Recent Posts
- Is the .co rebid biased toward Afilias? Yeah, kinda
- Amazon governments vow revenge for “illegal and unjust” ICANN decision on .amazon
- SaveDotOrg to protest outside ICANN HQ. #lol
- Ten years ago I predicted Oscar winners wanted a .movie gTLD. Was I right?
- ICANN gets a new European chief
- New CEO to step into the lion’s den at auDA
- Secrets of the .org deal revealed, but much info remains private
- Registrar terminated after what looks like domain hijacking
- NamesCon publishes full agenda for debut Austin conference
- .gay prices and availability revealed as registry promises to give 20% of revenue to charity
- Now .org critics actually want to take over the registry, blocking billion-dollar sale
- Verisign pays ICANN $20 million and gets to raise .com prices again
- ICANN predicts shrinkage in new gTLD sector
- ASO uses super powers to demand ICANN turn over .org buyout docs
- Now PIR rubbishes .org “downtime” claims
- DI Leaders Roundtable #4 — Big predictions for 2020
- Afilias denies .org will go down post-acquisition
- Palestine to release all one-character .ps domains, at a price
- PIR thinks 20-year domain regs are a good idea
- Amazon beats South America! Dot-brand contracts now signed
- Q3 industry growth driven by .tk, .com and .icu
- ICANN throws out second .org appeal, so URS stays
- Warning (or threat?) prices must go up or .org will suffer DAYS of downtime
- Russian company approved as gTLD escrow provider
- Guy gets 14 years for trying to steal a domain with a gun
- GoDaddy girls often make more money than the men
- Non-coms want .org’s future carved in stone
- Kamel’s deputy gets promoted at ICANN
- ICANN delays approval of .org acquisition
- AlpNames died months ago. Why is it still the “most-abused” registrar?
- Ethos promises to keep .org for many many many many years
- Amid .org controversy, Cerf predicts the death of all domains
- #SaveDotOrg to hold public web conference tomorrow with Ethos execs
- As pricey .new launches, Google reveals first set of big-name users including rapper Drake
- Three more dot-brands fizzle out. Total now 69, dudes
- Are ISOC’s claims about .org’s history bogus?
- Criminal .uk suspensions down this year
- Governments kill off another gTLD bid
- Four big developments in the .org pricing scandal
- DI Leaders Roundtable #3 — What did you think of ICANN 66?
- Petition launched to fight .org deal
- ICANN board meets to consider PIR acquisition TODAY
- XYZ buys dormant gTLD from “pyramid scheme” operator
- I attempt to answer ICA’s questions about the “terrible blunder” .org acquisition
- Selling off PIR, did ISOC just throw .org registrants under a bus?
- Rival dot-brand bidders in settlement talks, seek auction delay
- ICANN going back to Puerto Rico for a third time
- Montreal airport thinks DI is porn
- DI Leaders Roundtable #2 — Should we kill off “Whois”?
- Former NTIA chief Redl now working for Amazon
- Neustar’s .co contract up for grabs
- US official Heineman joins GoDaddy
- Web.com got pwned
- Surprise! ICANN throws out complaints about .org price caps
- Somber mood as ICANN 66 opens in Montreal
- America has Amazon’s back in gTLD fight at ICANN 66
- New (kinda) geo-TLD rules laid out at ICANN 66
- Emoji domains get a 😟 after broad study
- Industry veteran Jay Daley tapped to lead IETF
- Verisign likely to get its billion-dollar .com pricing windfall
- ICANN enters talks to kill off Whois for good
- Form an orderly queue: New Zealand wants a new back-end
- Brexit hell: .eu suspension plan put on hold
- DI Leaders Roundtable #1 — How many new gTLDs will be applied for next time around?
- Now you don’t have to live in the EU to register a .eu domain, but there’s a catch
- Spam is not our problem, major domain firms say ahead of ICANN 66
- Crunch time, again, for Whois access policy
- Google quietly launches .new domains sunrise
- After .org price outrage, ICANN says it has NOT scrapped public comments
- Hindu god smites Chrysler gTLD
- Top ICANN advisor Tarek Kamel dies at 57
- Three big changes could be coming to .uk
- Introducing… the DI Leaders Roundtable
- After killing the cows, what does the new Tucows logo remind you of?
- Radix acquires another gTLD
- .whoswho survives!
- Correction: the 10 most-used dot-brands
- Nominet raises .uk prices
- Registrar suspended over dodgy transfers
- Mediocre .vote gTLD drops restrictions
- ICANN’s babysitting fund goes live
- Claims auDA boss quit after he was busted for “falsified” law degree
- .bond domains could cost a grand each
- PIR’s “new” .org domain is just temporary. Help it pick another new one!
- MMX switches porn TLDs from Afilias to Uniregistry
- Argentina will use a lottery to decide 2LD landrush
- Sixty gTLD registries not monitoring security threats
- ICANN must do more to fight internet security threats [Guest Post]
- 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
ICANN’s new gTLD director quits
Kevin Murphy,
June 22, 2012, 00:08:46 (UTC),
Domain Policy
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.