ICANN Board Chair Maarten Botterman sent a letter to Gonzalo Camarillo, chair of the ISOC Board of Trustees. The ICANN Board asks to answer questions regarding the sale of the Public Interest Registry (PIR), which manages the .ORG gLTD, according to Domain Name Wire. It was previously reported that last fall ISOC, which controls PIR, had agreed to sell the registry to a private company, Ethos Capital, for $1.13 billion. This news raised deep concerns in most different communities, from regular registrants and public organizations, which consider .ORG their “house” domain, to the California Attorney General, who asked to see the material on the deal.
The main concern is that PIC becoming a commercial company instead of a non-commercial organization will result in a price increase in the domain zone. Maarten Botterman writes that back in 2002 when PIR was entrusted with running .ORG, ISOC made commitments to the Internet community on how it would differentiate and uphold the unique purpose of the .ORG TLD. The deal raises a question: will these interests be taken into account in the future and who will guarantee them?
The letter asks 18 questions in total, including whether ISOC had any discussions with Ethos Capital prior to receiving a written proposal from Ethos Capital in September 2019. This is quite an acute question, because last summer ICANN and PIR prolonged the .ORG management contract on new conditions. The lifting of the previous bans on price hiking was the key change in the new agreement. In this context, many people regard this step as “pre-sale preparations.” This does not sound too much like a conspiracy theory if we recall that several former ICANN top managers are directly related to Ethos Capital.
Observers regard the ICANN Board’s step as useful and reasonable, but note that it should have taken it much earlier before the California AG got interested in the matter.
