[CPWG] A white knight on the horizon for .ORG?

[Evan Leibovitch]

On Sun, 12 Jan 2020 at 20:40, David Mackey <mackey361 at gmail.com> wrote:


> "If we can keep our discussion on track, we will get to a result more
> quickly." Your wording seems a bit oblique.
>
> Are you suggesting that discussions around phrases like "End users
> benefit from a long-term commitment to the open and noncommercial
> internet" are off track?
>

Actually, in ICANN's narrow context, it might well be interpreted that way.

ICANN's mandate is about trust, stability and security of the DNS,
everything it does supposedly stems from that. It's not within ICANN's
remit to make value judgments on the inherent value of anything being open
and non-commercial. Yes, that means plenty to *us*, but when confronted
with that demand ICANN can just ignore it as out of scope. Its history of
extreme risk-aversion make it easy for ICANN's board to take advice from
its legal counsel that may silently override any emotional or ethical
arguments.

But that does not mean we have nothing to say, it's just how we say it.

ICANN's interest in the public good for its own sake is hard to come by. So
IMO our job, should we choose to accept it, is to paint the ISOC
abandonment of .ORG as an issue of stability, trust and security, so it's
directly in scope. Something that was assumed to be stable no longer is, an
assumed endowment of a rare resource is now being treated as a commodity,
and the secrecy of the transaction gives rise to potentially more
instability, especially if new owners prices or policies push registrants
away en-masse to other TLDs.

ICANN knows (or at least suspects) that if it derails the sale to Ethos
it's going to get sued, by insiders who know how ICANN works and how best
to threaten it. The case needs to be made that

- - Lawsuits on not, letting the re-delegation to Ethos goes through
contravenes
either ICANN's mission or commitments made when .ORG was given to ISOC
- - The lawsuits and government interventions to come by letting the sale
go through, that threaten ICANN itself, may exceed the danger of Ethos'
lawsuits if it blocks.


- Evan
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