Great discussion points to raise at the CPWG meeting which I believe has still been called for next week (at 3am for me) despite some participants being unable to attend. The show must go on (I'm sure JZ would say!) M On Fri, 22 Nov 2019, 9:18 AM Carlos Raul Gutierrez, <carlosraul@gutierrez.se> wrote:

Maureen!

As far a colored lights go: We started the discussion this week in CPWG and I can recall the following:

1) The CPWG Chairs suggested a single topic call on the issue. I'm not sure this will take place in the next call. I think everyone agreed that wee need a common, minimum level of information before we can have an organized discussion (instead of a flow of opinions).

2. I also understand that ISOC's board will have a meeting this weekend around the IGF. As the ISOC chapters have representatives in that Board, I would expect them to provide the rationale of their (unanimous?) consent to the transaction as a basic input to the single topic CPWG meeting, whenever it takes place. Hopefully next Wednesday.

3. I would also call for any other ALS that want to add their inputs (and eventually opinions) to the single topic CPWG

Hopefully all this pending info will allow us choose a color and decide if the issue is (still) within our narrow remit now to take positions, or if we should take the opportunity to be better prepared for ALAC's comments on the Sub-Pro PDP and make sure that this time we don't get surprised by the unintended consequences of previous PDPs (like the 2012 AGB and the transition ones in particular)....

In any case, from the last 41 minutes or so of this week's of the CPWG call (under Zuck) you will get a clear feeling of how unclear the basics of the deal are to most of us.

Thanks! Carlos Raúl Gutiérrez

El 22 nov. 2019 12:46, Maureen Hilyard <maureen.hilyard@gmail.com> escribió:

re: https://savedotorg.org

I would just need the go-ahead from CPWG - put our hands up and be counted if we feel strongly enough about this on behalf of the non-profit end-users who will be impacted by this decision.. We asked for change agents and thought leaders in Montreal. We should take the lead.

M

On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 8:41 AM Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com> wrote:

Have a look at https://savedotorg.org

Interesting list of signatories. Perhaps ALAC should endorse?

___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56

On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:16 p.m. Dev Anand Teelucksingh, < devtee@gmail.com> wrote:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/nonprofit-community-stands-together-pr... _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg

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Me tooAlberto Obtener Outlook para iOS On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 7:08 PM -0300, "John Laprise" <jlaprise@gmail.com> wrote: I'm in. Sent from my Pixel 3XL John Laprise, Ph.D. On Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 12:47 PM Maureen Hilyard <maureen.hilyard@gmail.com> wrote: re: https://savedotorg.org I would just need the go-ahead from CPWG - put our hands up and be counted if we feel strongly enough about this on behalf of the non-profit end-users who will be impacted by this decision.. We asked for change agents and thought leaders in Montreal. We should take the lead. M On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 8:41 AM Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com> wrote: Have a look at https://savedotorg.org Interesting list of signatories. Perhaps ALAC should endorse? ___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56 On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:16 p.m. Dev Anand Teelucksingh, <devtee@gmail.com> wrote: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/nonprofit-community-stands-together-pr... _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on._______________________________________________ GTLD-WG mailing list GTLD-WG@atlarge-lists.icann.org https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/gtld-wg Working Group direct URL: https://community.icann.org/display/atlarge/New+GTLDs _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on. _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on. _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.

Agree Jonathan Zuck Executive Director Innovators Network Foundation www.Innovatorsnetwork.org<http://www.Innovatorsnetwork.org> ________________________________ From: At-Large <at-large-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org> on behalf of Roberto Gaetano <mail.roberto.gaetano@gmail.com> Sent: Friday, November 22, 2019 7:32:47 PM To: Maureen Hilyard <maureen.hilyard@gmail.com> Cc: CPWG <cpwg@icann.org>; At Large <at-large@atlarge-lists.icann.org> Subject: Re: [At-Large] [CPWG] [GTLD-WG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG Replying to Maureen’s initial question, I think that before signing off a document against the sale of PIR I believe that we need to understand why we are against this sale. Personally, my motivation has nothing to do with the risk of price increase - I think that I made it clear when submitting comments about the .org contract renewal, well before the fate of PIR was known. My being upset is because this transaction, based on purely financial considerations, has broken the trust that ISOC was the champion of the interests of a wide community, spanning from individual users to the non-profit community, and that would have continued playing that role supporting a registry that was providing a safe harbour for those folks. The trust was not based on the dollar more, dollar less, of the yearly fees, but on the stance that PIR had about practices of an industry dominated by commercial interests. I believe that we need to have a deep discussion among ourselves before taking a decision, that should not result in a simple signature under a document, but a motivated argumentation. If and when we do this, there will be no problem in finding ourselves in the company of odd bedfellows - if OTOH we do not do this preliminary work the risk of being confused with other commercial interests and having our voice diluted, if not even misunderstood, is quite high. Cheers, Roberto On 22.11.2019, at 19:46, Maureen Hilyard <maureen.hilyard@gmail.com<mailto:maureen.hilyard@gmail.com>> wrote: re: https://savedotorg.org<https://savedotorg.org/> I would just need the go-ahead from CPWG - put our hands up and be counted if we feel strongly enough about this on behalf of the non-profit end-users who will be impacted by this decision.. We asked for change agents and thought leaders in Montreal. We should take the lead. M On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 8:41 AM Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com<mailto:evanleibovitch@gmail.com>> wrote: Have a look at https://savedotorg.org<https://savedotorg.org/> Interesting list of signatories. Perhaps ALAC should endorse? ___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56 On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:16 p.m. Dev Anand Teelucksingh, <devtee@gmail.com<mailto:devtee@gmail.com>> wrote: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/nonprofit-community-stands-together-pr... _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org<mailto:CPWG@icann.org> https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on._______________________________________________ GTLD-WG mailing list GTLD-WG@atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:GTLD-WG@atlarge-lists.icann.org> https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/gtld-wg Working Group direct URL: https://community.icann.org/display/atlarge/New+GTLDs _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on. _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org<mailto:CPWG@icann.org> https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on. _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org<mailto:CPWG@icann.org> https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.

Likewise.   Not only a breach of trust, but since this transfer was obviously under consideration for some time, a certain lack of candor on the part of ISOC in the discussions leading up to the decision by ICANN. Bill Jouris On Friday, November 22, 2019, 04:32:53 PM PST, Roberto Gaetano <mail.roberto.gaetano@gmail.com> wrote: Replying to Maureen’s initial question, I think that before signing off a document against the sale of PIR I believe that we need to understand why we are against this sale.Personally, my motivation has nothing to do with the risk of price increase - I think that I made it clear when submitting comments about the .org contract renewal, well before the fate of PIR was known.My being upset is because this transaction, based on purely financial considerations, has broken the trust that ISOC was the champion of the interests of a wide community, spanning from individual users to the non-profit community, and that would have continued playing that role supporting a registry that was providing a safe harbour for those folks. The trust was not based on the dollar more, dollar less, of the yearly fees, but on the stance that PIR had about practices of an industry dominated by commercial interests.I believe that we need to have a deep discussion among ourselves before taking a decision, that should not result in a simple signature under a document, but a motivated argumentation. If and when we do this, there will be no problem in finding ourselves in the company of odd bedfellows - if OTOH we do not do this preliminary work the risk of being confused with other commercial interests and having our voice diluted, if not even misunderstood, is quite high.Cheers,Roberto On 22.11.2019, at 19:46, Maureen Hilyard <maureen.hilyard@gmail.com> wrote: re: https://savedotorg.org I would just need the go-ahead from CPWG - put our hands up and be counted if we feel strongly enough about this on behalf of the non-profit end-users who will be impacted by this decision.. We asked for change agents and thought leaders in Montreal. We should take the lead. M On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 8:41 AM Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com> wrote: Have a look at https://savedotorg.org Interesting list of signatories. Perhaps ALAC should endorse? ___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56 On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:16 p.m. Dev Anand Teelucksingh, <devtee@gmail.com> wrote: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/nonprofit-community-stands-together-pr... CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on._______________________________________________ GTLD-WG mailing list GTLD-WG@atlarge-lists.icann.org https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/gtld-wg Working Group direct URL: https://community.icann.org/display/atlarge/New+GTLDs _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on. _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on. _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on. _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.

