Recent Posts
- Amazon offered $5 million of free Kindles for .amazon gTLD
- US not happy with Donuts hiring Atallah
- ICANN denies it’s in bed with trademark lawyers
- ICANN 63, Day 0 — registrars bollock DI as Whois debate kicks off
- Registrars still not responding to private Whois requests
- Book review — “Domain Names: Strategies and Legal Aspects”
- Co-founder Nevett leaves Donuts
- The internet is still working after KSK roll
- Donuts loses to ICANN in $135 million .web auction appeal
- ICANN says it can spend quarter-billion-dollar auction fund however it likes
- Google abandons its .kid gTLD bid
- ICANN number two Atallah is new CEO of Donuts
- ICANN blocks .islam after government veto
- Nominet to donate over $260,000 to Children In Need
- CentralNic buys .fans for peanuts
- Is auDA’s new marketing windfall working?
- Google adds censorship workaround to Android devices
- Spammy .loan makes Alibaba fastest-growing and fastest-shrinking registrar in June
- Here’s what ICANN’s boss is saying about Whois access now
- Parsons quits GoDaddy board
- Brazil dancing around four million reg milestone
- Donuts says DPML now covers “millions” of trademark variants as price rockets again
- Chinese registrars on the decline
- $3.2 million-a-year registrar up for grabs
- It’s Drazek vs Dammak for GNSO Council chair
- Cloudflare selling all domains at cost: “All we’re doing is pinging an API”
- MMX waving goodbye to .london? Boss puts focus on renewal profits, China
- Emoji domains now easier to use
- Chutzpah alert! DotKids wants ICANN handout to fight gTLD auction
- Afilias gets Guinness record for .au migration
- KSK vote was NOT unanimous
- ICANN turns 20 today (or maybe not)
- Van der Laan to leave ICANN board
- Set buttocks to clench! ICANN approves risky KSK rollover
- Mediators hired as Whois reformers butt heads
- US scraps fucking stupid “seven dirty words” ban
- Beginning of the end for DomainTools? Court orders it to scrub Whois records
- PIR chief: registries should stop stressing about volume
- .CLUB sees spam double after China promotion
- Com Laude acquires Scottish rival
- CentralNic acquired yet another company
- Empty Whois a threat to the US elections?
- Donuts gets bought by former ICANN CEO’s firm
- .tel’s second-biggest registrar gets canned
- Whois privacy did NOT increase spam volumes
- Afilias finally admits it’s American
- Could a new US law make GDPR irrelevant?
- No more free ride for ICANN Fellows?
- Afilias sues India to block $12 million Neustar back-end deal
- More consolidation? Endurance said to be up for sale
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.