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Pirate Bay founder says ICANN won’t let him be a registrar

Kevin Murphy, March 2, 2021, Domain Registrars

Peter Sunde, co-founder of the controversial Pirate Bay file-sharing web service, says ICANN is unfairly refusing him a registrar accreditation and he’s not happy about it.

Sunde told DI at the weekend that his application for his new registrar, Sarek.fi, to obtain accreditation was recently denied after over 18 months on the grounds that he lied about his criminal convictions on his application form.

He denies this, saying that his crimes were not of the type ICANN vets for, and in any event they happened over a decade ago.

He thinks ICANN is scared about doing business with a disruptive and “annoying” “pain in the ass” with a history of criticizing the intellectual property industry.

Would-be registrars have to select “Yes” or “No” to the question of whether any officer or major shareholder of the company has:

within the past ten (10) years, has been convicted of a felony or of a misdemeanor related to financial activities, or has been judged by a court to have committed fraud or breach of fiduciary duty, or has been the subject of a judicial determination that is similar or related to any of these;

Sunde was convicted by a Swedish court of enabling copyright infringement via the Pirate Bay in 2009, and was sentenced to a year in prison — later reduced to eight months on appeal — and hundreds of thousands of dollars of fines.

The Pirate Bay was a web site that collected links to BitTorrent files, largely copyrighted movies and music.

Because he was not based in Sweden, Sunde avoided jail for several years despite an Interpol arrest warrant.

He eventually served five months of his sentence after being arrested in 2014.

He checked “No” on his registrar accreditation application form, on the basis that he had not been convicted of fraud or any of the other listed financial crimes, and certainly not within the last 10 years.

But ICANN took a broader interpretation, and refused him accreditation due to the Pirate Bay conviction and his Interpol status in 2014, he says.

Since then, the Org, including CEO Göran Marby (with whom he had a brief email exchange) have been ignoring his emails, he says.

Sarek.fi has already been accredited to sell ccTLD domains by the likes of Nominet, Verisign and Donuts, but ICANN’s rejection means the company won’t be able to sell gTLD names.

Sunde says he’s now faced with the likelihood of having to leave his own company in order to secure accrediation, though he’s not ruled out pursuing ICANN through its own appeals process.

He says he suspects ICANN just doesn’t want to do business with him due to his reputation as a disrupter. He’s attended ICANN meetings in the past but wants to get more involved in the policy process.

“it’s really a way for ICANN to make sure that an annoying person with media influence and with a dislike for centralised organisations and monopolies to be there to raise concerns — that they just proved valid,” he told DI in an email.

I take quite an offence to their denial. Not just on the basis of their interpretation of the law (copyright infringement is not fraud, i would have been convicted of fraud then…) Not just because it seems that it’s ok to be a murderer the past 10 years. Or a wife beater. Or a neonazi. These things that are a bit worse than being an internet activist, caring about the free and open internet. The biggest offence I take is to their obligation to the general public to have a broader membership than what they allow today.

Sarek.fi’s business model is to charge a flat fee above wholesale cost for every domain registered.

It’s Sunde’s second domain business. He launched Njalla, a Tucows reseller with a focus on protecting the privacy of registrants, in 2017.