[CPWG] Calif. AG mentions ALAC advice in note to ICANN re: PIR

[John McCormac]

On 08/05/2020 20:26, Jonathan Zuck wrote:
> As for due diligence, you know quite well that I DID contact several 
> commenters/organizers to see how we might work together to achieve 
> consensus and the vitriol began very early. I ALSO know, as you do, that 
> the whole movement was begun by the domainers and carried their 
> imprimatur for quite some time. There was a HUGE campaign to get 

Really? With only 2.4% of .ORG on auction/sale sites it was those nasty 
domainers who mobilised everyone against the deal?

To put this in perspective, domainers concentrate on .COM because that's 
where the main money is and the main demand. The .ORG is not a big 
market for most domainers but they do form a convenient scapegoat. Some 
of the true believers consider that domainers are keeping all the good 
domain names for themselves in the gTLDs when the reality is that most 
of the domain names are not used and the registrars park them on PPC 
landing pages to monetise them. Those domain names may be used for 
e-mail or brand protection. The reality is that someone else registered 
the domain name first.

> non-profits involved but it didn’t start there. It began with Chicken 
> Little emails about the end of the world, coming from the only community 
> that REALLY has price sensitivity. In fact, you were one of the 

And it turned out that part of the deal involved lumbering PIR with 
hundreds of millions of Dollars of debt so that Ethos and co could take 
over the registry. As for "price sensitivity", every registrant in .ORG 
would end up paying more for the honour of having Ethos take over .ORG. 
Those hundreds of millions of Dollars of debt would have had to have 
been paid and the the people who would pay it would be the registrants. 
Not the lobbyists or the ICANN bubble dwellers to whom such matters are 
largely theoretical but the non-profits and the people who built 
websites about their kid's soccer or baseball team on .ORG because it 
wasn't like .COM. Those people trying to raise money for a good cause 
would have some of that money scalped to pay back those hundreds of 
millions of Dollars of debt. And some domainers might have to pay a 
little bit more for their registrations.

Outside the USA, the .ORG has recognition but it is a non-core TLD in 
that it does not have a major part of any country's domain name market. 
With most countries with an well run ccTLD, the bulk of new 
registrations are in the ccTLD. Most of the rest are in .COM. The 
.NET/ORG/BIZ/INFO new registrations are quite low. In terms of domain 
name footprints, the .ccTLD/.COM share of many country level markets is 
around 80%. The .ORG is stuck in that 20% competing with the other 
non-core gTLD (the other legacy gTLDs), the new gTLDs and adjacent 
market ccTLDs.

The optics on the Ethos deal were bad. No amount of turd polishing was 
going to make them seem good. There was an inevitablility about the CA 
AG's intervention and ICANN and Ethos have nobody but themselves to 
blame for this. It doesn't matter how many people on the list defended 
the deal or how many opposed the deal. Once the deal attracted the 
notice of US politicians in a presidential election year, it was dead.

The new gTLDs have not fared well and some of those gTLDs have been 
taken over without any objections. They are different from .ORG in that 
many of them have failed meet the predictions of the astrologers in 
ICANN who expected over 30 million registrations in the first year of 
operation. Those purchases of new gTLDs are largely firesales and they 
avoid the new gTLD going into EBERO. But they are all different to the 
.ORG. They are unlikely to attract any governmental oversight.

Ironically, the reputation of many of the new gTLDs amongst domainers is 
rather low. It might be a bit cynical to think that it would be better, 
in the future, to pay more attention to what domainers say as domainers 
actually put their money on the line and register domain names. They've 
got skin in the game and their opinion is just as valid, if not more so, 
than the lobbyists on both sides who talk a good game but never register 
domain names. Having high-minded opinions on a mailing list (or at ICANN 
meetings) about the interests of end-users is nice but someone else 
generally ends up paying for those opinions.

Regards...jmcc
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