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ICANN delays .org selloff after California’s attorney general intervenes
- rshnotsecure 7y agoEthos Capital is clearly a front company. There is widespread agreement on this. I disagree with the other commenters on who is behind the front company. One is saying Putin, but Russia is very cash conscious and this is not their style. I could be wrong but typically the Chinese have gone for the major overseas buyouts. What is clear is that even if they succeed in buying the fallout will come soon. Maybe a year, maybe two, but it will be an easy win espionage investigation that is sure to net at least a few American citizens. The last time this happened was in 2016 so more frequent than one would think.
- Hnrobert42 7y agoWhat you are saying is interesting but unclear. Can you point to any reputable news sources? Also, I don’t understand the “easy win” netting American citizens.
- eganist 7y ago> Ethos Capital is clearly a front company. There is widespread agreement on this. Can you please cite a few reputable sources for this claim?
- rocqua 7y agoI recall previous HN posts which found likely ties between Ethos capital and some members of the ISOC board. Where it was suggested they were selling the .org domain to themselves.
- nikitaga 7y agoSome of the public information is summarized and sourced in Wikipedia: > Ethos Capital was founded by Erik Brooks. Brooks is a former Managing Partner of another private equity firm Abry Partners. During his tenure at Abry, in September 2018, the company acquired Donuts, a domain name registrar with a wide portfolio of new gTLDs. In October 2018 former ICANN President of Global Domains Akram Atallah joined Donuts as CEO, while in December 2018 Donuts co-founder Jon Nevett joined Public Interest Registry as CEO. > Other former ICANN staff members are involved in Ethos Capital itself. Former CEO Fadi Chehadé serves as an advisor, and former Senior Vice President, Development and Public Responsibility Programs Nora Abusitta-Ouri serves as Chief Purpose Officer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethos_Capital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethos_Capital But the whole deal is designed to be as opaque as possible – as explained in TFA we have no idea who will really control the .org when it's done. What we do know is that ICANN management desperately wants those specific people to be in control of and profit from .org for some reason, otherwise they would have gone about this deal very differently. You know, like at least having a bidding process.
- CalRobert 7y agoDonuts is beyond shady. They literally demand protection money https://donuts.domains/what-we-do/brand-protection https://donuts.domains/what-we-do/brand-protection (Basically you pay to block OTHERS from registering domains instead of registering it yourself). At the creation of DPML it was assumed they could hose every major brand with this by threatening someone would register "bigbrand.dumbTld" and put porn up.
- rshnotsecure 7y agoFront companies are a well established method of operation certainly in spycraft (see the latest Crypto AG revelations), but also in internet hosting. For example, Google requires their employees at certain data centers to only wear the badges of / pretend to be COPT employees [1]. Additionally, the Wikileaks AWS Atlas [2] showed show how yet another major company does this. I realize these are cloud data centers, but the similarity between them and hosting registrars, in terms of "internet power", is very complementary. [1] - https://www.copt.com/ https://www.copt.com/ [2] - https://wikileaks.org/amazon-atlas/ https://wikileaks.org/amazon-atlas/
- notechback 7y agoWhat do the Chinese want with a .com domain? Occam's razor: is it spycraft with a front company or a good old capitalist scheme for own profit?
- kf 7y agoA good old capitalist scheme for profit that's also compromised by nation state spycraft!
- tal8d 7y agoHow 'bout a little bit of both? Imagine the past year of US corporate simpering in regard to Chinese interests - but across the entire .com domain. Everyone better make sure they're using the CCP approved South China Sea maps, yes - it would get that silly.
- TedDoesntTalk 7y agoEthos Capital is backed by Putin.
- surge 7y agoI can't see any way selling .org from a non-profit to a commercial entity who is profit motivated makes sense at all. In online debates a decade or more ago, I remember people, including myself, used to defend American control of the domain system by pointing out the altruistic and independent nature of the ICANN and their history of being good stewards of the DNS infrastructure thus far. That seems to no longer be the case. This whole deal calls into serious question their current integrity.
- koolba 7y ago> I can't see any way selling .org from a non-profit to a commercial entity who is profit motivated makes sense at all. It’s not about making sense. It’s about making dollars.
- DeathArrow 7y ago>It’s not about making sense. It’s about making dollars. Now it started making sense!
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoYou may note that ICANN only really got into these sorts of games after gaining independence from the US government...
- echelon 7y agoWhy did we let the ICANN go? Could we take it back? Wasn't Verisign a problem before ICANN became a non-government entity?
- wavesquid 7y agoBecause other governments found it unfair that one country (the US) could control the global namespace.
- notyourwork 7y ago
- misrab 7y agoWe need the Ethereum Naming System (ENS) as soon as possible. Domain names will be one of the first major applications of global consensus algorithms. https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/
- josefx 7y agoYou are aware that your link itself spells out that they aren't finished and still use a root cert with seven owners? There are likely more people involved in the decision making process at ICANN. But, yeah, lets migrate our critical infrastructure to some in progress project "as soon as possible". I mean it has electrolytes^W block-chain in it, that is what plants^W security experts crave, right?
- knolax 7y agoWild how organizations like ICANN that are supposedly international are in practice wholely within the jurisdiction of some regional government. Not even the Federal government, they're being stopped by the state of California!
- DeathArrow 7y agoI wonder why organizations like ICANN that are supposedly international are hurrying to sell .org tld to some private firm with very opaque ownership. And why that process of selling isn't transparent, why they didn't do any bidding before of selling?