I confess I’d be interested to see who is behind this site. The talking points are very similar to those with which we were bombarded by ICA during the original discussions around .ORG. Deep down, we ALL know that the only ones truly harmed by a price increase are volume registrants. It was you who suggested that a price hike might actually be pro-consumer. Let’s not lose site of all that because we’re pissed at ISOC. Let’s try to keep from being manipulated again and do a reasoned analysis of the situation. From: GTLD-WG <gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org> on behalf of Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com> Date: Friday, November 22, 2019 at 1:41 PM To: Dev Anand Teelucksingh <devtee@gmail.com> Cc: CPWG <cpwg@icann.org> Subject: Re: [GTLD-WG] [CPWG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG Have a look at https://savedotorg.org Interesting list of signatories. Perhaps ALAC should endorse? ___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56 On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:16 p.m. Dev Anand Teelucksingh, <devtee@gmail.com<mailto:devtee@gmail.com>> wrote: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/nonprofit-community-stands-together-pr... _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org<mailto:CPWG@icann.org> https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on._______________________________________________ GTLD-WG mailing list GTLD-WG@atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:GTLD-WG@atlarge-lists.icann.org> https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/gtld-wg Working Group direct URL: https://community.icann.org/display/atlarge/New+GTLDs _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.

Wise words On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 2:50 PM Jonathan Zuck <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org> wrote:

I confess I’d be interested to see who is behind this site. The talking points are very similar to those with which we were bombarded by ICA during the original discussions around .ORG. Deep down, we ALL know that the only ones truly harmed by a price increase are volume registrants. It was you who suggested that a price hike might actually be pro-consumer. Let’s not lose site of all that because we’re pissed at ISOC. Let’s try to keep from being manipulated again and do a reasoned analysis of the situation.

*From: *GTLD-WG <gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org> on behalf of Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com> *Date: *Friday, November 22, 2019 at 1:41 PM *To: *Dev Anand Teelucksingh <devtee@gmail.com> *Cc: *CPWG <cpwg@icann.org> *Subject: *Re: [GTLD-WG] [CPWG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG

Have a look at https://savedotorg.org

Interesting list of signatories. Perhaps ALAC should endorse?

___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56

On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:16 p.m. Dev Anand Teelucksingh, < devtee@gmail.com> wrote:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/nonprofit-community-stands-together-pr...

_______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg

_______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on._______________________________________________ GTLD-WG mailing list GTLD-WG@atlarge-lists.icann.org https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/gtld-wg

Working Group direct URL: https://community.icann.org/display/atlarge/New+GTLDs _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.

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_______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.

Fortunately, anyone who is interested in learning who is behind this petition, can just look at the non-profit signatories listed at the bottom of it (https://savedotorg.org/), and can read the accompanying letter (https://www.eff.org/document/coalition-letter-sale-public-interest-registry) signed by the impressive list of nonprofits, namely: American Alliance of Museums American Society of Association Executives Aspiration Association of Junior Leagues International, Inc. Creative Commons Crisis Text Line Demand Progress Education Fund DoSomething.org Electronic Frontier Foundation European Climate Foundation Free Software Foundation Girl Scouts of the USA Independent Sector Internet Archive Meals on Wheels America National Council of Nonprofits National Human Services Assembly NTEN Palante Technology Cooperative Public Knowledge R Street Institute TechSoup VolunteerMatch Volunteers of America Wikimedia Foundation YMCA of the USA YWCA USA Zak Muscovitch General Counsel, ICA Muscovitch Law P.C. zak@muscovitch.com<mailto:zak@muscovitch.com> 1-866-654-7129 416-924-5084 http://www.trademarks-canada.com/ https://www.muscovitch.com/ https://dnattorney.com/ From: CPWG <cpwg-bounces@icann.org> On Behalf Of Javier Rua Sent: November-22-19 2:08 PM To: Jonathan Zuck <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org> Cc: Dev Anand Teelucksingh <devtee@gmail.com>; CPWG <cpwg@icann.org>; Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com> Subject: Re: [CPWG] [GTLD-WG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG Wise words On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 2:50 PM Jonathan Zuck <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org<mailto:JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org>> wrote: I confess I’d be interested to see who is behind this site. The talking points are very similar to those with which we were bombarded by ICA during the original discussions around .ORG. Deep down, we ALL know that the only ones truly harmed by a price increase are volume registrants. It was you who suggested that a price hike might actually be pro-consumer. Let’s not lose site of all that because we’re pissed at ISOC. Let’s try to keep from being manipulated again and do a reasoned analysis of the situation. From: GTLD-WG <gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org>> on behalf of Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com<mailto:evanleibovitch@gmail.com>> Date: Friday, November 22, 2019 at 1:41 PM To: Dev Anand Teelucksingh <devtee@gmail.com<mailto:devtee@gmail.com>> Cc: CPWG <cpwg@icann.org<mailto:cpwg@icann.org>> Subject: Re: [GTLD-WG] [CPWG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG Have a look at https://savedotorg.org Interesting list of signatories. Perhaps ALAC should endorse? ___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56 On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:16 p.m. Dev Anand Teelucksingh, <devtee@gmail.com<mailto:devtee@gmail.com>> wrote: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/nonprofit-community-stands-together-pr... _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org<mailto:CPWG@icann.org> https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on._______________________________________________ GTLD-WG mailing list GTLD-WG@atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:GTLD-WG@atlarge-lists.icann.org> https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/gtld-wg Working Group direct URL: https://community.icann.org/display/atlarge/New+GTLDs _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on. _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org<mailto:CPWG@icann.org> https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.

I am somewhat comforted by the observation that the Free Software Foundation and Electronic Frontier Foundation have signed on to the site, neither of which is associated with being corporate proxies. I share your concern about ICA. However, at various points in history we've partnered with many different parts of the ICANN ecosystem and this time we happen to be on the same side as an organization we often consider as an adversary. Strange bedfellows indeed but why not? I maintain my position that PIR should be given more leeway to set prices. That's not the issue to me. The change of PIR from nonprofit to for-profit has far deeper implications for trust that price increases will be reasonable and serving an interest beyond maximizing revenue. I had trust that a nonprofit PIR would treat the removal of price caps with prudence. I have no such confidence in a profit-maximizing PIR. ___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56 On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:50 p.m. Jonathan Zuck, < JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org> wrote:

I confess I’d be interested to see who is behind this site. The talking points are very similar to those with which we were bombarded by ICA during the original discussions around .ORG. Deep down, we ALL know that the only ones truly harmed by a price increase are volume registrants. It was you who suggested that a price hike might actually be pro-consumer. Let’s not lose site of all that because we’re pissed at ISOC. Let’s try to keep from being manipulated again and do a reasoned analysis of the situation.

