Amazon governments vow revenge for “illegal and unjust” ICANN decision on .amazon

The eight nations of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization are unhappy that ICANN is giving .amazon to Amazon the retailer and have vowed to spread the word that ICANN has acted “illegally”.

ACTO secretary general Alexandra Moreira has written (pdf) to ICANN CEO Göran Marby to say: “We consider this decision an illegal and unjust expropriation of our culture, tradition, history and image before the world.”

She said that ACTO is now “committed to disseminating news of this situation to all relevant groups”, adding:

the international community should be aware of the very real consequences or ramifications (be it economic, environmental, cultural or related to questions of sovereignty) of granting exclusive access to the domain “.Amazon” to a single company.

The delegation of .amazon to Amazon the company, “jeopardizes the continued well-being of the societies that live there”, she wrote, with no elaboration.

Amazon was last month told it could have the gTLD after a years-long battle with ACTO and the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee, which had advised ICANN by consensus to reject the .amazon application.

That consensus broke last year when the US government basically said enough was enough and refused to continue back the eight South American governments’ plight.

Under the terms of Amazon’s contract, it has to protect hundreds of culturally sensitive second-level domains of ACTO’s choosing, and to give each of its members a single domain that they can use to promote their portion of the Amazonian region.

ACTO had wanted more, basically demanding joint ownership of .amazon, which Amazon refused.

It remains to be seen whether ACTO’s reaction will be limited to harsh language, or whether its members will actively try to disrupt ICANN activities. The next GAC-ICANN face-to-face, set for Cancun in March, could be interesting viewing.

ICANN gets a new European chief

ICANN has moved long-time head of North America stakeholder engagement Chris Mondini to head up the organization’s European office.

Mondini will take over the role of vice president of stakeholder engagement for Europe and will also become managing director of the Brussels office.

He replaces Jean-Jacques Sahel, who quit to join Google’s Asia policy team a few months ago.

As attendees at ICANN’s recent Montreal meeting may recall, American Mondini speaks (to my ear) pretty decent French, which will no doubt come in handy after he crosses the pond.

He will continue to lead Global Business Engagement initiatives worldwide and will continue to report to senior VP Sally Costerton.

Mondini has been with ICANN for over eight years, having joined during the Beckstrom years in 2011.

ICANN predicts shrinkage in new gTLD sector

ICANN will make less money from new gTLDs in its fiscal 2021 because fewer domains will be registered and renewed, according to its recently published draft budget.

The budget, released the day ICANN broke up for its Christmas holidays, shows that the organization expects to bring in $140.4 million in FY21, up a modest $300,000 on its FY20.

But it’s expecting the amount of money contributed by registries and registrars in the new gTLD sector to decline.

For FY21, it expects new gTLD registry transaction fees — the $0.25 paid to ICANN whenever a domain is registered, renewed or transferred — to be $5.1 million. That’s down from the $5.5 million currently forecast for FY20.

It expects registrar transaction fees for new gTLD domains to dip from $4.6 million to $4.3 million.

But at the same time, ICANN is predicting growth from its legacy gTLD segments, which of course are primarily driven by .com sales. All the other legacy gTLDs of note, even .org and .net, are currently on downward trajectories in terms of volumes.

For FY21, ICANN is forecasting legacy gTLD registry transaction fees to come in at $52.6 million, versus the $50.5 million it expects to see in the current FY20. In percentage terms, it’s about double the growth it’s predicting for the current FY.

Legacy gTLD registrar transaction fees are estimated to grow, however, from $31.2 million to $32.7 million.

In terms of fixed fees — the $25,000 every new gTLD registry has to pay every year regardless of transaction volume — ICANN is also predicting shrinkage.

It reckons it will lose a net seven registries in FY21, dropping from 1,170 to 1,163 by the end of June 2021. These are most likely dot-brand gTLDs that could follow the path of 69 predecessors and flunk out of the program.

ICANN also expects its base of paying registrars to go down by 100 accreditations, with no new registrar applications, causing fees to drop from $10.7 million this year to $9.6 million in FY21.

In short, it’s not a particularly rosy outlook for the gTLD industry, unless you’re Verisign.

ICANN’s financial year runs from July 1 to June 30 this year, and usually the December release of its draft budget includes some mid-year reevaluations of how it sees the current period playing out. But that’s not the case this time.

