Four Months, $1bn... and ICANN Still Hasn't Decided Whether to Approve .Org Sale with 11 Days to Go

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In 11 days, DNS overseer ICANN is supposed to rule on the $1.13bn purchase of a critical piece of the internet - the .org registry with its 10 million domain names. But ICANN has yet to even decide what criteria it will use decide whether to green-light the takeover.

Despite two previous postponements, four months' notice, dozens of letters, and a protest outside its headquarters, on Monday this week ICANN refused to say whether it will consider the broader public interest in its decision, or apply the same criteria it used last time the registry changed ownership.

It even refused to say whether it considered the use of so-called "public interest commitments" (PICs) - a format that ICANN had itself devised - would be legally sufficient to address concerns from the non-profit community that the sale of the registry from non-profit Internet Society to an unknown private-equity firm would undermine decades of investment in their .org addresses.

ICANN and its community were supposed to be meeting in person this week in Cancun, Mexico, but the Covid-19 coronavirus forced it to hold the conference virtually. The result was an hour-long Zoom call of frustration as representative after representative raised concerns about the deal and were met with a variation on "thank you for your input, next!"

At one point, after ICANN refused to answer a question about whether any commitments on the future of .org could be subsequently changed without input from .org owners, the virtual chatroom was flooded with people demanding a response from the organization supposedly in charge. They didn't get one.

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