Selling off PIR, did ISOC just throw .org registrants under a bus?

Public Interest Registry is to lose its not-for-profit status, dramatically increasing the chances of .org price increases, under an acquisition deal announced this evening.
The Internet Society is selling PIR to a brand-new private investment firm called Ethos Capital Investors, which is run by two people with ties to the domain industry.
PIR CEO Jon Nevett told DI today that the company is no longer a non-profit following the transaction, and that ISOC will no longer receive a slice of every .org registration fee.
There’s a lot to unpick here.
The biggest concern is arguably that the deal substantially increases risk for .org registrants.
PIR was recently, and very controversially, granted the right to raise its prices from $9.93 per year to whatever-the-hell-it-wants per year, due to a renegotiation of its ICANN contract that scrapped its longstanding 10%-per-year price increase caps.
Many domain investors and non-profits called for the caps to remain. Uncontrolled pricing could lead to smaller charities, for example, being priced out of their decades-held domains, it was claimed.
But PIR repeatedly assured concerned registrants that it was “a mission driven non-profit registry and currently has no specific plans for any price changes”.
That tune has changed, if only a little, today. Nevett told us:

Our goal has always been to make .ORG accessible and reasonably priced — and that will continue under our new ownership. PIR has made reasonable decisions on price in the past, and we will uphold this spirit going forward. We would never make dramatic price increases as we know it would harm our registrants, as well as our registrars.

PIR also says it plans to establish an advisory council and fund to ensure its founding principles are upheld, and to apply for “B Corporation” certification.
B Corp is a private program run by a non-profit called B Lab that certifies companies that meet certain social, environmental and transparency standards, but it has no legal recognition in, for example, the US tax code.
Nevett told us today that he does not know how long ISOC was negotiating the sale, but that neither PIR nor ICANN knew of it during their contract talks.
We know very little about the new owner. Its web site, which appears to have been created very recently, merely provides bios of its two principals.
These are founder and CEO Erik Brooks, who this year quit the private equity firm Abry Partners after 20 years.
Abry, you may recall, is the company that hired former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade in 2016 and gobbled up new gTLD registry Donuts in September last year.
His second is Nora Abusitta-Ouri, named as “chief purpose officer”, who’s apparently tasked with overseeing the moral “ethos” of the company’s investments.
Abusitta-Ouri is a former ICANN staffer who most recently held the role of senior VP for development and public responsibility programs until her 2016 departure. She’s also executive director of the Digital Ethos Foundation.
In short, based on what little information is publicly available, it appears that Ethos was set up purely for the purpose of acquiring PIR. It’s not at all clear where the money to fund the deal is coming from.
The acquisition price has not been disclosed, but given that PIR was grossing over $90 million a year at the last count, I doubt Brooks and Abusitta-Ouri are paying out of their own pockets.
Whoever’s backing this is going to want a return, and the best way to quickly soup up PIR’s growth would be to take advantage of its newfound ability to raise .org prices arbitrarily.
More than half of PIR’s revenue before today — close to $50 million a year — was handed directly to ISOC, to fund its capacity-building and education projects worldwide.
That’s all over now, which begs the question of how it will continue to fund itself in future. My guess is that, now that it has hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank, and is talking about an “endowment”, it’s going to stash its windfall in high-interest accounts and live off that income.
Meanwhile, whatever assurances .org registrants had that PIR was going to remain a non-profit concern have been utterly trashed.
UPDATE: Thanks to domain lawyer John Berryhill for pointing out in the comments that the domain name ethoscapital.org was registered by Abry’s Fadi Chehadé on May 7 this year. Additionally, a commenter on Domain Name Wire tonight noted that a company called Ethos Capital LLC was formed in Delaware on May 14, a day after ICANN published its summary of the .org contract renewal’s public comment period.