ICANN appears to be on-budget, suggesting that it’s getting better at modeling the industry the more years of historical transaction data it has access to.

The budget (pdf) is now open for public comment. I spotted a few errors, maybe you can too.

ASO uses super powers to demand ICANN turn over .org buyout docs

In an unprecedented move, ICANN’s Address Supporting Organization has exercised its special powers to demand ICANN hand over documents relating to the Ethos Capital acquisition of .org’s Public Interest Registry.

There’s a possibility, however small, that this could be the first shot in a war that could see the PIR acquisition scrapped.

Fair warning, this story is going to get pretty nerdy, which may not be compatible with the fuzzy-headedness that usually accompanies the first working day of the year. We’re heading into the overgrown weeds of the ICANN bylaws here, for which I apologize in advance.

The ASO — the arm of the ICANN community concerned with IP address policy — has asked ICANN Org for access to records concerning the $1.135 billion acquisition of PIR, which has attracted lots of criticism from non-profits, domainers and others since it was announced.

It’s unprecedented, and of interest to ICANN watchers, for a few reasons.

First, this is the ASO making the request. The ASO comprises the five Regional Internet Registries, the bodies responsible for handing out chunks of IP address space to ISPs around the world. It doesn’t normally get involved in policy related to domain names such as .org.

Second, it’s invoking an hitherto untested part of ICANN’s new bylaws that allows the certain community entities that make up the “Empowered Community” to make “Inspection Requests” of ICANN Org.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, there’s a hint of a threat that the ASO and other members of the EC may use their extraordinary powers to attempt to prevent the PIR acquisition from going ahead.

Before we unpick all of this, this is what the ASO has sent to ICANN, according to its December 31 statement:

As a Decisional Participant in the Empowered Community and pursuant to ICANN Bylaws section 22.7, the ASO hereby submits this Inspection Request to inspect the records of ICANN, including minutes of the Board or any Board Committee, for the purpose of determining whether the ASO’s may have need to use its empowered community powers in the near future relating to the potential assignment of the .org Registry Agreement. For this purpose, the ASO seeks to inspect any ICANN records which pertain to or provide relevant insight to the process by which ICANN will consider (and potentially approve) the assignment of the .org Registry Agreement, including the process by which input from the affected community will be obtained prior to ICANN’s consideration and potential approval of the assignment.

The Empowered Community is the entity that replaced the US government as ICANN’s primary overseer, following the IANA transition in late 2016.

Its members cover the breadth of the ICANN community, comprising the ASO, Generic Names Supporting Organization, Country Code Names Supporting Organization, Governmental Advisory Committee and At-Large Advisory Committee. Each member is a “Decisional Participant”.

Since the transition, its only real functions have been to approve appointments to the ICANN board of directors and to rubber-stamp the budget, but it does have some pretty powerful tools at its disposal, such as the nuclear ability to fire the entire board.

One of the powers enjoyed by each Decisional Participant, which has never been invoked publicly, is to make an Inspection Request — a demand to see ICANN’s accounts or documents related to the board’s decisions.

In this case, the ASO wants “records which pertain to or provide relevant insight to the process by which ICANN will consider (and potentially approve) the assignment of the .org Registry Agreement”.

But will it get this information? It seems the Inspection Request bylaw is a little bit like ICANN’s longstanding freedom-of-information commitment, the Documentary Information Disclosure Policy, with some key differences that arguably make the IR process less transparent.

Like DIDP, the IR process gives ICANN Org a whole buffet of rejection criteria to choose from. It can refuse requests for reasons of confidentiality or legal privilege, for example, or if it thinks the request is overly broad.

It can also reject a request if “is motivated by a Decisional Participant’s financial, commercial or political interests, or those of one or more of its constituents”, which makes the fact that this request is coming from the ASO particularly interesting.

If the GAC or the GNSO or the ccNSO, or even the ALAC, had made the request, ICANN could quite reasonably have thrown it out on the basis of “commercial or political interests”.

That’s not the case with the ASO, which makes me wonder (aloud, it seems) whether the ASO had received any nudges from other members of the EC before filing the request.

Inspection Requests also differ from DIDP in that any documents that are turned over are not necessarily published, and ICANN can also force the Decisional Participant to file a non-disclosure agreement covering their contents.

ICANN can even demand that an ASO member shows up at its Los Angeles headquarters in person to read (and, if they want, copy) the docs in question.

In short, ICANN has a lot of wriggle room to refuse or frustrate the ASO’s request, and it has a track record of not being particularly receptive to these kinds of demands.

The grey-hairs out there will recall that Karl Auerbach, one of its own directors, was forced to sue the organization back in 2002, just in order to have a look at its books.

But what’s perhaps most tantalizing about the ASO’s request is its excuse for wanting to inspect the documents in question.

It says it need the info “for the purpose of determining whether the ASO’s [sic] may have need to use its empowered community powers in the near future relating to the potential assignment of the .org Registry Agreement”.

One way of interpreting this is that the ASO needed to state a reason for its request and this is pretty much all it’s got.

But what powers does the Empowered Community have that could potentially cover the acquisition of PIR by Ethos? It certainly does not have the power to directly approve or reject the transfer of control of a gTLD contract.

The EC has nine bulleted powers in the ICANN bylaws. Some of them are explicitly about things like budgets and bylaws amendments, which could not possibly come into play here. I reckon only four could feasibly apply:

(i) Appoint and remove individual Directors (other than the President);

(ii) Recall the entire Board;

…

(viii) Initiate a Community Reconsideration Request, mediation or a Community IRP; and

(ix) Take necessary and appropriate action to enforce its powers and rights, including through the community mechanism contained in Annex D or an action filed in a court of competent jurisdiction.

Short of lawyering up or having the entire board taken out and shot, it seems like the most likely power that could be invoked at first would be the Community Reconsideration Request.

Judging by the bylaws, this is virtually identical to the normal Request for Reconsideration process, a process which very rarely results in ICANN actually reconsidering its decisions.

The major difference is that at least three of the five members of the Empowered Community has to vote in favor of filing such a request, and no more than one may object.

If they manage to muster up this consent — which could take many weeks — the fact that the reconsideration request comes from the “Community” rather than a single entity appears to make substantially no difference to how it is rejected considered by ICANN.

Threatening ICANN with a Community Reconsideration Request is a little like threatening to jump through an increasingly narrow series of hoops, only to find the last one leads into a pit filled with ICANN lawyers with laser beams attached to their heads.

A Community Independent Review Process, however, is a different kettle of snakes.

It’s substantially the same as a regular IRP — where ICANN’s fate is decided by a panel of three retired judges — except ICANN has to pay the complainant’s legal fees as well as its own.

ICANN’s track record with IRPs is not fantastic. It can and does lose them fairly regularly.

Could the ASO’s letter be the first portent of a community-led IRP bubbling up behind the scenes? Could such a move delay the PIR acquisition, putting Ethos’ plan for a profit-driven, price-raising .org on hold for a year or two? It’s certainly not impossible.

Amazon beats South America! Dot-brand contracts now signed

Amazon has prevailed in its seven-year battle to obtain the right to run .amazon as a branded top-level domain.

The company signed contracts for .amazon and the Chinese and Japanese translations on Thursday, despite years-long protests from the eight South American governments that comprise the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization.

This means the three gTLDs are likely to be entered into the DNS root system within a matter of weeks, after ICANN has conducted pre-delegation testing to make sure the registry’s technical systems are up to standard. The back-end is being provided by Neustar, so this is pretty much a formality.

.amazon is pretty much a done deal, in other words, and there’s pretty much nothing ACTO can do within the ICANN system to get the contract unsigned.

ACTO was of course angry about .amazon because it thinks the people of the Amazonia region have greater rights to the string than the American e-commerce giant.

It had managed to muster broad support against the gTLD applications from its Governmental Advisory Committee colleagues until the United States, represented on the GAC by the National Telecommunications Administration did a U-turn this November and withdrew its backing for the consensus.

This coincided with Amazon hiring David Redl, the most-recent former head of the NTIA, as a consultant.

The applications were originally rejected by ICANN due to a GAC objection in 2013.

But Amazon invoked ICANN’s Independent Review Process to challenge the decision and won in 2017, with the IRP panel ruling that ICANN had paid too much deference to unjustified GAC demands.

More recently, ACTO had been demanding shared control of .amazon, while Amazon had offered instead to protect cultural interests through a series of Public Interest Commitments in its registry agreements that would be enforceable by governments via the PIC Dispute Resolution Procedure.

