Paul Mockapetris shared a link.
1 May
Strange days. ICANN (with a little help from the state of California) shows it has the public interest at heart. Now it's time for ISOC to get that the internet is more important than the ISOC? (riff here on losing your soul) Victory! ICANN Rejects .ORG Sale to Private Equity Firm Ethos Capital
EFF.ORG
In a stunning victory for nonprofits and NGOs around the world working in the public interest, ICANN today roundly rejected Ethos Capital’s plan to transform the .ORG domain registry into a heavily indebted for-profit entity. This is an important victory that recognizes the registry’s long legac...

23 You, Richard Sexton and 21 others, 74 comments
Simon Higgs If only ICANN had been around to stop ISOC hijacking draft-postel to create ICANN.
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Dave Crocker
ISOC did not create ICANN.
Simon Higgs
Yes, technically, on 9/30/1998, a minion at Jones Day, following ze orders, created ICANN by filing papers with the State of California.
But I was referring to two years earlier (11/11/1996), when you and your little band of pirates, led by ISOC’s President Don Heath, quite literally hi-jacked the process away from Jon Postel, only to be shut down by the intervention of the Department of Commerce before you did any serious damage to the internet.
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Richard Sexton
Simon Higgs Ah yes, the infamous "wrap up meeting".
Hijacked indeed.
Also, I've never understood, how Postel, a guy with a bad heart went for a solo hike in the desert then died. He could barely walk to room to room when I saw him in Geneva.
Did I get some facts wrong here?

Gio Wiederhold
Mike Godwin
I'm pretty sure my soul is around here somewhere. Oh, yeah, here it is!
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Owen DeLong
I don't know if I'd go that far... I would say that faced with no good alternative, ICANN decided it was better to succumb to the public interest in this particular case vs. court further negative attention and a more thorough investigation of their pr… See more 2
Mike Godwin replied
· 8 replies
Војислав Родић It should concern the Internet community that ICANN has shown itself to be much more susceptible to political pressure than its limited mandate would recommend.
https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2020/05/our-work-to-make-the-internet-for-everyone-ma… See more
Our Work to Make the Internet for Everyone Marches On | Internet Society
INTERNETSOCIETY.ORG
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Mike Godwin Milton's view. No real winners in dot ORG decision https://www.internetgovernance.org/.../no-real-winners.../ 4 Richard Sexton It's hard to understand what Milton is on about here.
Owen DeLong Richard Sexton Is that unusual?
Mike Roberts It is interesting that Sullivan's latest tirade goes on at length about the supposed evils of ICANN's latest version of its stewardship mission in life and then describes the lofty goals of the latest ISOC/PIR mission, but somehow never gets around to … See more 1
Susan Estrada replied 4 replies
Christian Huitema Now the question is, who was financing Fadi Chehadé, and were they purposely trying to create this mess? 3
Ole Jacobsen replied · 3 replies
Eliot Lear
EFF lost a donor over this (me). 2
Paul Mockapetris
Author
Do ISOC members care about ISOC ethics? Maybe there’s an AG that should be looking there.
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Mike Godwin replied
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29 replies:
Eliot Lear
What did the ISOC people say when you asked them about it?
Paul Mockapetris Author
Vint Cerf, Steve Crocker, and Andrew Sullivan all think it was a good idea.
Mike Godwin As it turns out, I'm an ISOC board member who does a lot of work centering on ethics. Perhaps Paul could share with me which ethics issues he believes should be of interest to an attorney general.
John Laprise
I certainly see the logic (and am persuaded by Mike Godwin's arguments). However, ISOC's introduction of the proposal rivals that of "New Coke" for gross marketing malpractice. I mean really, it's on par with Rumsfeld's "the Iraqis will welcome us as liberators." Speaking personally, I was royally PO'd because I had just finished having great conversations and sessions with ISOC representatives at ICANN66 about their continued stewardship of .org. Days later it was being sold off. That by itself alienated large chunks of the ICANN community because I was not the only one having those conversations and damaged ISOC's credibility.
