This is the old "announce an inquiry" ploy. This should be familiar to anyone who has watched "Yes, Minister" - or has paid any attention at all to anything eve

This is the old "announce an inquiry" ploy. This should be familiar to anyone who has watched "Yes, Minister" - or has paid any attention at all to anything ever made in public. Basically, someone "blows the whistle" and suddenly something that should have gone relatively under the radar blows up on your face. People start asking a lot of difficult questions and making a lot of noise. So what do you do? You announce a private inquiry (or, to put it in ICANN's terms "We will thoughtfully and thoroughly evaluate the proposed acquisition to ensure that the .ORG registry remains secure, reliable, and stable."). The point of the inquiry isn't to find out any new facts or correct any problems - it's to stall until this goes out of the public eye (people have short attention spans, and we are in the Holiday season which always helps with "forgetting"), to clear up their names of any wrongdoing (because they reviewed everything thoroughly and found no cause for concern) and to bury the evidence (because some of it will be "accidentally" misplaced into a shredder). In a month or so, a report will come out saying that there is some cause for concern, but that the danger is either overblown or that their hands are tied so nothing can be done due to this or that circumstance (legal, financial, etc). It will come with a stern paragraph warning that internal guidelines (you know, the ones the public can't see) must be reviewed sometime in the near future (i.e., around the year 2050) to prevent this from happening again, but it will conclude that everyone did their due diligence properly and we were all just victims of circumstances. In short, better luck next time. Why yes, people have called me a cynic, why do you ask?