On Mon, 18 Nov 2019 at 09:16, Hadia Abdelsalam Mokhtar EL miniawi <Hadia@tra.gov.eg> wrote:

I would certainly assume that ISOC got a very decent amount of money from Ethos for the deal to go forward. At this point I would assume that ISOC has insured its way forward. However, what is still to be seen is the effect on the .org prices, hopefully going forward they would have special prices for non profits.

Two factors come to mind in considering the long term effects of the sale, over and above the financial-stability component of which we are all aware. Consider:

The substance:

PIR was more than just an ISOC asset. The Internet Society was custodian of the only global top-level domain that was, by nature and its very name, acting in the public interest. In a sea of TLD sharks, dot-org could be seen as a body that brought both financial stability to ISOC and social responsibility among the registries. Its size and nonprofit status would keep costs down and corporate direction serving a social mission. Its competitive presence could tamp down the excesses of the industry.

And now that's gone. More important than the divestment of PIR is its change from nonprofit to Just Another Shareholder-Value-Maximizing part of the domain ecosystem, its uniqueness vanished in an instant. In the aim of maximizing its own revenue ISOC has eliminated from the the Internet the only publicly-accessible nonprofit gTLD. Gone is this substantial voice of public-interest sanity within the registry community, replaced by an entity barely more ethically motivated than Donuts. As a dot-org "owner", this hurts personally. But as someone trying to advance Internet domains as a component of progress, this hurts on a global scale.

Stewardship of a socially-motivated registry was one of ISOC's core global functions IMO. With that gone, so is part of ISOC's value.

The process:

The path that led to the divestment of PIR, both before and after the decision had been made, has laid bare a core ISOC culture that is the opposite of the openness it asks the world to embrace. At a level of fiscal responsibility, ISOC's action was exactly what one would expect any for-profit entity to do. Maximize benefit through a secretive process that catches everyone unaware -- not just of the transaction but of the urgency to do it,

Except ISOC is not a for-profit entity. It displays itself to the world as a community body that encourages involvement at a personal, regional, institutional or national scale. It has carefully crafted and evolved a Chapters Advisory Council explicitly designed to provide management with the view from the grassroots, alongside a parallel Council for corporate participants. This was combined with global virtual events such as InterCommunity that were created to give ISOC a global awareness of what was needed to promote a more-open Internet. And it has always had an individual-membership program, which isn't really talked about these days as these "members" have neither any costs nor any benefits.

None of these mechanisms were employed, none of these entities consulted, before or after the decision, even under NDA. The community wasn't even aware that PIR was being shopped around. As a result, there was no open solicitation, no publicly-competitive process, no opportunity for any other firm to make a counter-offer that might keep PIR nonprofit. We'll never know. Or maybe it wasn't shopped around and someone just made ISOC an offer it couldn't refuse. But ISOC isn't Jack Woltz. The community had no idea of any sense of urgency to sell PIR, and certainly was never consulted about the ethics or consequences of turning PIR for-profit. The common nonprofit practice of having major decisions ratified by stakeholders at an AGM is also nowhere in sight.

So now we know the reality of ISOC's corporate culture. Promote openness and consultation when convenient, but be opaque when it matters.

I don't know if ISOC considers me a stakeholder, or for that matter anyone else on this list, any Chapter or any Organization Member. In fact right now I have no idea who ISOC considers its stakeholders to be; it certainly didn't consult any before the fact or ask for any blessings afterwards. Not even informally. So who shows up at the AGM? Just the Trustees?

In any case, the deal is essentially done. ISOC clearly appears to have assured its financial stability, which is certainly a Good Thing. But with a crown jewel of the Internet fading away and the shallowness of its commitment to openness and community exposed in the process, it is legitimate to ask whether ISOC has sold more than a registry.

We won't know the answer to that for a while

- Evan

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