Mike Godwin There are really two aspects to your comments that deserve an explanatory response, John. With regard to the first aspect: ISOC was not planning to sell .ORG/PIR, and in fact had turned down other offers to buy them. It is an outcome of ISOC's effective stewardship that .ORG/PIR were attractive to potential buyers. That said, stewardship of .ORG was never part of the mission of ISOC, and you can easily confirm that by looking at the incorporation documents of ISOC and PIR. ISOC's board and executives necessarily had fiduciary obligations to consider a sale if ISOC could reasonably believe that sale would promote ISOC's organizational missions. The notion that ISOC exists primarily (or solely, as I imagine some people believed) to maintain a kind of parasitical status quo with .ORG and PIR suggests to me that these critics have not given adequate attention to what stewardship and fiduciary obligations mean. I've written about these questions at some length elsewhere, but I don't believe "the ICANN community" is serving itself by blaming its misunderstanding of the legal relationships on ISOC. It's all right there in the documents. With regard to the second aspect: the assumption here is that ISOC had, or could have had, the kind of control of the messaging about the transaction that would allow post-mortem conclusions that we were guilty of "gross marketing malpractice." ISOC did not have anything like that degree of control, so your argument here is akin to blaming the emergency-room physician for the automobile accident that brought the victims into the ER. That said, we took pains to publicize what we could about the transaction as soon as we could, in advance of IETF and IGF--even though the transaction had not been completely finalized--because we thought it was important that the communities hear the news as soon as possible. I changed travel plans to attend IGF (right after IETF) just to be able to answer what questions I could about the transaction, and other board and staff members made similar efforts. Does this mean I'm happy with what we did, or that I did not chafe under the constraints we had to deal with? No. I have said again and again I would have preferred a more open and transparent process, as, I think, ISOC organizationally would have preferred as well. Lacking that control, we pushed for increasing openness about the transaction over time, possibly to the detriment of the deal. I recognize that everyone else in this forum is used to having 100 percent control of all public messaging at all times, but when it comes to sales transactions of any sort, that's rarely actually the case. 2
Barry Shein I read John's "gross marketing malpractice" as not anticipating the negative reaction from some when it was announced that the buyer was a newly formed (two person staff) private investment company etc. That's what the "New Coke" analogy said to me: When Coca-Cola introduced a change in the flavor of their flagship product and it provoked such a negative public reaction that they withdrew the change entirely. How could they not have anticipated that?
So I'm not sure about the ER analogy other than to guess you read that completely differently. I suppose John could clarify.
My take is the deal was never run by someone who would be reflexively critical and might have said words like "newly formed private investment company, former ICANN CEO, full disclosure of where the funding actually came from will not be part of the announcement and will be generally answered evasively...this has 'smell test' problems." TBH it feels a lot like a very small group of like-minded people in a room basically said $1B dollars and rid of the PIR/ORG stewardship? We live off a basically cash investment portfolio, forever? Wow, how do we make this happen!?" Again, that in and of itself doesn't say it was wrong, but it projects a certain shallowness of concern with public relations and image and perhaps just a tad bit of awestruckness. 1
Richard Sexton "Mike Godwin As it turns out, I'm an ISOC board member who does a lot of work centering on ethics" That explains it. 1
Greg Shatan Barry, I expect that’s a shallower explanation than what actually happened, and I also expect that each team had their own set of thoughts (in retrospect, off-target thought) rather than a single groupthink. It would be a good “lessons learned” exercise for ISOC and PIR to dissect this, self-critique and figure out what went wrong and how.
But I think if you look at the big picture — the overall contours of the transaction and how it was perceived (rather than who exactly did or thought what), Barry’s painted the broad strokes quite accurately. 2
Mike Godwin Barry Shein, that might have projected "a certain shallowness of concern with public relations and image and perhaps just a tad bit of awestruckness" if that had been what actually happened. It was not what actually happened.
Mike Godwin Richard Sexton writes: 'That explains it.' I'm not sure what it explains. I'm just one vote. And my training doesn't answer the question of what "ethics" issues Paul has in mind that would interest an attorney general. I'm not sure Paul knows what he was thinking about.
Mike Godwin Greg Shatan writes: 'It would be a good “lessons learned” exercise for ISOC and PIR to dissect this, self-critique and figure out what went wrong and how.' I hope it doesn't undercut any investment n your existing opinions of ISOC to state that we arrived at this opinion some time ago on our own. 'But I think if you look at the big picture — the overall contours of the transaction and how it was perceived (rather than who exactly did or thought what), Barry’s painted the broad strokes quite accurately.' Except that Barry assumes that this was the only proposed transaction that was offered to us, and that we didn't turn down any offers of similar scale from other potential buyers. 1
John Curran Mike - So, if ISOC already arrived on a similar opinion regarding need for a "lessons learned" exercise, might that include resolving the fairly apparent expectation mismatch between ISOC and ICANN over .org responsibilities? i.e. is there any chance of constructive collaboration between the organizations to achieve better alignment regarding respective roles/responsibilities here? (Aside from the obvious benefits to both organizations in having better clarity, it would be of substantial to benefit to the .org community to know what is (and is not) reasonable expectations of stewardship and accountability going forward.)