*From: *GTLD-WG <gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org> on behalf of Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com> *Date: *Friday, November 22, 2019 at 1:41 PM *To: *Dev Anand Teelucksingh <devtee@gmail.com> *Cc: *CPWG <cpwg@icann.org> *Subject: *Re: [GTLD-WG] [CPWG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG

Have a look at https://savedotorg.org

Interesting list of signatories. Perhaps ALAC should endorse?

___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56

On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:16 p.m. Dev Anand Teelucksingh, < devtee@gmail.com> wrote:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/nonprofit-community-stands-together-pr...

_______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg

_______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on._______________________________________________ GTLD-WG mailing list GTLD-WG@atlarge-lists.icann.org https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/gtld-wg

Working Group direct URL: https://community.icann.org/display/atlarge/New+GTLDs _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.

Yes, those are the same issues raised during the original discussion about .ORG but they are still pretty specific to folks in the secondary market if you go one layer down. I've got about a dozen .ORG domains registered which I suspect is more than most non-profits, and I'd be fine with the price quadrupling if it put a dent in the secondary market for confusingly similar, snapped up and turned into porn sites and just plain expensive domains. I've run an arts non-profit called DC Dogs for the past decade. I found it a LOT cheaper to get the .COM than the .ORG because the .ORG was being held by a domain investor. Several times a year, I get an email from a broker asking if I'm ready to buy the .ORG. And THIS year, I was breathlessly notified that there had been a HUGE price decrease so I could now pick it up for the low low price of $7,500! Another time, I switched from competitivetechnology.org to actonline.org and unfortunately allowed competitivetechnology.org to lapse. It was immediately purchased and turned into a porn site, capitalizing on the traffic WE had established so to buy it back, I had to match the revenue it was making for the domain investor, something close to $10k. It's a little ironic to talk about non-profit management of .ORG when so many of the second level domains are in the hands of the most for profit actors in the market. We should also remember there are safeguards and PICs in the new contract that legacy domains do not need to implement and we have not evaluated their relative value to end users. As end users, we're most certainly not automatically for limiting IP rights, for example, because of the high correlation between infringement and malware. If we don't like the safeguards, we have a role to play in improving them which will go a LOT further than any reliance on someone's non-profit status to protect us. There are PLENTY of very greedy non-profits in the world whos executives make a great deal of money. I think the PIR CEO pay is something like $750k so before we cry a river over their loss, let's have a real discussion about how best to protect our interests in this. All this said, I have nothing against domain investors and they are simply a reflection of a free market (that will exist with, or without PIR) and I myself once sold activate.com for much more than I paid for it. However, I do not believe the internet community owes them anything and should not concern ourselves with their interests. Consequently, when they are the primary driver behind an initiative to control pricing, we should be wary of their motives. Yes, they managed to generate a lot of comments and yes, Nat, I'm sure those comments were legitimately from the organizations listed but we know little of how the problem is being described to those organizations or how shrill the rhetoric about domain takedowns, etc. What we DO know is that domain investors are the group with the MOST to lose here whereas doubling the price of innovatorsnetwork.org will make a lot of cash for Ethos and not make a bit of difference to the Innovators Network Foundation. So Evan, I make no statement about the best outcome, because I have not yet studied it and I have NO problems with strange bedfellows if we're on the right side of something. I'm just not ready to ASSUME this is a bad development because folks with an entirely unique stake tell me so. All I ask is that we spend the time to discuss it. Jonathan ________________________________ From: Kaili Kan <kankaili@gmail.com> Sent: Friday, November 22, 2019 3:12 PM To: Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com> Cc: Jonathan Zuck <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org>; Dev Anand Teelucksingh <devtee@gmail.com>; CPWG <cpwg@icann.org> Subject: Re: [CPWG] [GTLD-WG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG After reading the letter signed by over 20 NGOs, I find it going beyond far potential price increases. The following are their listed concerns: -- The power to raise .ORG registration fees without the approval of ICANN or the .ORG community. A .ORG price hike would put many cash-strapped NGOs in the difficult position of either paying the increased fees or losing the legitimacy and brand recognition of a .ORG domain. -- The power to develop and implement Rights Protection Mechanisms unilaterally, without consulting the .ORG community. If such mechanisms are not carefully crafted in collaboration with the NGO community, they risk censoring completely legal nonprofit activities. -- The power to implement processes to suspend domain names based on accusations of “activity contrary to applicable law.” The .ORG registry should not implement such processes without understanding how state actors frequently target NGOs with allegations of illegal activity. If these are true, it seems that we have even more reasons to act. Kaili On Sat, Nov 23, 2019 at 3:56 AM Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com<mailto:evanleibovitch@gmail.com>> wrote: I am somewhat comforted by the observation that the Free Software Foundation and Electronic Frontier Foundation have signed on to the site, neither of which is associated with being corporate proxies. I share your concern about ICA. However, at various points in history we've partnered with many different parts of the ICANN ecosystem and this time we happen to be on the same side as an organization we often consider as an adversary. Strange bedfellows indeed but why not? I maintain my position that PIR should be given more leeway to set prices. That's not the issue to me. The change of PIR from nonprofit to for-profit has far deeper implications for trust that price increases will be reasonable and serving an interest beyond maximizing revenue. I had trust that a nonprofit PIR would treat the removal of price caps with prudence. I have no such confidence in a profit-maximizing PIR. ___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56 On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:50 p.m. Jonathan Zuck, <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org<mailto:JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org>> wrote: I confess I’d be interested to see who is behind this site. The talking points are very similar to those with which we were bombarded by ICA during the original discussions around .ORG. Deep down, we ALL know that the only ones truly harmed by a price increase are volume registrants. It was you who suggested that a price hike might actually be pro-consumer. Let’s not lose site of all that because we’re pissed at ISOC. Let’s try to keep from being manipulated again and do a reasoned analysis of the situation. From: GTLD-WG <gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org>> on behalf of Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com<mailto:evanleibovitch@gmail.com>> Date: Friday, November 22, 2019 at 1:41 PM To: Dev Anand Teelucksingh <devtee@gmail.com<mailto:devtee@gmail.com>> Cc: CPWG <cpwg@icann.org<mailto:cpwg@icann.org>> Subject: Re: [GTLD-WG] [CPWG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG Have a look at https://savedotorg.org Interesting list of signatories. Perhaps ALAC should endorse? ___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56 On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:16 p.m. Dev Anand Teelucksingh, <devtee@gmail.com<mailto:devtee@gmail.com>> wrote: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/nonprofit-community-stands-together-pr... _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org<mailto:CPWG@icann.org> https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on._______________________________________________ GTLD-WG mailing list GTLD-WG@atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:GTLD-WG@atlarge-lists.icann.org> https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/gtld-wg Working Group direct URL: https://community.icann.org/display/atlarge/New+GTLDs _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on. _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org<mailto:CPWG@icann.org> https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.

