Warren, Wyden formally ask ICANN to reject sale. Elizabeth Warren is one of the lawmakers asking ICANN to reject the .org sale. Photo from ElizabethWarren.com. Six U.S. lawmakers have asked (pdf) ICANN to reject the sale of .Org to Ethos Capital, a private equity company. The lawmakers include presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, Rony Wyden, Richard […]
Pricing and investment arguments are wrong. Ethos Capital and Internet Society are working overtime to spin the deal to sell .org for $1.35 billion as a good thing. There are certainly some good things about it, but I cringe when I read certain talking points. One is around pricing. Yesterday, from ISOC board member Mike […]
ICANN made it possible for this transaction to happen. There’s only so much the internet community can do now. It has been two months since Internet Society (ISOC) announced that it was selling Public Interest Registry (PIR), which runs .org, to private equity company Ethos Capital. There have been many revelations since then, including that […]
No-brainer case reveals purchase price of Lotto.com. A German lottery operator has failed to take the domain name Lotto.com from another lottery operator through the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). Bremer Toto und Lotto GmbH filed the dispute in October. Even without reviewing the case details, it was obvious that this case was […]
Verisign will put $20 million in the kitty in return for multi-billion dollar windfall. Last year I made a prediction in my annual predictions podcast: ICANN would let Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) raise prices on .com, but Verisign would pay it extra money for the right to do so. That’s the crux of a proposed agreement […]
FMA, once one of the domain industry’s most revered domain investors, sues its former attorneys. For years, Future Media Architects was known in the domain name industry for owning a portfolio of high-quality domain names—and for never selling them. People knew the company’s founder, Thunayan Al-Ghanim, as Elequa. He was somewhat of a mystery man, […]
A case of domain name envy? The owner of Curated.io says Curated.com (pictured) is infringing its trademarks and cybersquatting. A company that does business at Curated.io has sued (pdf) Deal.com, which uses the domain Curated.com. It claims that the latter is infringing its trademarks and cybersquatting. Among its demands: that Curated.com be transferred to it. […]
Desktop will make it easier for companies to manage web apps. If you’re like me, you manage a lot of web apps. A CRM system. Email. Trello. Smartsheet. Zapier. And that’s just for me as a an individual. Imagine running a business in which you need to correctly provision access to apps to your employees […]
Constituency addresses pricing and censorship issues. The Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group (NCSG) has sent a letter to ICANN, asking it to make three changes to the .org registry contract if it is to be sold to Ethos Capital. The group points out that the contract to be the steward of .org was awarded to Internet Society […]
Other companies should now circle .org, and GoDaddy is one of them. There’s a lot of consternation about Ethos Capital’s proposed takeover of the .org registry. It will move from a non-profit entity that’s out to help organizations to one that is profit-motivated. It’s also clouded by the involvement of former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé […]