Mike Godwin John Curran, it's hard to interpret ICANN's actions as an "expectation mismatch" because that assumes ICANN had thought through a framework about .ORG before ISOC considered the transaction. I don't believe there is any evidence that ICANN had any such framework in place before being intimidated into pretending to have one by the publicity campaign and by the California AG. Now, you may have the view that ICANN engaged in deeply grounded philosophical consideration of the role of .ORG stewardship before now, but if that's true, it's hard to explain why ICANN pushed for removal of .ORG price caps. Certainly ICANN's decision (within its formal rights) to decline to approve the transaction did not point to any criteria at all under which future transactions regarding .ORG stewardship or stewardship of any other major TLDs might be approved. Why should we bother pretending that ICANN is staffed and led by deep philosophers when it manifestly is not? 3
Mike Godwin In defense of ICANN, I doubt ICANN ever anticipated having to justify its actions to any great degree. It never really has had to before now.
John Curran Mike - By mismatch, I was referring to Andrew Sullivan's remark to the effect that "Now that we know that ICANN believes its remit to be much larger than we believe it is ..."
(It's never good to operate a relationship with significant mismatch in expectations, and doubly so when matters of stewardship and/or public trust are involved - hence my question of whether there's any chance of constructive collaboration to resolve same.)
https://www.keypointsabout.org/.../our-work-to-make-the...
Our Work to Make the Internet for Everyone Marches On — KeyPointsAbout.org
KEYPOINTSABOUT.ORG
John Laprise
Barry Shein Yes. I wonder how ISOC could have so catastrophically misjudged public reception. Mike, whether or not that's the way it was, it was certainly the way it was perceived by many. I know from my own interactions that it caused a major, global WTF reaction. 1
Mike Godwin John Curran writes: 'By mismatch, I was referring to Andrew Sullivan's remark to the effect that "Now that we know that ICANN believes its remit to be much larger than we believe it is ..."' Then he extemporizes more on the "mismatch of expectations" theme. But John is misunderstanding Andrew's sentence (which he helpfully truncates). ICANN only just discovered its new, broad remit. If you are trying to assert that ICANN always believed it had a broad remit to review all TLD transactions as it reviewed this one, I think you need to provide citations in support that assertion. If you are trying to assert that we had zero contact with ICANN prior to being offered this particular transaction, or had never heard of ICANN before, or had never paid attention to ICANN's history of TLD transactions until the Ethos deal came over the transom, then the issue isn't really any "mismatch of expectations." It's your transparently obvious presumption that we idiotically gave no study to ICANN's remit before last year. I'm going to maintain, John, that I'm not as stupid as I look, and that ISOC's other board members are not as stupid as I look either.
Mike Godwin John Laprise writes: "I wonder how ISOC could have so catastrophically misjudged public reception." Why do you imagine that we did not anticipate any pushback in public reception? Did you think we slept through the controversy about ICANN's removal of the .ORG price caps? It might reasonably be speculated that the prospect of ending dependence on ICANN's not-entirely-wise decisionmaking about TLDs might have been an argument for getting out of the TLD business in the course of diversifying our portfolio. I'm not saying it was, but I have alluded to ICANN's decision making in the run-up to the Ethos transaction in a number of places, notably in my Techdirt podcast about the .ORG deal. https://www.techdirt.com/.../techdirt-podcast-episode-234...

John Laprise I don't know. I do know that ISOC sprung the plan upon a global Internet community as a top down fait accompli...a global Internet community that values transparency, accountability, consultation and consensus. You tell me: did ISOC misjudge public(and community) opinion/reaction? 1
Mike Godwin John Laprise, there's what you "know" and what actually happened, and unsurprisingly there's a divergence. I think we correctly judged that there would be authentic public opinion/reaction that would be negative. What we didn't correctly judge was that Ethos, which had every incentive to be open and transparent about the transaction, would be slow to do so. In addition, we also incorrectly judged that if ICANN wanted to impose conditions (in terms of PICs or other requirements) on the transaction, it would do so. Neither Ethos nor ICANN lived up to what was expected of them, and in doing so created once-a-decade fundraising opportunities for EFF and Access Now. 1
Mike Godwin BTW, I can tell who's bothered to listen to the podcast I just posted a link for.