12 Comments Tagged: .org, abry, ethos, ICANN, isoc, pir, price caps, public interest registry

Rival dot-brand bidders in settlement talks, seek auction delay

Two companies called Merck have managed to delay an ICANN auction for the .merck dot-brand top-level domain.
The two companies applied for .merck in 2012 and have spent the last almost eight years conducting a battle for the string using various ICANN conflict and appeals mechanisms.
Earlier this year, ICANN placed the two applications into a “last resort” auction, the proceeds of which would flow into ICANN’s own coffers.
Scheduled for July, it would have been the first time competing brands had fought for the same gTLD at ICANN auction.
But the two Mercks sought and received multiple extensions to the auction date, telling ICANN that they were in private settlement talks, until ICANN seemingly got bored and denied their last extension request.
The auction was set to go ahead in late October, but the two applicants managed to get another delay anyway by filing a Request for Reconsideration with ICANN, asking that the refusal to extend be overturned.
While the request is likely to be rejected, the mere fact of its filing means both applications continue to be in “On Hold” status while the request is processed, buying the companies at least a month of extra time to come to their own less-expensive resolution.
The two companies are US-based Merck Registry Holdings, Inc. and its former parent, Germany-based Merck KGaA. The German company is over 350 years old and split from its American subsidiary when it was seized by the US government during World War I. They’re both in the chemicals business.

1 Comment Tagged: auction, dot-brands, ICANN, last resort, merck, new gTLDs

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.

3 Comments Tagged: ICANN, icann 73, puerto rico

Montreal airport thinks DI is porn

The web site you’re reading right now is classified as “pornography/sex” by Montreal airport, according to DI readers.
Some readers en route home from ICANN 66 last week noticed that they couldn’t access the site over the airport’s WiFi and instead got this warning:

Given how frequently I’ve used words such as “porn” in the past — it comes up all the time in stories related to censorship, abuse, and certain gTLDs — I think it’s pretty clear that DI has tripped a lazy keyword filter created by a crappy censorware vendor.
Datavalet appears to have WiFi content filtering contracts with several major hotel chains and airlines, including Air Canada.
Hopefully, nobody was too inconvenienced by this, but I’d still be interested to hear if anyone’s experience similar issues while travelling elsewhere.
Out of an abundance of caution, I shall endeavor to make my coverage of domain name politics less sexually arousing in future.

4 Comments Tagged: censorware, porn, wifi

DI Leaders Roundtable #2 — Should we kill off “Whois”?

Should we stop using the word “Whois” to describe registration data lookup services?
That’s the question I posed for the second DI Leaders Roundtable.
I’m sure you’re all very well aware that the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) is the imminent replacement for the Whois protocol, as the technical method by which domain registrant contact information is stored, transmitted and displayed.
ICANN also regularly refers to Registration Data Directory Services (RDDS) as a protocol-independent blanket term covering the concept of looking up Whois or RDAP data.
You may also recall that ICANN, which is ostensibly a technical body, appears to bedeprecating the word “Whois” in favor of “Lookup” on its own web-based query service.
ICANN has a track record of introducing new acronyms to describe already well-understood functions. The IANA has technically been called “Public Technical Identifiers” for years, but does anyone actually call it “PTI”? No, everyone still talks about “IANA”.
So I wanted to know:

Should we continue to call it “Whois” after the technical transition to RDAP is complete? Will you continue to refer to “Whois”? Should we change to a different word or acronym? Should the industry standardardize its language one way or the other?

There seems to be a general consensus that “Whois” ain’t going anywhere.
The responses, in no particular order.
Jothan Frakes, Executive Director, Domain Name Association

The term WHOIS won’t quickly leave the zeitgeist due to the decades of its use as a description of the lookup process. Lookup is somewhat confusing, as there is DNS Query lookup that works across the resolution system, and WHOIS Lookup that works to find registrant info via the registration system. As far as the term “Lookup” as the label for the new normal that is poised to replace WHOIS? It is better than the acronym “RDDS”. The general public probably would not assume that RDDS is a way to find out about a domain owner or registration information, because it sounds like it involves dentistry (DDS) if one is not following the ICANN world as close as insiders. Despite the evolutionary path the basic function seems to be on, it is likely that WHOIS continues to be what the nickname for the lookup process called, regardless of the support technology layers below it not literally being WHOIS.

