Sat, Jan 11, 2020 page10

• Nonprofit leaders fighting deal to sell control of .org

  • Reuters, SAN FRANCISCO
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  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.
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