SaveDotOrg to protest outside ICANN HQ. #lol

Good grief.
Just when you thought the outrage over .org manager Public Interest Registry’s imminent sale to Ethos Capital couldn’t get any weirder, the #SaveDotOrg campaign has announced that it is going to physically protest ICANN’s headquarters in Los Angeles next week.
From 0900 until 1100 local time, Friday January 24, they’ll gather to demand that non-profit voices are heard in ICANN’s decision whether to approve the acquisition. From the announcement:

Join us in demanding that ICANN commit to a process that includes the voices and priorities of nonprofits and grassroots organizations. The .ORG domain isn’t up for sale without our participation. We’ll rally outside ICANN’s offices in Los Angeles on Friday, January 24. This is an important moment in the SaveDotOrg campaign, and we want you to join us!

Sloganed T-shirts and signs will be available.
The event is being organized by NTEN, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fight For The Future. All very lovely people; I can’t see this turning into some Hong Kong-style riot situation.
Unusual as it is, this kind of direct action against ICANN is not unprecedented.
Back in 2011, a group of pornographers and civil liberties activists gathered outside the Westin St Francis hotel in San Francisco to, where ICANN was holding its public meeting, protest the imminent approval of .xxx, which they thought was a threat to free speech online. About 25 people showed up, by my count, chanting slogans such as “We want porn! No triple-X!”. Buttman was there.
Those protesters, it turns out many years later, really had nothing to worry about; nobody has been forced to buy a .xxx domain, and my friends tell me porn is still very much available on the internet.
I rather suspect the #SaveDotOrg guys are in the same boat. Of all the arguments against the acquisition, the one claiming that free speech is at risk still seems to me the least convincing.

Now .org critics actually want to take over the registry, blocking billion-dollar sale

A group of ICANN alumni and non-profits want to block the $1.135 billion sale of .org manager Public Interest Registry and for ICANN to hand over the reins to a new not-for-profit entity.
The Cooperative Corporation of .ORG Registrants was reportedly formed in California this week, supported by a long list of opponents of the .org deal, which would see the Internet Society sell PIR to a new private equity company called Ethos Capital.
Currently not-for-profit .org would become commercial again, answerable to shareholders who want to see a return on their investment. PIR recently had its 10%-a-year price caps lifted by ICANN, enabling it to increase its annual registry fees by as much as it wants.
Founding directors of the new co-op reportedly include ICANN founding chair Esther Dyson and founding CEO Mike Roberts, neither of whom have been heavily involved in ICANN or the domain name industry for the better part of two decades.
According to Reuters, Also on the board are Wikimedia Foundation CEO Katherine Maher, Jeff Ubois of the MacArthur Foundation, and Bill Woodcock, executive director of Packet Clearing House, which provides .org, via back-end Afilias, with DNS resolution services.
Dyson told the New York Times: “If you’re owned by private equity, your incentive is to make a profit. Our incentive is to serve and protect nonprofits and the public.”
The new registry would not have a profit motive, and excess funds would be returned to the non-profit community.
While the new group has yet to make a formal, public proposal, the idea is reportedly to persuade ICANN to block the sale of PIR to Ethos — something nobody can seem to agree is even within its powers — and instead transfer stewardship to this new co-op.
It’s a crazily ambitious goal.
The group would be basically asking ICANN to cut off ISOC’s primary funding source. PIR currently gives tens of millions of dollars a year to its owner, and after the Ethos deal ISOC intends to live off the interest of its billion-dollar windfall.
If ICANN canceled the PIR contract and handed .org to a third party, ISOC would get nothing, potentially crippling it and subsidiaries such as the IETF.
I can’t imagine such a decision, on the outside chance ICANN actually went down this path, not resulting in litigation.
The Cooperative Corporation of .ORG Registrants is reportedly also being backed by other supporters of the #SaveDotOrg campaign (which now has over 20,000 supporters), including the free speech advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and NTEN, a conference/community hub for non-profits.
This campaign last month managed to persuade a group of four Democrat members of Congress — Ron Wyden, Richard Blumenthal, Elizabeth Warren and Anna Eshoo — to express their concerns about the Ethos deal and ask ISOC/Ethos/PIR a series of pointed questions about its potential ramifications.
In its response this week (pdf), the leaders of the three entities avoided directly answering the bulleted questions, but did make some commitments that I believe are new.
Notably, they said that the registry would reincorporate as a Public Benefit LLC before the acquisition closes. This is a relatively new form of legal entity, which has been described like this:

A Public Benefit LLC is a for-profit entity; however, in operating a Public Benefit LLC, the LLC’s management can take into account social, economic and political considerations without violating its fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the company.

In other words, PIR would be free to place the needs of .org’s non-profit registrants ahead of the needs of its own shareholders without opening itself up to legal action.
A “statement of public benefit” would be in its certificate of formation, and would include a commitment “to limit any potential increase in the price of a .ORG domain registration to no more than 10% per year on average”.
I’ve noted before that this is worded vaguely enough to give Ethos some flexibility to raise prices by over 10%, but the fact that it’s offering to bake a commitment on pricing into its corporate DNA may be seen as a step in the right direction by critics.
It’s also proposing a “Stewardship Council”, which would be “an independent and transparent body” tasked with providing policy guidance to PIR and overseeing a new “Community Investment Fund” that would be used for initiatives such as the annual .org awards program.

#SaveDotOrg to hold public web conference tomorrow with Ethos execs

The two top executives at Ethos Capital are due to confront non-profits that want to stymie its $1.13 billion acquisition of Public Interest Registry on a public call tomorrow.
The call has been put together by NTEN, a conference organizer that focuses on the use of tech by non-profits.
According to NTEN, the call will feature speakers from anti-deal Electronic Frontier Foundation, The National Council of Nonprofits, and Internet Society chapter leaders (some of whom are against the deal).
PIR boss Jon Nevett, as well as Ethos CEO Erik Brooks and chief purpose office Nora Abusitta have also agreed to attend. Andrew Sullivan, CEO of the Internet Society “has been invited but has not confirmed participation”, NTEN said.
It’s going to be the first time that those in favor of the deal will face off in public against those that want it scrapped.
The acquisition is controversial because it represents the .org gTLD going into private, for-profit hands for the first time in 17 years, with previous pricing restrictions removed.
So far, over 12,000 people have signed a petition at savedotorg.org to express their dismay with the deal.
You can find details about the call here, including an email address to submit questions in advance.
The call will happen online at 2000 UTC (1200 US Pacific Time) Thursday December 5. You may have to install some software in advance, though a browser-only option seems to be available too.