ICANN Delays .ORG Sale Approval

I can&#x27;t tell if ICANN is trying to publicly clear their own name of any wrongdoing, or if all the added attention has woken them up to how seriously flawed this whole ordeal was (which either by policy or procedure they managed to miss) or both. None of those answers are satisfying. Here&#x27;s hoping they do the right thing and kill the sale... but even then, I&#x27;d be concerned they&#x27;d restructure the deal and try again.<p>I thought ICANN was supposed to be the good guys? You know, the responsible managers of the Internet and providing solid governance which serves as the best argument against any kind of government intrusion? I&#x27;m hoping they didn&#x27;t just grow bored with it and decide to get rid of it. As though it was some sort of dearly loved Google service with mild profitability and little-to-no opportunity for internal career development. ;)

If ISOC hadn&#x27;t removed the .org price restrictions, I feel like this could have been defensible. Farm out the management but hold the new stewards under a strict leash, fine. (Of course it wouldn&#x27;t have gone for $1B+ in that case.) But coupling it with the unrestricted price increases is just indefensibly corrupt and hopefully illegal given that ISOC was never intended to profit from .org in the first place.

The people behind this deal are ICANN insiders who know the rules intimately; in some cases they may have written the rules. It&#x27;s hard to imagine that ICANN won&#x27;t approve the deal.

The only sane outcome is clawing back .org from PIR, regardless of what they intend to do with it now. They&#x27;ve shown themselves to be bad stewards that view it as purely monetizable asset.<p>I doubt the will would be there even if it were legal. But one can dream.

This continuing privatization of public goods is unconscionable and the leadership of ICANN should be held to account.

&quot;Public announcements by PIR, ISOC and Ethos Capital contain relevant facts that were not required in the request for approval.&quot;<p>What facts?<p>Why were those facts not required?<p>Sounds like under the system in place there is little due diligence expected to be done by ICANN before a decision is made -- none of these public facts were &quot;required&quot;, let alone anything non-public.<p>At least we know someone is reading the public announcements.

The `.or` tld isn&#x27;t taken.<p>1. Create a non-profit to buy `.or` as a new gTLD. Legally carter it so that the stakeholders are distributed and it can never be taken private.<p>2. Pre-reserve `.or` domains for all existing `.org` domains.<p>Optional:<p>3. Give free lifetime registration to any org stakeholder that redirects their domain to the `.or` version and&#x2F;or displays a banner about PIR&#x27;s malfeasance.<p>4. Any new `.org` registrants are barred from registering a `.or`<p>5. Buy back `.org` when it becomes worthless and give it back to the stakeholders.

Their site supports public comments and, for all the noise, I see all of three comments up there right now. Go comment.

<i>&quot;On 14 November 2019, PIR formally notified ICANN of the proposed transaction. Under the .ORG Registry Agreement, PIR must obtain ICANN’s prior approval before any transaction that would result in a change of control of the registry operator. Typically, similar requests to ICANN are confidential; we asked PIR for permission to publish the notification and they declined our request.&quot;</i><p>Unbelievable. The brazenness of this heist continues out in the open.

For someone who isn&#x27;t super familiar with the details, on a scale of 0 to IOC&#x2F;FIFA, how corrupt is ICANN?

Has anyone looked at PIR&#x27;s 990 Forms and has knowledge of business operations in the sector. It looks like from their expense sheet PIR contracts all of the actual management of the their TLDs to Afilias. What is the breakdown of responsibility here? What does PIR actually do?

I really hope this isn&#x27;t too little too late. The sale should be stopped.

ICANN is just trying to calm down the riot. This won&#x27;t end well until there&#x27;s some formal investigation from the US government.

This might be the 3rd-worlder in me talking, but I kinda want the sale to happen so a better DNS system can rise from its ashes.

Anybody know of large .org sites that reconsidered or perhaps already have changed their URL(s)?<p>I do hear from contacts .org are more often not renewed when prompted for yearly fee, I did not either for my shelved .org domains.

Its cool that my $13 domain is now worth &gt;$750.

We should have a peer-to-peer DNS driven by some consensus system like blockchain. Why do we allow critical pieces of internet infrastructure to be centralized?