Frank Schilling, CEO, Uniregistry

WHOIS IS DEAD, LONG LIVE WHOIS.
The echo of “Whois” will live long after Whois is dead and gone. The very nature of its replacement word “Lookup” ensures that the information hungry public will expect more fulsome data than ICANN intends the word to provide. There will continue to be services who try to engineer a Whois hack and provide accurate underlying data for paying customers. Whois is going to outlive all of us. Even those who diet, exercise, and eat organic food.

Dave Piscitello, Partner, Interisle Consulting Group

Just as most of the world isn’t familiar with new TLDs, most have no appreciation for the differences between Whois and RDAP. The term “Whois” is convenient, memorable, and embedded. It also represents a service to most users, not a protocol, so if we do “standardize” we should use “RDS”. While we sort out the disastrous effects of ICANN’s Temp Spec policy on both investigators and victims of DNS abuse, most parties involved with educating policy makers and legislators should continue to use Whois for consistency’s sake.

Christa Taylor, CMO, MMX

As the old adage goes, “Don’t fix what’s not broken.” While “Whois” may have lost some of its luster due to GDPR I prefer to retain the term — it’s simple, representative of the information it provides and avoids adding any confusion especially for people outside of ICANN. Employing standardized language is, of course, logical and after twenty years of using “Whois” it is the accepted term both inside and outside the industry.

Sandeep Ramchamdani, CEO, Radix Registry

First up, the transition to the RDAP system is much needed given the fundamental flaws of Whois.
It would help in placing some guardrails around customers’ privacy while still providing agencies such as law enforcement authenticated access that they need to do their work.
Whois is a major cause of spam and in the age where privacy is top currency, public, unauthenticated availability of personal data is unacceptable.
It should also smooth out inter-registrar transfers and lower customer frustration while moving out to a different service provider.
When it comes to its name, calling it “RDAP” or “Lookup” would be a branding error. It would cause some confusion and for those not intimately involved in the industry, who may find it hard to discover the new system.
In my mind, keeping the original nomenclature “Whois”, while making it clear that it’s a newer avatar of the same solution would be the way to go.
Can’t think of a better term than “Whois 2.0”.
Very easy to understand that it’s a newer, more advanced iteration of the same product.

Michele Neylon, CEO, Blacknight

Whois was originally a simple little protocol that allowed network operators to contact each other to address technical issues. It predates the usage of domain names or the “web”.
When domains were introduced the same concept was simply transposed over to the new identifiers.
However over the past 20 plus years the way that people viewed Whois has morphed dramatically. The first time I spoke at an ICANN meeting 12 years ago was on the subject of Whois!
Now the term is used both to talk about the technical protocol, which is being replaced in the gTLD space and the data that it is used to store and possibly display. We talk about “Thin Whois”, “Thick Whois” and so many other services and issues linked back to it.
Whois as a protocol is far from perfect, which is why replacing the technical side of it makes a lot of sense.
So with the world slowly moving towards a new technical method for processing domain registration data then maybe we should come up with another word for it. However I’m not sure if there’s much to be gained by doing that.
We are all used to the floppy disk icon to save a document, even if floppy disks are no longer used. With the term “Whois” being part of people’s vocabulary for the nearly a quarter of a century. it’d be pretty hard to find a simple replacement and have people adopt it widely. Sure, in the more technical conversations it makes sense to use more accurate terms like “RDAP”, but the average punter just wants to be able to use a term that they can understand.
Those of us who work with domains and internet technology in our day jobs might care about the “correct” terminology, but we’re in a minority. We all get excited when the mainstream media picks up on a story involving domain names or the DNS and even gets half of it right! If we conjure up some new term that we think is accurate it’ll take years before anyone outside our bubble is comfortable with it. So I don’t think we should.
We should simply accept that “Whois” is a term used to refer to domain registration data no matter what technology under the hood is used to handle it.