Good point ________________________________ From: GTLD-WG <gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org> on behalf of Alexander Schubert <alexander@schubert.berlin> Sent: Friday, November 22, 2019 4:12 PM To: 'CPWG' <cpwg@icann.org> Subject: Re: [GTLD-WG] [CPWG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG Any price INCREASE up to about US $100 per year would be a POSITIVE: It scares scalpers away. The REAL risk we are facing is obviously the OPPOSITE: That PIR allows freebee “creates” (first year registrations) to hike the .org domain count. The result of such action: bad actors snatching up EVERY single generic term based .org; and expired domains. I am not afraid of rice hikes. I am afraid of the opposite: free “creates”. These monetization sites BADLY hurt the “.org” trust with Google. We shouldn’t ask ICANN for a “price cap” – rather for a guaranteed MINIMUM reg fee! Thanks, Alexander.berlin From: GTLD-WG [mailto:gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Zuck Sent: Freitag, 22. November 2019 15:58 To: Kaili Kan <kankaili@gmail.com>; Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com> Cc: CPWG <cpwg@icann.org> Subject: Re: [GTLD-WG] [CPWG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG Yes, those are the same issues raised during the original discussion about .ORG but they are still pretty specific to folks in the secondary market if you go one layer down. I've got about a dozen .ORG domains registered which I suspect is more than most non-profits, and I'd be fine with the price quadrupling if it put a dent in the secondary market for confusingly similar, snapped up and turned into porn sites and just plain expensive domains. I've run an arts non-profit called DC Dogs for the past decade. I found it a LOT cheaper to get the .COM than the .ORG because the .ORG was being held by a domain investor. Several times a year, I get an email from a broker asking if I'm ready to buy the .ORG. And THIS year, I was breathlessly notified that there had been a HUGE price decrease so I could now pick it up for the low low price of $7,500! Another time, I switched from competitivetechnology.org to actonline.org and unfortunately allowed competitivetechnology.org to lapse. It was immediately purchased and turned into a porn site, capitalizing on the traffic WE had established so to buy it back, I had to match the revenue it was making for the domain investor, something close to $10k. It's a little ironic to talk about non-profit management of .ORG when so many of the second level domains are in the hands of the most for profit actors in the market. We should also remember there are safeguards and PICs in the new contract that legacy domains do not need to implement and we have not evaluated their relative value to end users. As end users, we're most certainly not automatically for limiting IP rights, for example, because of the high correlation between infringement and malware. If we don't like the safeguards, we have a role to play in improving them which will go a LOT further than any reliance on someone's non-profit status to protect us. There are PLENTY of very greedy non-profits in the world whos executives make a great deal of money. I think the PIR CEO pay is something like $750k so before we cry a river over their loss, let's have a real discussion about how best to protect our interests in this. All this said, I have nothing against domain investors and they are simply a reflection of a free market (that will exist with, or without PIR) and I myself once sold activate.com for much more than I paid for it. However, I do not believe the internet community owes them anything and should not concern ourselves with their interests. Consequently, when they are the primary driver behind an initiative to control pricing, we should be wary of their motives. Yes, they managed to generate a lot of comments and yes, Nat, I'm sure those comments were legitimately from the organizations listed but we know little of how the problem is being described to those organizations or how shrill the rhetoric about domain takedowns, etc. What we DO know is that domain investors are the group with the MOST to lose here whereas doubling the price of innovatorsnetwork.org will make a lot of cash for Ethos and not make a bit of difference to the Innovators Network Foundation. So Evan, I make no statement about the best outcome, because I have not yet studied it and I have NO problems with strange bedfellows if we're on the right side of something. I'm just not ready to ASSUME this is a bad development because folks with an entirely unique stake tell me so. All I ask is that we spend the time to discuss it. Jonathan ________________________________ From: Kaili Kan <kankaili@gmail.com<mailto:kankaili@gmail.com>> Sent: Friday, November 22, 2019 3:12 PM To: Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com<mailto:evanleibovitch@gmail.com>> Cc: Jonathan Zuck <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org<mailto:JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org>>; Dev Anand Teelucksingh <devtee@gmail.com<mailto:devtee@gmail.com>>; CPWG <cpwg@icann.org<mailto:cpwg@icann.org>> Subject: Re: [CPWG] [GTLD-WG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG After reading the letter signed by over 20 NGOs, I find it going beyond far potential price increases. The following are their listed concerns: -- The power to raise .ORG registration fees without the approval of ICANN or the .ORG community. A .ORG price hike would put many cash-strapped NGOs in the difficult position of either paying the increased fees or losing the legitimacy and brand recognition of a .ORG domain. -- The power to develop and implement Rights Protection Mechanisms unilaterally, without consulting the .ORG community. If such mechanisms are not carefully crafted in collaboration with the NGO community, they risk censoring completely legal nonprofit activities. -- The power to implement processes to suspend domain names based on accusations of “activity contrary to applicable law.” The .ORG registry should not implement such processes without understanding how state actors frequently target NGOs with allegations of illegal activity. If these are true, it seems that we have even more reasons to act. Kaili On Sat, Nov 23, 2019 at 3:56 AM Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com<mailto:evanleibovitch@gmail.com>> wrote: I am somewhat comforted by the observation that the Free Software Foundation and Electronic Frontier Foundation have signed on to the site, neither of which is associated with being corporate proxies. I share your concern about ICA. However, at various points in history we've partnered with many different parts of the ICANN ecosystem and this time we happen to be on the same side as an organization we often consider as an adversary. Strange bedfellows indeed but why not? I maintain my position that PIR should be given more leeway to set prices. That's not the issue to me. The change of PIR from nonprofit to for-profit has far deeper implications for trust that price increases will be reasonable and serving an interest beyond maximizing revenue. I had trust that a nonprofit PIR would treat the removal of price caps with prudence. I have no such confidence in a profit-maximizing PIR. ___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56 On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:50 p.m. Jonathan Zuck, <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org<mailto:JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org>> wrote: I confess I’d be interested to see who is behind this site. The talking points are very similar to those with which we were bombarded by ICA during the original discussions around .ORG. Deep down, we ALL know that the only ones truly harmed by a price increase are volume registrants. It was you who suggested that a price hike might actually be pro-consumer. Let’s not lose site of all that because we’re pissed at ISOC. Let’s try to keep from being manipulated again and do a reasoned analysis of the situation. From: GTLD-WG <gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org>> on behalf of Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com<mailto:evanleibovitch@gmail.com>> Date: Friday, November 22, 2019 at 1:41 PM To: Dev Anand Teelucksingh <devtee@gmail.com<mailto:devtee@gmail.com>> Cc: CPWG <cpwg@icann.org<mailto:cpwg@icann.org>> Subject: Re: [GTLD-WG] [CPWG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG Have a look at https://savedotorg.org Interesting list of signatories. Perhaps ALAC should endorse? ___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56 On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:16 p.m. Dev Anand Teelucksingh, <devtee@gmail.com<mailto:devtee@gmail.com>> wrote: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/nonprofit-community-stands-together-pr... _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org<mailto:CPWG@icann.org> https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on._______________________________________________ GTLD-WG mailing list GTLD-WG@atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:GTLD-WG@atlarge-lists.icann.org> https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/gtld-wg Working Group direct URL: https://community.icann.org/display/atlarge/New+GTLDs _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on. _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org<mailto:CPWG@icann.org> https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.