This wasn’t enough for ACTO, and the GAC demanded that ICANN facilitate bilateral talks with Amazon to come to a mutually acceptable solution.

But these talks never really got underway, largely due to ACTO internal disputes during the political crisis in Venezuela this year, and eventually ICANN drew a line in the sand and approved the applications.

After rejecting an appeal from Colombia in September, ICANN quietly published Amazon’s proposed PICs (pdf) for public comment.

Only four comments were received during the month-long consultation.

As a personal aside, I’d been assured by ICANN several months ago that there would be a public announcement when the PICs were published, which I even promised you I would blog about.

There was no such announcement, so I feel like a bit of a gullible prick right now. It’s my own stupid fault for taking this on trust and not manually checking the .amazon application periodically for updates — I fucked up, so I apologize.

PICs commenters, including a former GAC vice-chair, also noticed this lack of transparency.

ACTO itself commented:

The proposed PIC does not attend to the Amazon Countries public policy interests and concerns. Besides not being the result of a mutually acceptable solution dully endorsed by our countries, it fails to adequately safeguard the Amazon cultural and natural heritage against the the risks of monopolization of a TLD inextricably associated with a geographic region and its populations.

Its comments were backed up, in pretty much identical language, by the Brazilian government and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Under the Amazon PICs, ACTO and its eight members each get a .amazon domain that they can use for their own web sites.

But these domains must either match the local ccTLD or “the names of indigenous peoples’ groups, and national symbols of the countries in the Amazonia region, and the specific terms OTCA, culture, heritage, forest, river, and rainforest, in English, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish”.

The ACTO nations also get to permanently block 1,500 domains that have the aforementioned cultural significance to the region.

The ACTO and Brazilian commenters don’t think this goes far enough.

But it’s what they’ve been given, so they’re stuck with it.

Russian company approved as gTLD escrow provider

ICANN has approved Russian internet exchange point MSK-IX as its 10th gTLD data escrow provider.

The organization said that week that Joint Stock Company “Internet Exchange “MSK-IX” has been added to its roster of companies fighting for gTLD registries escrow business.

MSK-IX is mainly in the business of operating an internet peering hub — a location where ISPs can connect their networks to backbones and to each other — in Moscow.

It becomes the fourth escrow provider in Europe, and the only one in Europe outside of the EU.

There are also five approved providers in Asia and only one — original provider Iron Mountain — in North America.

ICANN says it is not currently looking for any more providers.

gTLD registries are contractually obliged to periodically put their domain and registrant data into escrow, on the off-chance they go out of business and domains need to be transferred to a different company.

Kamel’s deputy gets promoted at ICANN

ICANN has promoted Mandy (Kathryn) Carver to the position of senior VP for governmental and intergovernmental engagement, replacing her late boss, Tarek Kamel.

Carver has been with ICANN for 13 years and reported to Kamel, as a plain VP, for the last six. She’ll now report directly to the CEO.

She’s a human rights and health lawyer, with previous experience at several non-profit entities.

Kamel died in October at 57 after a long battle with poor health.

ICANN board meets to consider PIR acquisition TODAY

ICANN’s board of directors will gather today to consider whether the acquisition of Public Interest Registry by a private equity company means that it should reverse its own decision to allow PIR to raise .org prices arbitrarily.

Don’t get too excited. It looks like it’s largely a process formality that won’t lead to any big reversals, at least in the short term.

But I’ve also learned that the controversy could ultimately be heading to an Independent Review Process case, the final form of appeal under ICANN rules.

The board is due to meet today with just two named agenda items: Reconsideration Request 19-2 and Reconsideration Request 19-3.

Those are the appeals filed by the registrar Namecheap in July and rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation in August.

Namecheap and EFF respectively wanted ICANN to reverse its decisions to remove PIR’s 10%-a-year price-raising caps and to oblige the registry to enforce the Uniform Rapid Suspension anti-cybersquatting policy.

Both parties now claim that the sale by the Internet Society of PIR to private equity firm Ethos Capital, announced last week, casts new light on the .org contract renewal.

The deal means PIR will change from being a non-profit to being a commercial venture, though PIR says it will stick to its founding principles of supporting the non-profit community.

I reported a couple of weeks ago that the board had thrown out both RfRs, but it turns out that was not technically correct.