Rick Schwartz, domain investor

Hate to give the same basic answer to two questions in a row, but who cares?
Really!! Who cares? Nobody!
This is inside baseball that doesn’t affect anyone on the entire planet except for a handful of domain investors and ICANN etc.
Call it whatever you like just make sure it’s public info.

Comment Tagged: di leaders roudtable, ICANN, rdap, rdds, roundtable, whois

Former NTIA chief Redl now working for Amazon

David Redl, the former head of the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration has joined Amazon as an internet governance advisor, I’ve learned.
I don’t know whether he’s taken a full-time job or is a contractor, but he’s been spotted palling around with Amazon folk at ICANN 66 in Montreal and knowledgeable sources tell me he’s definitely on the payroll.
Redl was assistant secretary at the NTIA until May, when he was reportedly asked to resign over a wireless spectrum issue unrelated to the domain names after just 18 months on the job.
His private sector career prior to NTIA was in the wireless space. I don’t believe he’s ever been employed in the domain industry before.
NTIA is of course the US agency responsible for participating in all matters ICANN, including the ongoing fight over Amazon’s application for the .amazon brand gTLD.
The proposed dot-brand has been in limbo for many years due to the objections of the eight nations of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, which claims cultural rights to the string.
ACTO nations on ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee want ICANN to force Amazon back to the negotiating table, to give them more power over the TLD after it launches.
But the NTIA rep on the GAC indicated at the weekend that the US would block any GAC calls for .amazon to be delayed any longer.
As I type these words, the GAC is debating precisely what it should say to ICANN regarding .amazon in its Montreal communique, using competing draft texts submitted by the US and European Commission, and it’s not looking great for ACTO.
As I blogged earlier in the week, another NTIA official, former GAC rep Ashley Heineman, has accepted a job at GoDaddy.
UPDATE: As a commenter points out, Redl last year criticized the revolving door between ICANN and the domain name industry, shortly after Akram Atallah joined Donuts.

1 Comment Tagged: .amazon, acto, amazon, dot-brands, gac, geographic, ICANN, icann 66, montreal, trademarks

Neustar’s .co contract up for grabs

Colombia is looking for a registry operator for its .co ccTLD.
If you’re interested, and you’re reading this before noon on Wednesday November 6 and you’re at ICANN 66 in Montreal, hightail it to room 514A for a presentation from the Colombian government that will be more informative than this blog post.
Hurry! Come on! Move it!
The Ministry of Information Technology and Communications (MinTIC) has published a set of documents describing some of the plan to find a potentially new home for .co.
There doesn’t appear to be a formal RFP yet, but I gather one is imminent.
What the documents do tell us is that Neustar’s contract to run .co expires in February, and that MinTIC is looking into the possibility of a successor registry.
Currently, .co is delegated to .CO Internet, a Colombian entity that relaunched the TLD in 2010 and was acquired by Neustar for $109 million in 2014.
But under a law passed earlier this year, it appears as if MinTIC is taking over policy management for .co and may therefore seek IANA redelegation.
There’s no indication I could see that there’s a plan to reverse the policy of allowing anyone anywhere in the world to register a .co, indeed MinTIC seems quite proud of its international success.
The documents also give us the first glimpse for years into .co’s growth.
It had 2,374,430 names under management in September, after a couple of years of slowing growth. The documents state that .co had an average of 323,590 new regs per year for the first seven years, which has since declined to an average of 32,396.
.co is not the cheapest TLD out there, renewing at around $25 at the low end.