Hi Nat, Just to clarify, At Large isn't a representative organization. Rather, it collectively strives to be a good steward on behalf of the interests of end users. More than anything else, we listen. On .org, my sense is that the organization managing .org should at it's heart have non profit sensibilities. We thought that was true of ISOC and we were disappointed. Management by a fund is about as antithetical as you can get. The bigger picture for me is that in many places, being a nonprofit or being affiliated with one is a personal security risk. Authoritarian governments do not like non-profits. If .org is managed by an org driven by $, then all it takes it coercion or money to get them to betray .org. A non-profit with a mission is much more difficult to coerce. The next billion users live in such places. I would not see them put at risk. Sent from my Pixel 3XL John Laprise, Ph.D. On Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 4:19 PM Nat Cohen <ncohen@telepathy.com> wrote:

This discussion has taken an interesting turn - "very greedy non-profits", "turned it into a porn site", "any price INCREASE up to about $100 would be a POSITIVE".

There's a lot to unpack here.

I am a domain investor. I recognize it may seem odd for domain investors to care about how much nonprofits are paying for their .org domain names. Indeed, the primary focus of domain investors is .com domain names. .Org domain names represent a negligible holding in most investors' portfolios.

Domain investors are first and foremost registrants. We care about registrant rights. We care about our ownership rights in our domain names. We want registry service providers to act like service providers. We don't like it when registries attempt to usurp the value in entire namespaces when those name spaces are legacy name spaces that they did not create nor nuture to maturity.

As registrants, do registrants own their domain names, or do the registries own those domain names? That is a key question. The right to charge any price to renew a domain name is the right of an OWNER, not a contracted service provider.

The right to tell EFF, ICANN, the Girl Scouts, and the registrants of ten million other .org domain names that their right to continue using their long term home on the Internet depends on paying PIR whatever price PIR wishes to impose, conveys to PIR the right of an owner. PIR runs a database. Actually they outsource the running of a database. The marginal cost of adding or renewing a domain name is a fraction of a cent. Yet PIR charges over $9 for performing that service - or rather for hiring someone else to perform that service - for an average cost of under $2 per domain name.

As others have pointed out, the benefits from these agreements are concentrated in a couple of registries, in particular PIR and Verisign, while the harm is diffused across tens of millions of registrants. The harm suffered by the average registrant is not great enough to motivate them to engage with ICANN. So registries exert their influence on ICANN, the registrants don't participate, and the result is that the registrants are harmed while the registries negotiate sweetheart deals.

One of the few businesses where registrations are concentrated such that the harm incurred is high enough to make it worthwhile to engage at ICANN is domain investing. Domain investors are similarly situated with other registrants as to registrant rights issues. You may not like our business model. You may have other issues with us. But in the absence of engagement by the millions of registrants around the world who bear the brunt of ICANN's policies but aren't here to participate in the process, we are speaking out. You can think of us like the Lorax in the Dr. Seuss book, we speak for the trees when the trees can't speak for themselves.

One might ask about the legitimacy of the participants in At Large to speak on behalf of the global Internet community. What are your interests here?

I am friendly with Alexander. I know that he is a promoter of new gTLDs. It is no accident he has the excellent domain name Schubert.Berlin. Higher prices for legacy domain names, such as .org domain names at $100 or so, would make the new gTLDs he is promoting more attractive.

Jonathan - I am fairly new here. You have strong opinions on these matters. What is your interest in these issues?

As for your question about what shrill rhetoric may have motivated the nonprofits to comment, there is a blog post by NameCheap that they shared with their .org registrants that led many of them to comment, and some of them to use the form that the ICA created to facilitate comments. That blog post is here - https://www.namecheap.com/blog/keep-domain-prices-in-check/. I agree that the blog post raises the fear of sharply higher prices - "sky-high .org prices could be coming" and "Rather than a 10% increase to renew your domain next year, it could suddenly start charging registrars like Namecheap 100 times as much." You can read the post for yourself and form your own opinion.

Yet what I wonder about is why are the opinions of the folks who joined this group - I mean, you even allowed a domain investor to join - more relevant that what the nonprofit community is saying loudly and clearly and consistently.

To the extent that this group has any relevance at all, and actually has any overlap with its stated purpose of representing Internet users at large, shouldn't it be guided by the interests of the nonprofits as stated by those nonprofits themselves, rather than whoever wandered into this group for whatever unknown reason?

Regards,

Nat Cohen

On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 4:15 PM Jonathan Zuck <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org> wrote:

...

Good point ------------------------------ *From:* GTLD-WG <gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org> on behalf of Alexander Schubert <alexander@schubert.berlin> *Sent:* Friday, November 22, 2019 4:12 PM *To:* 'CPWG' <cpwg@icann.org> *Subject:* Re: [GTLD-WG] [CPWG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG

Any price INCREASE up to about US $100 per year would be a POSITIVE: It scares scalpers away.

The REAL risk we are facing is obviously the OPPOSITE:

That PIR allows freebee “creates” (first year registrations) to hike the .org domain count. The result of such action: bad actors snatching up EVERY single generic term based .org; and expired domains.

I am not afraid of rice hikes. I am afraid of the opposite: free “creates”. These monetization sites BADLY hurt the “.org” trust with Google. We shouldn’t ask ICANN for a “price cap” – rather for a guaranteed MINIMUM reg fee!

Thanks,

Alexander.berlin

*From:* GTLD-WG [mailto:gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org] *On Behalf Of *Jonathan Zuck *Sent:* Freitag, 22. November 2019 15:58 *To:* Kaili Kan <kankaili@gmail.com>; Evan Leibovitch < evanleibovitch@gmail.com> *Cc:* CPWG <cpwg@icann.org> *Subject:* Re: [GTLD-WG] [CPWG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG

Yes, those are the same issues raised during the original discussion about .ORG but they are still pretty specific to folks in the secondary market if you go one layer down. I've got about a dozen .ORG domains registered which I suspect is more than most non-profits, and I'd be fine with the price quadrupling if it put a dent in the secondary market for confusingly similar, snapped up and turned into porn sites and just plain expensive domains. I've run an arts non-profit called DC Dogs for the past decade. I found it a LOT cheaper to get the .COM than the .ORG because the .ORG was being held by a domain investor. Several times a year, I get an email from a broker asking if I'm ready to buy the .ORG. And THIS year, I was breathlessly notified that there had been a HUGE price decrease so I could now pick it up for the low low price of $7,500! Another time, I switched from competitivetechnology.org to actonline.org and unfortunately allowed competitivetechnology.org to lapse. It was immediately purchased and turned into a porn site, capitalizing on the traffic WE had established so to buy it back, I had to match the revenue it was making for the domain investor, something close to $10k. It's a little ironic to talk about non-profit management of .ORG when so many of the second level domains are in the hands of the most for profit actors in the market.

We should also remember there are safeguards and PICs in the new contract that legacy domains do not need to implement and we have not evaluated their relative value to end users. As end users, we're most certainly not automatically for limiting IP rights, for example, because of the high correlation between infringement and malware. If we don't like the safeguards, we have a role to play in improving them which will go a LOT further than any reliance on someone's non-profit status to protect us. There are PLENTY of very greedy non-profits in the world whos executives make a great deal of money. I think the PIR CEO pay is something like $750k so before we cry a river over their loss, let's have a real discussion about how best to protect our interests in this.

All this said, I have nothing against domain investors and they are simply a reflection of a free market (that will exist with, or without PIR) and I myself once sold activate.com for much more than I paid for it. However, I do not believe the internet community owes them anything and should not concern ourselves with their interests.