The full ICANN board did in fact consider both appeals, but it was doing so in only a “preliminary” fashion, according to an ICANN spokesperson. ICANN told me:

On 3 November the Board considered “proposed determinations” for both reconsideration request 19-2 and 19-3. In essence, the Board was taking up the Board Accountability Mechanism Committee (BAMC) role, as the BAMC had not been able to reach quorum in early November due to certain recusals by BAMC members.

Once the Board adopted the proposed determinations (in lieu of the BAMC issuing a recommendation to the Board) the parties that submitted the reconsideration requests had 15 days to submit a rebuttal, for the Board’s full consideration of the matter, which is now on the agenda.

Normally, RfRs are considered first by the four-person BAMC, but in this case three of the members — Sarah Deutsch, Nigel Roberts, and Becky Burr — recused themselves out of the fear of appearing to present conflicts of interest.

The committee obviously failed to hit a quorum, so the full board took over its remit to give the RfRs their first pass.

The board decided that there had been no oversights or wrongdoing. Reconsideration always presents a high bar for requestors. The .org contract was negotiated, commented on, approved, and signed completely in compliance with ICANN’s governing rules, the board decided.

But the ICANN bylaws allow for a 15-day period following a BAMC recommendation during which rejected RfR appellants can submit a rebuttal.

And, guess what, both of them did just that, and both rebuttals raise the PIR acquisition as a key reason ICANN should think again about the .org contract changes.

The acquisition was announced a week ago, and it appears to have come as much of a surprise to ICANN as to everyone else. It’s a new fact that the ICANN board has not previously taken into account when considering the two RfRs, which could prove important.

Namecheap reckons that the deal means that PIR is now almost certain to raise .org prices. New gTLD registry Donuts was bough by Ethos affiliate Abry Partners last year, and this year set about raising prices across the large majority of its 200-odd gTLDs. Namecheap wrote in its rebuttal:

Within months of be acquired by Abry Partners, it raised prices in 2019 for 220 out of its 241 TLDs. Any statements by PIR now to not raise prices unreasonably are just words, and without price caps, there is no way that .org registrants are not used a source to generate revenue for acquisitions or to pay dividends to its shareholders.

It also said:

The timing and the nature of this entire process is suspicious, and in a well-regulated industry, would draw significant scrutiny from regulators. For ICANN not to scrutinize this transaction closely in a completely transparent and accountable fashion (including public disclosure of pertinent information regarding the nature, cost, the terms of any debt associated with the acquisition, timeline of all parties involved, and the principals involved) would demonstrate that ICANN org and the ICANN Board do not function as a trusted or reliable internet steward.

Namecheap also takes issue with the fact that ICANN’s ruling on its RfR (pdf) draws heavily on a 2009 economic analysis by Professor Dennis Carlton, which concluded that price caps were unnecessary in the new gTLD program.

The registrar trashes this analysis as being based on more opinion than fact, and says it is based on outdated market data.

Meanwhile, the EFF’s rebuttal makes the acquisition one of four reasons why it thinks ICANN should reverse course. It said;

ICANN must carefully reexamine the .ORG Registry Agreement in light of this news. Without the oversight and participation of the nonprofit community, measures that give the registry authority to institute new [Rights Protection Mechanisms] or make other major policy changes invite management decisions that conflict with the needs of the .ORG community.

Quite often, RfRs are declined by ICANN because the requestor does not present any new information that the board has not already considered. But in this case, the fact of the PIR acquisition is empirically new information, as it’s only week-old news.

Will this help Namecheap and the EFF with their cause? The board will certainly have to consider this new information, but I still think it’s unlikely that it will change its mind.

But I’ve also learned that Namecheap has filed with ICANN to trigger a Cooperative Engagement Process procedure.

The CEP is an often-lengthy bilateral process where ICANN and an aggrieved party attempt to resolve their differences in closed-door talks.

When CEP fails, it often leads to an Independent Review Process complaint, when both sides lawyer up and three retired judges are roped in to adjudicate. These typically cost both sides hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

CEP and IRP cases are usually measured in years rather than months, so the PIR acquisition could be under scrutiny for a long time to come.

I attempt to answer ICA’s questions about the “terrible blunder” .org acquisition

The Internet Commerce Association launched a withering attack on ICANN late last week, accusing the organization of a “terrible blunder” by lifting pricing restrictions on .org domain names.

