Recent Posts
- Bumper batch of dot-brands off themselves for Friday 13th
- .org price cap complaints more like “spam” says Ombudsman
- Botterman is new ICANN chair
- Another victory for Amazon as ICANN rejects Colombian appeal
- Kafka turns in grave as ICANN crowbars “useless” Greek TLD into the root
- Sorry, you still can’t sue ICANN, two-faced .africa bidder told
- Why you should never let a pizza joint apply for your billion-dollar dot-brand
- More than 1,000 new gTLDs a year? Sure!
- Paranoid ICANN opens another root server in China
- A third of the top TLDs are shrinking
- These two ccTLDs drove two thirds of all domain growth in Q2
- .blog registry handover did NOT go smoothly
- Donuts slashes prices on a million domains
- .tech gTLD startups “raise $2 billion”
- Whois killer deadline has passed. Did most registrars miss it?
- CIRA replaces CORE as emergency backup registry
- The Amazon is burning. Is this good news for .amazon?
- China’s MySpace trainwreck sells its gTLD
- Second-level .au names delayed
- ICANN names new directors, replaces Facebook exec
- After getting acquired, bank scraps its dot-brand
- Porn-block retail prices revealed. Wow.
- Registrars could be held liable for US gun violence
- Three-letter .com owned by hospital “hijacked”
- “We’re Irish!” claim Brits as .eu shrinks yet again
- Mystery .vu registry revealed
- Berkens says new gTLDs mostly suck but geos suck hardest
- .gay gets rooted
- Neustar takes control of two new gTLDs
- Epik will sponsor 8chan’s domain, but will not host its site
- EFF becomes second to appeal new .org contract
- CentralNic to pay $3.4 million for iwantmyname
- Google has big, innovative plans for .new
- Amazon and Google have been BEATEN by a non-profit in the fight for .kids
- After more racist shootings, take one guess which registrar 8chan just switched to
- Radix releases huge amount of premium domain data
- ICANN dumps the “Whois” in new Whois tool
- Now auDA loses its CEO too
- Porn blocks could be worth millions to MMX
- Cryptocurrency firms to be banned from .bank
- Cybersquatting cases down a bit in the UK
- Looks like .fans has a new Chinese owner
- Can NameCheap reverse .org price cap scrap?
- Neustar to keep .us for another decade
- MMX to pay $5.1 million to get out of terrible .london deal
- ZADNA boss canned for “misconduct”
- ICANN’s new conferencing software has a webcam security bug
- ICANN explains how .org pricing decision was made
- CEO lost millions on Manhattan apartment deal just days before AlpNames went dark
- Zimbabwe wants to rebuild its domain market from scratch
ICANN’s new gTLD director quits
Michael Salazar, director of ICANN’s new gTLD program, has quit.
He’ll be replaced on an interim basis by Kurt Pritz, senior director of stakeholder relations, according to a statement from ICANN this evening.
No reason for his resignation, which comes shortly after the Big Reveal and on the eve of ICANN’s public meeting in Prague, was given.
Salazar, a KPMG alum, joined ICANN in July 2009. Unlike Pritz, he’s not been a particularly public face of the program.
It’s not entirely unusual for people to leave companies after hitting project milestones, but the timing in this case, given ICANN’s ongoing public perception problem, is unfortunate.
The organization is due to reveal its new CEO in about 12 hours time, and from what I gather the new appointee isn’t expected to take on the role for a couple months.
Having another senior staffer with responsibility over the new gTLD program quit at the same time will look bad.
Here’s where things get fun. In the latest Form 990 (for the year ending June 30, 2011, pages 58 and 59), Kurt Pritz and Michael Salazar *claimed* to already be working 60 hours per week. How can ICANN, with a straight face, suggest that Pritz will be doing 120 hours/week of work now?
Com’n Kevin…can we say fall guy?
George – from what I hear Kurt can barely keep his regular job in order…and now they are adding more?
I hope the arse-end falls out of it all.. these new gTLDs are only going to confuse and devalue the industry!!
And these greedy pigs don’t give a flying F about any of us trying to survive in an already F’d up marketplace.. tossers!
Hope they FAIL – they deserve it !!
@Andreas Agreed totally. I too hope they all fail because they are simply going to confuse the F out of people ,and are also going to make it just that bit harder to persuade companies to buy our .com domains .Got to remember that the ONLY reason that .com is the “main” tld is because people have become used to it. The next generation coming along may not even know what .com is.
@naysayers: People had also become used to Geocities, MySpace etc. After something better came along, they became “unused” to it.
If this causes second market prices to go down in the long run, as some @naysayers fear, that would be a useful side-effect.
Smart man
I think he decided being in charge of a great clusterf*uck may not look so good on his resume.
Leaving now will be perceived as genius when we look back. His replacement will eventually follow in his footsteps. The only question is how long that will be.
Me thinks not that long.
Another one didnt I hear that the President or CEO of ICANN was not renewing his three year contract and resigning today as well?
Seems like reasons for wild west over there more and more.