- DeathArrow 7y agoAm I the only one who believes .tld model is broken? ICANN and IANA overseeing all .tld creation, the current pollution with thousands of .ltds, being just two problems. Maybe even the .tld model is too old to help identify hosts. In the beginning of Internet com, edu, gov, mil, org were enough to group hosts. But now, that we have zillions of hosts, .tld might not be enough. If IPv6 is a response to IPv4 limits, maybe we need something better than .tld, too.
- markovbot 7y agoWhat are your concerns about TLD "pollution"? opening up TLDs for sale seems like a (somewhat) logical way to expand the available namespace for domains. We have zillions of hosts, why require them to conform to one of a few random categories. Certainly, I have issues with how TLDs are allocated and controlled, but that doesn't mean that the general idea of allowing essentially arbitrary top level domains the same the way we do with second level domains is inherently a bad thing.
- ender341341 7y agoThe main issue is that it breaks expectations. Someone missing a space after a period now potentially typed in a syntactically valid URL (I see this pretty commonly in texts where the messaging app decides its a link), it breaks the UX of searching in browsers URL/Omni-bar and now you have to include a question mark for lots of cases where you haven't for multiple decades.
- labawi 7y agoIt ossifies the namespace. As in, you can't have a name that is both reasonable and can coexist with the current DNS model. Any of .onion, .bit, .coin, .eth, .crypto, .zil, can expect the .dev treatment, or, in time there won't be many nice available one for future developments. Similar issue might be with things like .ipfs, which don't resolve in the usual sense, but could cause confusion if there was an ICANN .ipfs domain. Some domain trader will come and say those aren't "real" names, and you are supposed to rent them from ICANN, but that seems like a protection racket.
- DeathArrow 7y agoCan't we come up with a simple, good technical solution to identify hosts? Something that is scalable, is easy to use from a technical perspective and also easy to use by humans? The biggest thing to solve is that meaningful dictionary words are few and many people fight over them. But the current solution to that means thousands upon thousands of tlds, which nobody cares of, are hard to remember. Most people still fight over .com domains and prices got to insane levels. To have the chance to use a decent .com name for your business, you have to first buy another tld, work for a few years, pile up some millions of USD and get it from the domain hoarders. Having a .com domain with a name relevant to your business is still perceived as a big advantage.
- clarry 7y ago> Can't we come up with a simple, good technical solution to identify hosts? We can, but every single solution is a set of trade-offs and even geeks will never agree on what's the right set of trade-offs. If the people who could give the tech widespread support don't agree, how is there ever any hope of rolling it out? The only way I see to shatter the status quo is if big companies decide to push ahead with whatever they came up with and the rest of the world just has to follow. QUIC is a bit like that, I think. Only problem is I don't there being big incentive for big companies to overthrow the system. It works well enough? Of course, I would love to throw away DNS and start using a system where I can be John Smith and you can be John Smith and I can pass your fingerprint to my friend John Smith so that they won't accidentally connect to John Smith the rich prince from Nigeria. I think one global namespace is a dumb idea.
- organsnyder 7y ago> Something that is scalable, is easy to use from a technical perspective and also easy to use by humans? That's exactly what we have right now. This is a business/culture/government/economics problem—not a technical one. As long as the end goal of the system is "type in a string of text on any computer connected to the internet, and get the same result[1]", we're going to have issues like this. When I got my first domain name, the cost was $100 for two years (and $50/year thereafter). At that price, no one thought of squatting on any but the most lucrative domain names—certainly not mass-registering thousands of domains and holding on to them for years. I don't want to go back to those prices, but those are the sorts of parameters that impact the domain name market. [1] Yes, there non-public zones, geo-routing, etc. But as long as we define "result" as "exactly what the organization controlling that substring wants you to get" I think it works.
- uasm 7y agoThe "Chief Purpose Officer" at Ethos is working hard these days to keep us all well informed - http://www.circleid.com/pp/dot-org-sale http://www.circleid.com/pp/dot-org-sale
- _0ffh 7y agoI wonder if the name is a reflection of the PR strategy to claim special merit on exactly the point where you're actually most lacking.
- nikanj 7y agoDelays, not cancels. Alas, the attackers have a lot to gain, so they'll keep mounting the attacks. And the defenders have very little -personal- reason to fight back.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- blablabla123 7y agoThat's really stupid, maybe this will push alternatives like namecoin...
- rattray 7y agoThe letter from the AG is here: https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/correspondence/becerra-to-botterman-marby-15apr20-en.pdf https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/correspondence/becerra... It opens with this: My office has “responsibility for supervising charitable trusts in California, for ensuring compliance with trusts and articles of incorporation, and for protection of assets held by charitable trusts and public benefit corporations…” (Gov. Code, § 12598.) My office is tasked with the authority to “investigate transactions and relationships of corporations and trustees…for the purpose of ascertaining whether or not the purposes of the corporation or trust are being carried out in accordance with the terms and provisions of the articles of incorporation or other instrument.” (Gov. Code, § 12588). To that end, my office conducted an investigation of ICANN and its role in approving the transfer of the .ORG Registry Agreement from the Public Interest Registry (“PIR”) (the supporting organization to the Internet Society (“ISOC”)) to Ethos Capital... and yes, ICANN is based in California, so it seems they could possibly have their charter revoked if they sell and the AG comes after them (IANAL).
- zelon88 7y agoIs this deal something the SEC can throw the book at? I mean it's quite obvious that this is an inside deal with front companies to gut a public non-profit just less than 4 years after ICANN stopped being supervised by the Department of Commerce. How is this legal and why isn't it being criminally investigated?
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoCorruption, in USA? That's entirely legal for rich people and endorsed by congress I thought. smh
- type0 7y agoNow it's time to change the name to Pathos Capital