As by now you’re no doubt aware, .org manager Public Interest Registry was acquired last week by a private equity firm with ties to ICANN’s former CEO, in a deal likely to have delivered hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more, to former owner the Internet Society.

The deal means PIR is now almost certain to exercise its newfound right to raise its prices arbitrarily, adding tens of millions to its annual top line at the expense of .org registrants.

While such a price increase is likely to have little impact on most registrants — an annual increase of even 100% would only add about $10 to the per-domain cost — it would certainly prove onerous to many of the high-volume domain investors ICA represents.

So ICA chief Zak Muscovitch whipped off a letter to ICANN (pdf) on Friday, demanding that ICANN use its contractual powers to terminate PIR’s registry agreement and put .org out for open tender. He wrote:

If you were led to believe that removing price caps on .Org domain names was a sound approach because the registry would remain in the hands of a nonprofit foundation, you have clearly been misled. If you were led to believe that despite being the effective owner of the .org registry, you were somehow forced to let your service providers tell you how much they can charge, instead of the other way around, you have been led astray. If you have been told that .Org does not have market power within the nonprofit sector, you have been led astray. If you have been told that competition from other gTLDs will constrain .org prices, you have been led astray.

I think the letter has about as much chance of working as an ice sculptor in hell, but Muscovitch does include a list of seven questions for ICANN that I’m going to attempt to answer to the best of my ability here.

First, he asks:

Were you aware whether ISOC was in talks to sell the registry when you approved the removal of the price caps?

I put the same question to PIR CEO Jon Nevett last week, and he told me: “I don’t know when the talks started with ISOC and the buyer, but neither ICANN nor PIR knew about it when finalizing the .ORG [Registry Agreement].”

I’ve no particular reason to believe he’s lying.

If ISOC was in such talks at that time, why was this material fact not disclosed to you by the registry operator, prior to you approving the renewal agreement?

The acquisition talks between ISOC and Ethos Capital certainly could have been going on prior to the .org contract being signed, which happened June 30 this year.

The main piece of evidence here is that Fadi Chehadé of private equity firm and presumed Ethos affiliate Abry Partners registered the domain ethoscapital.org on May 7, according to Whois records. A company of the same name was formed in Delaware a week later.

Given that Ethos appears to be an Abry vehicle set up purely to acquire PIR, it seems likely that talks were already underway at this point.

The domain ethoscapital.com, which Ethos is currently using as its primary, seems to have been acquired on the secondary market around August. The acquisition was announced November 13.

To Muscovitch’s question, though, I return to Nevett’s line that PIR knew nothing about the acquisition talks before the RA was finalized.

The RA was finalized and opened to public comment in March.

It’s quite possible Ethos and ISOC entered talks in the three months after the deal had been finalized but before it had been signed.

When did you first learn of the negotiations to sell the .Org registry?

An excellent question I’ve also posed but as yet have no answer to.

Did you base your decision to approve the removal of price caps, at least in part, on the expectation or belief that the registry would continue to be operated by a nonprofit organization with a public commitment to maintaining a stable pricing environment, instead of on behalf of a private equity firm whose objective is to maximize profits for its funders?

Cheekily, I’m going to take ICANN at its word and say the answer is “yes”.

One of the controversies concerning the .org renewal was that ICANN seemingly ignored thousands of comments calling for the retention of price caps.

This, ICANN has denied, saying that it “reviewed and evaluated” every comment.

Among the very few comments that weren’t outright condemnations of the decision to remove price caps were two nuanced, arguably ambivalent, analyses from two influential ICANN structures — the At-Large Advisory Committee and the Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group.

ALAC’s eight-page comment (pdf) was very much of the “on the one hand…” variety, but it paid special attention to ISOC’s public interest works when putting forward the view that uncapped pricing might be a good thing, noting (and quoting itself):

a significant portion of .ORG registration fees “are returned to serve the Internet community [through] redistribution of .org funds into the community by the Internet Society, to support Internet development.”… ISOC’s goals and priorities, while far broader than At-Large (and even ICANN), parallel those of At-Large and the interests of end-users. Many At-Large Structures are also ISOC Chapters, further demonstrating the commonality of interests.

NCSG, meanwhile, said in its comments (pdf) that price caps should remain, but increased from the 10%-per-year level. It acknowledged that some .org money flows into funding NCSG.

So there’s two influential groups, both with organizational and/or funding ties to ISOC, saying price increases may be a good thing because ISOC acts in the public interest.