Consequently, when they are the primary driver behind an initiative to control pricing, we should be wary of their motives. Yes, they managed to generate a lot of comments and yes, Nat, I'm sure those comments were legitimately from the organizations listed but we know little of how the problem is being described to those organizations or how shrill the rhetoric about domain takedowns, etc. What we DO know is that domain investors are the group with the MOST to lose here whereas doubling the price of innovatorsnetwork.org will make a lot of cash for Ethos and not make a bit of difference to the Innovators Network Foundation.

So Evan, I make no statement about the best outcome, because I have not yet studied it and I have NO problems with strange bedfellows if we're on the right side of something. I'm just not ready to ASSUME this is a bad development because folks with an entirely unique stake tell me so. All I ask is that we spend the time to discuss it.

Jonathan

------------------------------

*From:* Kaili Kan <kankaili@gmail.com> *Sent:* Friday, November 22, 2019 3:12 PM *To:* Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com> *Cc:* Jonathan Zuck <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org>; Dev Anand Teelucksingh <devtee@gmail.com>; CPWG <cpwg@icann.org> *Subject:* Re: [CPWG] [GTLD-WG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG

After reading the letter signed by over 20 NGOs, I find it going beyond far potential price increases. The following are their listed concerns:

-- The power to raise .ORG registration fees without the approval of ICANN or the .ORG community. A .ORG price hike would put many cash-strapped NGOs in the difficult position of either paying the increased fees or losing the legitimacy and brand recognition of a .ORG domain.

-- The power to develop and implement Rights Protection Mechanisms unilaterally, without consulting the .ORG community. If such mechanisms are not carefully crafted in collaboration with the NGO community, they risk censoring completely legal nonprofit activities.

-- The power to implement processes to suspend domain names based on accusations of “activity contrary to applicable law.” The .ORG registry should not implement such processes without understanding how state actors frequently target NGOs with allegations of illegal activity.

If these are true, it seems that we have even more reasons to act.

Kaili

On Sat, Nov 23, 2019 at 3:56 AM Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com> wrote:

I am somewhat comforted by the observation that the Free Software Foundation and Electronic Frontier Foundation have signed on to the site, neither of which is associated with being corporate proxies.

I share your concern about ICA. However, at various points in history we've partnered with many different parts of the ICANN ecosystem and this time we happen to be on the same side as an organization we often consider as an adversary. Strange bedfellows indeed but why not?

I maintain my position that PIR should be given more leeway to set prices. That's not the issue to me. The change of PIR from nonprofit to for-profit has far deeper implications for trust that price increases will be reasonable and serving an interest beyond maximizing revenue. I had trust that a nonprofit PIR would treat the removal of price caps with prudence. I have no such confidence in a profit-maximizing PIR.

___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56

On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:50 p.m. Jonathan Zuck, < JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org> wrote:

I confess I’d be interested to see who is behind this site. The talking points are very similar to those with which we were bombarded by ICA during the original discussions around .ORG. Deep down, we ALL know that the only ones truly harmed by a price increase are volume registrants. It was you who suggested that a price hike might actually be pro-consumer. Let’s not lose site of all that because we’re pissed at ISOC. Let’s try to keep from being manipulated again and do a reasoned analysis of the situation.

*From: *GTLD-WG <gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org> on behalf of Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com> *Date: *Friday, November 22, 2019 at 1:41 PM *To: *Dev Anand Teelucksingh <devtee@gmail.com> *Cc: *CPWG <cpwg@icann.org> *Subject: *Re: [GTLD-WG] [CPWG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG

Have a look at https://savedotorg.org

Interesting list of signatories. Perhaps ALAC should endorse?

___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56

On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:16 p.m. Dev Anand Teelucksingh, < devtee@gmail.com> wrote:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/nonprofit-community-stands-together-pr...