John Curran Mike - ICANN has a larger remit regarding .Org than ISOC expected (per Andrew), and you've suggested that this new broad remit regarding .Org is something ICANN only just discovered.
However, ICANN's asserted remit certainly looks to be in line with the original .org RFP and award in 2002. I've already noted that it would be have been much better if the contracting documents included some of their expectations, but that didn't happen and that is history at this point.
At no time did I suggest that ISOC "had zero contact with ICANN prior to being offered this particular transaction" nor did I suggest that ISOC "gave no study to ICANN's remit before last year", so please do not mischaracterize my remarks.
What I did ask is whether there will be any effort towards "resolving the fairly apparent expectation mismatch between ISOC and ICANN over .org responsibilities? i.e. is there any chance of constructive collaboration between the organizations to achieve better alignment regarding respective roles/responsibilities here?" It's actually a simple question, and it's not really about ISOC or ICANN, but rather concerns what expectations the .Org community should have.
Mike Godwin Your question insists that your framing is correct. It's incorrect, however. My general answer with regard to amateurish framing exercises of this sort is to tell the framer to fuck off. In this instance, however, it's worth repeating (again!) that the issue is not and never was a "mismatch of expectations." You're an adult. If I say there was no mismatch of expectations prior to the pushback, you ought to be able to figure out what that means. If you were really concerned about "what expectations the .ORG community should have," you'd ask questions about that, and not about your outsider's tendentious speculations based on your fabulation from one phrase of Andrew's posting. If you abandon your deep investment in framing this as a "mismatch of expectations" and confine yourself to the narrow question of "is there any chance of constructive collaboration between the organizations to achieve better alignment regarding respective roles/responsibilities here?" I think the answer to the question is yes, but it would require ICANN to demonstrate some character and resolve that, in my personal view, it has shown no trace of up to now.
John Curran Mike - It really doesn't matter whether there was a mismatch on the expectations prior to the pushback or not – the fact remains that there definitely exists one today. (I would not be surprised if there wasn't any hint of an issue before the deal was announced, as ICANN staff have repeatedly characterized gTLD registry assignment as just a routine matter of contract administration.)
You've got quite a bit of hostility, and that's also understandable - perhaps it's best to have more time before trying to discuss constructive steps forward.
Mike Godwin I'm hostile because literally every issue you're being bitchy about is addressed in the podcast I link to, supra, as well as elsewhere. As for hostility, my hostility is aimed specifically at your self-satisfied tendentiousness. (With regard to ICANN, all that's happened is that it confirmed many people's worst expectations of its process and principles.) Don't let the door slam on your back as you show yourself out--it might hurt the hand you're patting yourself with.
John Curran Mike - You perhaps misunderstand me - I'm not going anywhere, but simply recognize that you don't wish to engage with me on this topic, and will respect that. (It's apparent that there's a lack of clarity over what constitutes appropriate stewardship of .org, and others may still wish to discuss that issue in this forum.)
Mike Godwin If you were less preoccupied with advancing your smug vision of yourself and your wisdom, I'd be less uninterested in engaging with you. In the meantime, try clicking the link on the podcast.
John Curran (Mike - I listened to the Techdirt podcast when it came out, but thanks for the pointer.)
Mike Godwin
Try using both ears next time.
Richard Sexton
So many Nero's fiddling while Rome burns.
David Cake replied
Phill Hallam-Baker Whatever people think of the merits of the issue itself, the cost of winning has been to permanently discredit the notion that ICANN is independent of US government pressure. And the inevitable long term consequence of that is that the ICANN functions … See more 1
Phill Hallam-Baker Right now, it is still possible for us all to shut our eyes and clap and pretend that the US is the sole global hyperpower. While I am not one of the folk who spends their time hyperventilating about the rise of China and don't believe they are serious… See more
Phill Hallam-Baker A better outcome would be for the ICANN function to be transferred to the WHO. Dropping the cost of TLD registrations to $100 and selling them on a first come first served basis would maximize revenue and allow the organization to become independent of… See more
Owen DeLong First, there are no "ICANN functions". There are IANA functions which are currently contracted to ICANN through the empowered communities. In order for those functions to be transferred to some body chartered by the ITU, there would have to be consent … See more