[CPWG] PIR/Ethos

[Bill Woodcock]

>> On Jan 21, 2020, at 12:33 PM, Nat Cohen <ncohen at telepathy.com> wrote:
>> 
>> My view is that the consensus, though not full, seems to suggest that we try to stop the sale rather than merely impose contract provisions on the new entity.

I’ve seen you say that several times, but most everyone else seems to be in agreement that this deal is not ok, and cannot be made ok by any of the non-binding “promises” that the PE folks have been talking about.  Those are, literally, just talk.  The whole point of using the coop form was to create a legal binding mechanism for the necessary protections.  If the PE folks were serious, they’d have offered up some mechanism of their own.  They haven’t.

I think the question at hand is whether we advocate for disallowing this particular back-door deal (and then have to address the same question over and over as ISOC comes back with their #2 PE offer, and their #3 PE offer, and their #4 PE offer…), or whether we advocate for disallowing back-door deals as a matter of principle, and point out instead that ICANN has a regulatory duty to the stability of the name and number system, and a regulatory duty to the public interest, and that they can only serve those duties by enacting an actual competitive, multistakeholder process for redelegation.

That gives good outcomes.

Letting people go wildly into debt in order to circumvent competition and the multistakeholder process guarantees bad outcomes.

                               -Bill

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