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Well Nat, you’d be surprised at the public spirit of this group. As for process, we’re working on it. Fundamentally, we try to evaluate those interests logically. Our mandate is to identify and advocate for the interests of “individual end users” which does not include non-profit organizations but does, by definition, include people who benefit from their important work. So perhaps the strongest argument here is not for individual non-profits but for collective loss to their efforts in the face of a price hike. That may very well be where we end up. All I said is that we spend some time to truly evaluate this. There’s no reason we should take as an article of faith that a non-profit is the best registry for non-profits just because it has always been. Rumors abound about the poor management of PIR. If that’s the case, it’s possible that Ethos could make money but simply running the registry more efficiently and not raising prices a cent. You, yourself, made the argument that you believe PIR was pulling too much money out of the market for too little work. That said, we also cannot assume that the interests of domain investors are 100% aligned with those of other registrants, much less with individual end users and that there might be benefits to the new contract that benefit end users that do not benefit domain investors. There are a lot of threads here unfortunately so I’ll leave it there. We just need to spend some time on this. Jonathan From: Nat Cohen <ncohen@telepathy.com> Date: Friday, November 22, 2019 at 6:05 PM To: John Laprise <jlaprise@gmail.com> Cc: Jonathan Zuck <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org>, Alexander Schubert <alexander@schubert.berlin>, CPWG <cpwg@icann.org> Subject: Re: [CPWG] [GTLD-WG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG Hi John, Thanks for that clarification. What is the mechanism by which At Large, which requires no qualifications to join, aligns itself with the interests of end users? The more familiar I become with ICANN the more I recognize that those who engage here usually have financial interests in the outcome. And yes, I am one with financial interests, and it was those interests that led me to first pay attention to ICANN. It takes a huge amount of time to productively engage here. Unless one is exceptionally public spirited, that is a lot to ask of someone to devote so much time to ICANN without a financial interest and on behalf of the interests of random end users. So while the purpose of At Large is to be a good steward on behalf of the interests of end users, how is that ensured? What prevents At Large from being populated by those with financial interests adverse to the interests of end users, such that the guidance from At Large is equally adverse to the interests of end users? As to your comment about .org being managed by those who make decisions primarily based on the financial impact, and who may therefore readily betray a .org or shut down a nonprofit website if an authoritarian government with which the private equity firm has business interests complains, that is one more good reason, among many, to be concerned about the sale to Ethos Capital. Regards, Nat On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 5:43 PM John Laprise <jlaprise@gmail.com<mailto:jlaprise@gmail.com>> wrote: Hi Nat, Just to clarify, At Large isn't a representative organization. Rather, it collectively strives to be a good steward on behalf of the interests of end users. More than anything else, we listen. On .org, my sense is that the organization managing .org should at it's heart have non profit sensibilities. We thought that was true of ISOC and we were disappointed. Management by a fund is about as antithetical as you can get. The bigger picture for me is that in many places, being a nonprofit or being affiliated with one is a personal security risk. Authoritarian governments do not like non-profits. If .org is managed by an org driven by $, then all it takes it coercion or money to get them to betray .org. A non-profit with a mission is much more difficult to coerce. The next billion users live in such places. I would not see them put at risk. Sent from my Pixel 3XL John Laprise, Ph.D. On Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 4:19 PM Nat Cohen <ncohen@telepathy.com<mailto:ncohen@telepathy.com>> wrote: This discussion has taken an interesting turn - "very greedy non-profits", "turned it into a porn site", "any price INCREASE up to about $100 would be a POSITIVE". There's a lot to unpack here. I am a domain investor. I recognize it may seem odd for domain investors to care about how much nonprofits are paying for their .org domain names. Indeed, the primary focus of domain investors is .com domain names. .Org domain names represent a negligible holding in most investors' portfolios. Domain investors are first and foremost registrants. We care about registrant rights. We care about our ownership rights in our domain names. We want registry service providers to act like service providers. We don't like it when registries attempt to usurp the value in entire namespaces when those name spaces are legacy name spaces that they did not create nor nuture to maturity. As registrants, do registrants own their domain names, or do the registries own those domain names? That is a key question. The right to charge any price to renew a domain name is the right of an OWNER, not a contracted service provider. The right to tell EFF, ICANN, the Girl Scouts, and the registrants of ten million other .org domain names that their right to continue using their long term home on the Internet depends on paying PIR whatever price PIR wishes to impose, conveys to PIR the right of an owner. PIR runs a database. Actually they outsource the running of a database. The marginal cost of adding or renewing a domain name is a fraction of a cent. Yet PIR charges over $9 for performing that service - or rather for hiring someone else to perform that service - for an average cost of under $2 per domain name. As others have pointed out, the benefits from these agreements are concentrated in a couple of registries, in particular PIR and Verisign, while the harm is diffused across tens of millions of registrants. The harm suffered by the average registrant is not great enough to motivate them to engage with ICANN. So registries exert their influence on ICANN, the registrants don't participate, and the result is that the registrants are harmed while the registries negotiate sweetheart deals. One of the few businesses where registrations are concentrated such that the harm incurred is high enough to make it worthwhile to engage at ICANN is domain investing. Domain investors are similarly situated with other registrants as to registrant rights issues. You may not like our business model. You may have other issues with us. But in the absence of engagement by the millions of registrants around the world who bear the brunt of ICANN's policies but aren't here to participate in the process, we are speaking out. You can think of us like the Lorax in the Dr. Seuss book, we speak for the trees when the trees can't speak for themselves. One might ask about the legitimacy of the participants in At Large to speak on behalf of the global Internet community. What are your interests here? I am friendly with Alexander. I know that he is a promoter of new gTLDs. It is no accident he has the excellent domain name Schubert.Berlin. Higher prices for legacy domain names, such as .org domain names at $100 or so, would make the new gTLDs he is promoting more attractive. Jonathan - I am fairly new here. You have strong opinions on these matters. What is your interest in these issues? As for your question about what shrill rhetoric may have motivated the nonprofits to comment, there is a blog post by NameCheap that they shared with their .org registrants that led many of them to comment, and some of them to use the form that the ICA created to facilitate comments. That blog post is here - https://www.namecheap.com/blog/keep-domain-prices-in-check/. I agree that the blog post raises the fear of sharply higher prices - "sky-high .org prices could be coming" and "Rather than a 10% increase to renew your domain next year, it could suddenly start charging registrars like Namecheap 100 times as much." You can read the post for yourself and form your own opinion. Yet what I wonder about is why are the opinions of the folks who joined this group - I mean, you even allowed a domain investor to join - more relevant that what the nonprofit community is saying loudly and clearly and consistently. To the extent that this group has any relevance at all, and actually has any overlap with its stated purpose of representing Internet users at large, shouldn't it be guided by the interests of the nonprofits as stated by those nonprofits themselves, rather than whoever wandered into this group for whatever unknown reason? Regards, Nat Cohen On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 4:15 PM Jonathan Zuck <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org<mailto:JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org>> wrote: Good point ________________________________ From: GTLD-WG <gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org>> on behalf of Alexander Schubert <alexander@schubert.berlin> Sent: Friday, November 22, 2019 4:12 PM To: 'CPWG' <cpwg@icann.org<mailto:cpwg@icann.org>> Subject: Re: [GTLD-WG] [CPWG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG Any price INCREASE up to about US $100 per year would be a POSITIVE: It scares scalpers away. The REAL risk we are facing is obviously the OPPOSITE: That PIR allows freebee “creates” (first year registrations) to hike the .org domain count. The result of such action: bad actors snatching up EVERY single generic term based .org; and expired domains. I am not afraid of rice hikes. I am afraid of the opposite: free “creates”. These monetization sites BADLY hurt the “.org” trust with Google. We shouldn’t ask ICANN for a “price cap” – rather for a guaranteed MINIMUM reg fee! Thanks, Alexander.berlin From: GTLD-WG [mailto:gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org>] On Behalf Of Jonathan Zuck Sent: Freitag, 22. November 2019 15:58 To: Kaili Kan <kankaili@gmail.com<mailto:kankaili@gmail.com>>; Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com<mailto:evanleibovitch@gmail.com>> Cc: CPWG <cpwg@icann.org<mailto:cpwg@icann.org>> Subject: Re: [GTLD-WG] [CPWG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG Yes, those are the same issues raised during the original discussion about .ORG but they are still pretty specific to folks in the secondary market if you go one layer down. I've got about a dozen .ORG domains registered which I suspect is more than most non-profits, and I'd be fine with the price quadrupling if it put a dent in the secondary market for confusingly similar, snapped up and turned into porn sites and just plain expensive domains. I've run an arts non-profit called DC Dogs for the past decade. I found it a LOT cheaper to get the .COM than the .ORG because the .ORG was being held by a domain investor. Several times a year, I get an email from a broker asking if I'm ready to buy the .ORG. And THIS year, I was breathlessly notified that there had been a HUGE price decrease so I could now pick it up for the low low price of $7,500! Another time, I switched from competitivetechnology.org<http://competitivetechnology.org> to actonline.org<http://actonline.org> and unfortunately allowed competitivetechnology.org<http://competitivetechnology.org> to lapse. It was immediately purchased and turned into a porn site, capitalizing on the traffic WE had established so to buy it back, I had to match the revenue it was making for the domain investor, something close to $10k. It's a little ironic to talk about non-profit management of .ORG when so many of the second level domains are in the hands of the most for profit actors in the market. We should also remember there are