6 Comments Tagged: .co, back-end, cctlds. mintic, colombia, icann 66, montreal, neustar, redelegation, rfp

US official Heineman joins GoDaddy

Former US government official Ashley Heineman has joined the staff of GoDaddy.
Heineman was until quite recently a policy specialist at the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the US representative on ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee.
But GoDaddy confirmed to DI today that she’s now left NTIA and joined the market-leading registrar.
I don’t know what her job title is yet. One assumes it’s related to policy or legal issues.
Heineman spent 15 years at NTIA and has been the ICANN GAC rep for the US for the last few years.
She’s had a respectably hands-on role, for a GACer, including being a member of the ongoing “EPDP” cross-community working group conducting a post-GDPR review of Whois policy.
Judging by my embarrassing error at the weekend, the US is currently being represented on the GAC by the NTIA’s Vernita Harris.
I’ve also heard rumors from ICANN 66 that another former NTIA official has also recently moved into the domain name industry. I’ll blog it up just as soon as I get confirmation.

7 Comments Tagged: godaddy, ICANN, icann 65, montreal, ntia

Web.com got pwned

Web.com, which owns top 20 registrars Network Solutions and Register.com, got itself and millions of its customers hacked a few months ago.
The company disclosed last week that malicious hackers broke into its network in late August, making off with customer account information.
The attack was not discovered until October 16.
The compromised data included “name, address, phone numbers, email address and information about the services that we offer to a given account holder”, Web.com said.
“We encrypt credit card numbers and no credit card data was compromised as a result of this incident,” it added.
Customers are being told to change their password next time they log in to their services.
It’s not clear how many registrants were affected. The NetSol accreditation has over seven million domains in the gTLDs alone, while Register.com has almost 1.8 million.
Web.com said it brought on a private security firm to investigate the attack, and informed US law enforcement.

Comment Tagged: attack, hacking, network solutions, register.com, security, web.com

Surprise! ICANN throws out complaints about .org price caps

ICANN has rejected two appeals against its decision to lift price caps and introduce new anti-cybersquatting measures in the .org space.
In other news, gambling is going on in Rick’s Cafe.
NameCheap and the Electronic Frontier Foundation both filed Requests for Reconsideration with ICANN back in July and August concerning the .org contract renewal.
NameCheap argued that ICANN should have listened to the deluge of public comments complaining about the removal of price caps in Public Interest Registry’s .org contract, while EFF complained about the inclusion of the Uniform Rapid Suspension rights protection mechanism.
Reconsideration requests are usually handled by the Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee but this time around three of its four members (Sarah Deutsch, Nigel Roberts, and Becky Burr) decided to recuse themselves due to the possibility of perception of conflicts of interest.
That meant the committee couldn’t reach a quorum and the RfRs went to ICANN’s outside lawyers for review instead, before heading to the full ICANN board.
This hasn’t happened before, to my recollection.
Also unprecedented, the board’s full discussion of both requests was webcast live (and archived here), which negates the need for NameCheap or the EFF to demand recordings, which is their right under the bylaws.
But the upshot is basically the same as if the BAMC had considered the requests in private — both were denied in a unanimous (with the three recusals) vote.
Briefing the board yesterday, ICANN associate general counsel Elizabeth Le said:

There was no evidence to support that ICANN Org ignored public consultation. Indeed both renewals went out for public comments and there were over 3,700 comments received, all of which ICANN reviewed and evaluated and it was discussed in not only the report of public comments, but it was discussed through extensive briefings with the ICANN board…
Ultimately, the fact that the removal of the price caps was part of the Registry Agreements does not render the public comment process a sham or that ICANN failed to act in the public benefit or that ICANN Org ignored material information.

General counsel John Jeffrey and director Avri Doria both noted that the board may not have looked at each individual comment, but rather grouped together based on similarity. Doria said:

Whether one listens to the content once or listens to it 3,000 times, they have understood the same content. And so I really just wanted to emphasize the point that it’s not the number of comments, it’s the content of the comments.

This seems to prove the point I made back in April, when this controversy first emerged, that letter-writing campaigns don’t work on ICANN.
As if to add insult to injury, the board at the same meeting yesterday approved paying an annual bonus to the ICANN Ombudsman, who attracted criticism from NameCheap and the Internet Commerce Association after dismissing many of the public comments as “more akin to spam”.

7 Comments Tagged: .org, bamc, ICANN, icann 66, montreal, pir, price caps, pricing, public interest registry, rfr