And ICANN said it read and absorbed all the comments, so I’m cheekily going to say that yes, ICANN at least in part renewed the .org contract in the belief that PIR would continue to be a non-profit and act in the public interest.

Had you been aware of the planned sale of the .Org registry to a private equity firm, would you have treated the renewal of the .Org registry agreement and the removal of price caps as worthy of robust discussion and a vote by the Board, such that perhaps the terms of the agreement would have been modified?

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say hell, no. ICANN doesn’t want to be a pricing regulator, regardless of the registry operator, in my view. It’s only the US government that’s preventing it lifting price restrictions on .com, I reckon.

What involvement did your former CEO, Mr. Chehade and your former SVP, Ms. Abusitta-Ouri, have in the decision to employ the base gTLD registry agreement for legacy TLDs during their tenure, if any?

In Chehadé’s case, the answer is fairly clear. Even if he did not have a hands-on role in the decision to cajole legacy gTLD registries toward the 2012 agreement, it all happened on his watch so he bears ultimate responsibility.

It’s worth noting, perhaps, that most of the legacy gTLD agreements that migrated over to the new gTLD agreement’s standard language happened not only while Chehadé was at the helm, but also after he’d already accepted his new job at Abry.

He announced his early resignation in May 2015, telling the AFP at the time that he already had a job lined up in the commercial sector, but he declined to give specifics.

He’d probably made his mind up to quit some time before the announcement. He registered the domain name chehade.company, which he now uses for his investment vehicle Chehadé & Company, in the April.

He revealed he was joining Abry as senior advisor on digital strategy in August that year, but didn’t actually leave until March 2016.

During that interim, lame-duck period ICANN negotiated and signed (all in October 2015) renewals for 2003-round gTLDs .pro, .cat and .travel, all of which incorporated 2012 contract language related to, for example, the Uniform Rapid Suspension process.

Three months before Chehadé’s resignation announcement, ICANN signed a very similar deal with .jobs, the first time it had incorporated 2012 language into a legacy gTLD contract.

These contracts were all signed for ICANN not by Chehadé but by his long-time buddy, frequent co-worker and then-president of the Global Domains Division, Akram Atallah (who is now CEO of Donuts, which is owned by Abry).

Since Chehadé’s departure, ICANN has also taken the same contract renewal stance with TLDs including .xxx, .mobi, .museum and .aero.

By 2016 it had become standard operating practice at ICANN to nudge registries towards the 2012-round contract, as Atallah explained to then-ICA lead Phil Corwin at ICANN’s Hyderabad meeting in November 2016. Atallah stated (pdf):

So basically the negotiations are — the registries come and ask for something, and we tell them please adopt the new gTLD contract. And if they push back on it and they say they don’t want something, we can’t force them to take it. It’s a negotiation between two parties. And I think it’s within the remit of the corporation to negotiate its contracts. If the policy comes back and says that the URS is not something that we want to have as a policy, of course, we would support that.

As regards Nora Abusitta-Ouri, Ethos’s “chief purpose officer”, her former job title of “senior VP for development and public responsibility programs” suggests she had little to no involvement in gTLD contractual issues.

While her LinkedIn profile doesn’t mention it, she appears to have become chief engagement officer at Chehadé & Company after her stint at ICANN ended in July 2016.

What restrictions do you have in place with respect to cooling-off periods for former executives?

Fuck all, clearly.

ICANN going back to Puerto Rico for a third time

ICANN has selected Puerto Rico for its ICANN 73 public meeting.

The meeting is slated to be held at the Puerto Rico Convention Center in San Juan from March 5 to March 10, 2022.

That’s the same venue ICANN visited in March last year, in the wake of Hurricane Maria, which caused extensive damage and loss of life on the island. Indeed, the convention center had just months earlier been used as a command and control center for the recovery effort.

San Juan will become just the third city that ICANN has visited three times. It’s been to Singapore four times and its home city of Los Angeles (if you include Marina Del Rey) six times.

Puerto Rico had also been scheduled as the venue for ICANN 57 in 2016, but the meeting was moved to India instead, because of the Zika virus that was causing international concern at the time.

In 2020, meetings are to be held in Cancún, Kuala Lumpur and Hamburg, in that order. In 2021, ICANN’s going to Cancún (again), The Hague and Seattle.