A group of prominent Internet pioneers is mobilizing to block the US$1.1 billion sale of control of the .org Internet domain, arguing that the takeover by a newly formed private company would hurt the millions of nonprofits that rely on it.
Registrations for Web sites ending in .org have long been overseen by the US nonprofit Internet Society via the Public Interest Registry (PIR).
In November last year, the society unexpectedly announced that it was selling control to a year-old company called Ethos Capital. The firm counts a former head of Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet’s governing authority, as one of its advisers.
In a move to press US-based ICANN to block the sale, prominent Internet executives said that they have created a nonprofit cooperative they are offering as an alternative owner.
“There needs to be a place on the Internet that represents the public interest, where educational sites, humanitarian sites and organizations like Wikipedia can provide a broader public benefit,” said Wikimedia Foundation chief executive Katherine Maher, who has signed on to be a director of the new nonprofit.
Crowd-sourced research tool Wikipedia is the most visited of the 10 million .org sites registered worldwide.
“The Internet Society’s central focus is not on domain name operations,” the society said in a statement on Tuesday. “We need to focus on the goals we have — to make the Internet available to the people who don’t have it, and to make sure the Internet is defended against its attackers.”
It has previously said that Ethos Capital would keep the same management team, consult with nonprofits and offer more services.
Hundreds of nonprofits have already objected to the transaction, worried that Ethos would raise registration and renewal prices, cut back on infrastructure and security spending, or make deals to sell sensitive data, or allow censorship or surveillance.
A statement provided by a spokesperson for PIR, the society and Ethos Capital said that the groups had committed “to maintaining PIR’s historical practices on .org pricing to ensure affordability, as well as to preserving the strong policies PIR already has in place to protect freedom of expression and safeguard against censorship.”
Some said they see ICANN’s response to the deal as a critical test of its sole authority over a rapidly expanding domain-name system already dominated by private industry and subject to government pressures.
“What offended me about the Ethos Capital deal and the way it unfolded is that it seems to have completely betrayed this concept of stewardship,” said Andrew McLaughlin, who oversaw the transfer of Internet governance from the US Department of Commerce to ICANN which completed in 2016.
Maher and others said the idea of the new cooperative is not to offer a competing financial bid for .org, which brings in about US$100 million in revenue from domain sales. Instead, they hope that the unusual new entity, formally a California Consumer Cooperative Corp, can manage the domain for security and stability, and make sure it does not become a tool for censorship.
Advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which previously organized a protest over the .org sale that drew in organizations such as the YMCA, Greenpeace and Consumer Reports, is also supporting the cooperative.
“It’s highly inappropriate for it to be turned over to a commercial venture at all, much less one that’s going to need to recover US$1 billion,” EFF executive director Cindy Cohn said.
The initial seven directors of the cooperative include ICANN founding president Michael Roberts, MacArthur Foundation philanthropist Jeff Ubois and Bill Woodcock, whose Packet Clearing House runs technical aspects of the .org system under contract.
The new group has briefed members of the US Congress and hopes to prompt the society to reconsider the sale, but its best shot at stopping the pending sale lies with ICANN, which can veto any change in ownership out of concern for the security, reliability or stability of the .org domain.
ICANN has 30 days from Dec. 30 last year to approve the Ethos Capital sale, reject it or ask more questions, ICANN senior vice president Cyrus Namazi said.
ICANN has not solicited public input on the deal, but would consult with its board before making a final decision, he said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained