Debate over .Org Sale Rolls on at ICANN Virtual Forum

Questions about ICANN's role in vetting the Public Interest Registry's sale to private equity firm Ethos Capital and how public interest commitments for .org should be enforced predominated Monday at ICANN's first entirely virtual public forum. ICANN board members were in listening-mode only as they try to decide whether to approve PIR's sale by the Internet Society. They were pressed for more detail about how they plan to settle the controversial issue. The March 7-12 meeting was scheduled to be in Cancun, Mexico, but is taking place remotely due to the coronavirus (See 2002270028).

ICANN's role derives from its authority under the .org registry agreement, said General Counsel John Jeffrey. It may evaluate only such factors as who controls Ethos, whether the firm meets ICANN registry operator criteria, and whether it has the financial and technical ability to manage .org, he said. ICANN also is working with the California attorney general on the transfer of PIR from a nonprofit to a for-profit organization. ICANN's decision, originally due 30 days after the deal was announced in November, has now been postponed to March 20. Jeffrey said more time is needed for the state's input.

The limited scope of ICANN's evaluation raised some hackles. Stakeholders aren't asking about the details of the transaction itself but for ICANN to concretely identify the criteria and process by which it will assess it, said John Curran, CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers.

Another sore point was the accountability commitment package Ethos floated last month (see 2002210017). Electronic Frontier Foundation representatives criticized the public interest commitments (PICs), saying they're inadequate to safeguard the rights of .org registrants and nonprofits because they aren't substantive. At-Large Advisory Committee Vice Chair Jonathan Zuck cited "broad pessimism" about the success of PICs in the past and sought changes to that process. There are substantive and procedural ways PIR and Ethos could create legally binding commitments to be enforced by the ICANN community, but we aren't seeing them, said Domain Name Rights Coalition President Kathy Kleiman, a former PIR policy director.

Sweeping structural changes to PICs are unlikely, said Internet Governance Project co-founder Milton Mueller, of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy. He said the comparison shouldn't be between what Ethos is doing with its PICs and some "fictional utopia" of nonprofits, but between how the registry looks post-sale compared with how it was before. EFF Senior Staff Attorney Mitch Stoltz said even if PIR's contractual obligations remain, the new owners' incentives will differ because they will have to recoup the $1.1 billion handed over by Ethos investors.