[CPWG] PIR sale…

[Bill Woodcock]

> On Jan 3, 2020, at 7:17 PM, Jonathan Zuck wrote:
> 
> To be clear, I haven't "figured out" anything. Here's what I see:
> 
>   1.  #SaveDotOrg is in active recruitment mode. Thanks to Evan, I was introduced to them so that I could better understand their positions and perhaps gain their feedback on any advice we might deliver to the board.
>   2.  EFF is one of the founding members of #SaveDotOrg
>   3.  EFF is made up primarily of lawyers who take folks to court to protect our civil liberties. They are very good and generally very process oriented.
>   4.  The NRO is regarded as an organization free of conflicts when it comes to domain name policy. They are who I would recruit.
>   5.  The interesting wording in their letter "We have therefore agreed to issue an Inspection Request to ICANN..."
>   6.  ​Kevin Murphy seems to be suspecting something similar when he says "makes me wonder (aloud, it seems) whether the ASO had received any nudges from other members of the EC before filing the request."
> 
> I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong with it but I'm always interested in the genesis of such a, as Alan put it, "historic action." Make sense?


Sorry to be chiming in late, but just in case this was still a mystery for anyone…  No, the EFF wasn’t involved with the NRO’s letter, it was Amy Sample Ward, of NTEN, who called the EC action into being:

> From: Amy Sample Ward <amy at nten.org>
> Subject: [ECAdmin] Request for Emergency Relief
> Date: 3 December 2019 at 12:15:42 AM AST
> To: ECAdmin at icann.org, krista.papac at icann.org
> 
> Dear Krista Papac,
> ICANN Complaints
> 
> Dear Stephen Deerhake, Keith Drazek, Maureen
>  Hilyard, Manal Ismail,
> 
> Empowered Community Administration
> We call for an immediate freeze on any Board of Staff action pertaining to the .ORG Registry Agreement pending a full and thorough investigation of the following complaints:
> 
> 	• Whether any current or former ICANN Staff or Board Members engaged in corrupt or inappropriate behaviour vis-a-vis the .ORG registry agreement renegotiation and subsequent sale.
> 
> 	• Whether ISOC breached the terms of the agreement on which it was awarded .ORG in 2002 when it sold the .ORG domain. See: https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2002-10-14-en

…etc.

It came out of the blue, the EC weren’t expecting it, they discussed it, and the NRO was seen as the one of the five that was most neutral and most able to execute in a nonpartisan way.

At the time, I was still pro-sale, because I was giving everyone involved the benefit of the doubt and assuming that they were talking about a reasonable deal. I guess the fact that they were behaving like teenagers at an auction with someone else’s credit card broke on December 1, but it took me a couple more days to run the numbers and see just how far out of whack they were.

                                -Bill

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