETITIVE BIDDING, which it should have done originally.

NO - entering into perpetual contracts is not sound management, nor is there any justification for it.

NO - the guidance that you received from the stakeholder constituencies did not represent the interests of diverse stakeholders. You heard PIR talking points parroted by the ISOC members and allies who populate all levels of iCANN. These are further pushed by all the people paid by Verisign to push Verisign's interests throughout ICANN - and Verisign wants uncapped pricing to be ICANN's policy for .com as well. When the constituency purporting to represent nonprofits comes out with a statement in favor of raising prices on .org domain names so that nonprofits will need to pay tens of millions of dollars a year in unjustified fees to benefit ISOC, then that's a clue that the non-commercial constituency has been captured by ISOC. When thousands of actual nonprofits express their adamant opposition to price increases through the public comments, that's a clue that the non-commercial constituency does not represent the actual non-commercial community, but it has been captured. When the Business Constituency, representing companies that collectively own tens of thousands of .com domain names, comes out in favor of enabling registries with monopoly power in no-bid perpetual contracts to raise prices without limit, that is Verisign speaking through its representatives, not the true interest of businesses who don't want to be dependent on a third party for the continued right to use their online presence.

NO - long established registrants cannot easily pick up and move.

NO - a 20 year history of trust built up on a nonprofit's .org domain cannot be swapped out for a different domain.

NO - even if a nonprofit rebranded it must still keep renewing its existing .org domain name, otherwise someone else could register it.

NO - it is not sound policy to make nonprofits vulnerable to unjustified price increases to benefit the unknown big money funding Abry and Ethos Capital.

NO - ICANN does not want to risk reading an exposé in the paper one day that the true owners of PIR, who provided the funds to acquire it, are corrupt oligarchs who have been permitted to plunder the non-profit community of funds. (Don't know that is the case. Don't know that isn't the case. That's the point.) Perhaps ICANN will want to find out who the true owners of Ethos Capital are before the acquisition of PIR by Ethos Capital is complete.

NO - ICANN does not want to enable Ethos Capital to one day sell the online home of non-profits to an unethical business, let's call it Unethos Capital, perhaps it is a company controlled by a businessperson of unsavory reputation who, thanks to ICANN's ineptitude, can treat the donations made to the nonprofit community as his personal piggy bank to raid at will by raising prices on .org domain names higher and higher.

ICANN leadership appears to be single minded in its focus on destroying the stability of the DNS and their own reputations.

It is a sad statement of the low esteem in which the ICANN leadership is held that Kevin Murphy, in his article on DomainIncite (domainincite.com/24988-i-attempt-to-answer-icas-questions-about-the-terrible-blunder-org-acquisition), believes that the efforts to persuade ICANN to prevent this disaster have as much chance of success as "an ice sculptor in hell".