safeguards and PICs in the new contract that legacy domains do not need to implement and we have not evaluated their relative value to end users. As end users, we're most certainly not automatically for limiting IP rights, for example, because of the high correlation between infringement and malware. If we don't like the safeguards, we have a role to play in improving them which will go a LOT further than any reliance on someone's non-profit status to protect us. There are PLENTY of very greedy non-profits in the world whos executives make a great deal of money. I think the PIR CEO pay is something like $750k so before we cry a river over their loss, let's have a real discussion about how best to protect our interests in this. All this said, I have nothing against domain investors and they are simply a reflection of a free market (that will exist with, or without PIR) and I myself once sold activate.com<http://activate.com> for much more than I paid for it. However, I do not believe the internet community owes them anything and should not concern ourselves with their interests. Consequently, when they are the primary driver behind an initiative to control pricing, we should be wary of their motives. Yes, they managed to generate a lot of comments and yes, Nat, I'm sure those comments were legitimately from the organizations listed but we know little of how the problem is being described to those organizations or how shrill the rhetoric about domain takedowns, etc. What we DO know is that domain investors are the group with the MOST to lose here whereas doubling the price of innovatorsnetwork.org<http://innovatorsnetwork.org> will make a lot of cash for Ethos and not make a bit of difference to the Innovators Network Foundation. So Evan, I make no statement about the best outcome, because I have not yet studied it and I have NO problems with strange bedfellows if we're on the right side of something. I'm just not ready to ASSUME this is a bad development because folks with an entirely unique stake tell me so. All I ask is that we spend the time to discuss it. Jonathan ________________________________ From: Kaili Kan <kankaili@gmail.com<mailto:kankaili@gmail.com>> Sent: Friday, November 22, 2019 3:12 PM To: Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com<mailto:evanleibovitch@gmail.com>> Cc: Jonathan Zuck <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org<mailto:JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org>>; Dev Anand Teelucksingh <devtee@gmail.com<mailto:devtee@gmail.com>>; CPWG <cpwg@icann.org<mailto:cpwg@icann.org>> Subject: Re: [CPWG] [GTLD-WG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG After reading the letter signed by over 20 NGOs, I find it going beyond far potential price increases. The following are their listed concerns: -- The power to raise .ORG registration fees without the approval of ICANN or the .ORG community. A .ORG price hike would put many cash-strapped NGOs in the difficult position of either paying the increased fees or losing the legitimacy and brand recognition of a .ORG domain. -- The power to develop and implement Rights Protection Mechanisms unilaterally, without consulting the .ORG community. If such mechanisms are not carefully crafted in collaboration with the NGO community, they risk censoring completely legal nonprofit activities. -- The power to implement processes to suspend domain names based on accusations of “activity contrary to applicable law.” The .ORG registry should not implement such processes without understanding how state actors frequently target NGOs with allegations of illegal activity. If these are true, it seems that we have even more reasons to act. Kaili On Sat, Nov 23, 2019 at 3:56 AM Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com<mailto:evanleibovitch@gmail.com>> wrote: I am somewhat comforted by the observation that the Free Software Foundation and Electronic Frontier Foundation have signed on to the site, neither of which is associated with being corporate proxies. I share your concern about ICA. However, at various points in history we've partnered with many different parts of the ICANN ecosystem and this time we happen to be on the same side as an organization we often consider as an adversary. Strange bedfellows indeed but why not? I maintain my position that PIR should be given more leeway to set prices. That's not the issue to me. The change of PIR from nonprofit to for-profit has far deeper implications for trust that price increases will be reasonable and serving an interest beyond maximizing revenue. I had trust that a nonprofit PIR would treat the removal of price caps with prudence. I have no such confidence in a profit-maximizing PIR. ___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56 On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:50 p.m. Jonathan Zuck, <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org<mailto:JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org>> wrote: I confess I’d be interested to see who is behind this site. The talking points are very similar to those with which we were bombarded by ICA during the original discussions around .ORG. Deep down, we ALL know that the only ones truly harmed by a price increase are volume registrants. It was you who suggested that a price hike might actually be pro-consumer. Let’s not lose site of all that because we’re pissed at ISOC. Let’s try to keep from being manipulated again and do a reasoned analysis of the situation. From: GTLD-WG <gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org>> on behalf of Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com<mailto:evanleibovitch@gmail.com>> Date: Friday, November 22, 2019 at 1:41 PM To: Dev Anand Teelucksingh <devtee@gmail.com<mailto:devtee@gmail.com>> Cc: CPWG <cpwg@icann.org<mailto:cpwg@icann.org>> Subject: Re: [GTLD-WG] [CPWG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG Have a look at https://savedotorg.org Interesting list of signatories. Perhaps ALAC should endorse? ___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56 On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:16 p.m. Dev Anand Teelucksingh, <devtee@gmail.com<mailto:devtee@gmail.com>> wrote: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/nonprofit-community-stands-together-pr... _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org<mailto:CPWG@icann.org> https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on._______________________________________________ GTLD-WG mailing list GTLD-WG@atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:GTLD-WG@atlarge-lists.icann.org> https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/gtld-wg Working Group direct URL: https://community.icann.org/display/atlarge/New+GTLDs _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on. _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org<mailto:CPWG@icann.org> https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). 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Oh I guess this IS the same thread. Sorry about that. Nat, thank you for your thoughtful note here and who doesn’t love a good analogy to Dr. Seuss? Back when George Kirkos was part of At-Large, he made many of the same points about registries as service providers, property managers rather than landlords, etc. and it’s a strong point. Of course, it’s a bit simplistic as we have increasingly placed other responsibilities on them beyond “running a database” that involve market making, security, stability, PICs, etc. I don’t know how to value all of that but that’s the case for all the registries now. I’ve been on the side of the secondary market in fights with Ticketmaster making many of the same arguments. Of course, the challenge is when the secondary market becomes the primary market because of automation, etc. so that a concert is sold out minutes after tickets go on sale. While, thankfully, that’s not quite the case here, we do have some interesting challenges when a tiny arts non-profit needs to pay $7,500 for a domain that should only have been available to a non-profit to begin with and another has to pay $10k just keep orphaned links from going to a porn site. Both of these are quite a bit more of a hit to a non-profit than having to pay $20 instead of $10. You see my problem here? What if, instead, it was much more expensive to buy a domain? They’d still be the cheapest part of a brand but there might be fewer prospectors, fewer phishing scams, less typo squatting and dcdogs.org might only cost $35 dollars to register instead of $7,500. Now that’s not just the cast for registrants but for individual ends users as well hoping for a more predictable experience on the web. When we look at the rights management stuff, the same issue arises. Avoiding consumer confusion, fraud, malware is easier to do with good IP enforcement in the domain space as well. Any consumer protection agency will tell you that’s true. And yes, I have read the blog and I’ve seen a few emails that were used to get folks on board for the initial campaign against PIR and the rhetoric does seem a bit extreme to me, given the practical implications. I find it a bit difficult to see the ICA as the Lorax when it is, in fact, their business model to profit off those very same non-profits whose interests they claim to advance. Again, after careful consideration, we may end up at the same place for different reasons. I’m retired now. I used to run a trade association that was very aligned with trademark and copyright holders and served as part of the IPC to try and advance those interests. These days I concern myself solely with the focus and integrity of the ALAC and make every effort to ensure we explore the logical interests of individual end users with some rigor. I don’t have an opinion on where we should end up on this discussion; simply on how we get there. Hope that makes sense. Jonathan From: Nat Cohen <ncohen@telepathy.com> Date: Friday, November 22, 2019 at 5:18 PM To: Jonathan Zuck <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org> Cc: Alexander Schubert <alexander@schubert.berlin>, CPWG <cpwg@icann.org> Subject: Re: [CPWG] [GTLD-WG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG This discussion has taken an interesting turn - "very greedy non-profits", "turned it into a porn site", "any price INCREASE up to about $100 would be a POSITIVE". There's a lot to unpack here. I am a domain investor. I recognize it may seem odd for domain investors to care about how much nonprofits are paying for their .org domain names. Indeed, the primary focus of domain investors is .com domain names. .Org domain names represent a negligible holding in most investors' portfolios. Domain investors are first and foremost registrants. We care about registrant rights. We care about our ownership rights in our domain names. We want registry service providers to act like service providers. We don't like it when registries attempt to usurp the value in entire namespaces when those name spaces are legacy name spaces that they did not create nor nuture to maturity. As registrants, do registrants own their domain names, or do the registries own those domain names? That is a key question. The right to charge any price to renew a domain name is the right of an OWNER, not a contracted service provider. The right to tell EFF, ICANN, the Girl Scouts, and the registrants of ten million other .org domain names that their right to continue using their long term home on the Internet depends on paying PIR whatever price PIR wishes to impose, conveys to PIR the right of an owner. PIR runs a database. Actually they outsource the running of a database. The marginal cost of adding or renewing a domain name is a fraction of a cent. Yet PIR charges over $9 for performing that service - or rather for hiring someone else to perform that service - for an average cost of under $2 per domain name. As others have pointed out, the benefits from these agreements are concentrated in a couple of registries, in particular PIR and Verisign, while the harm is diffused across tens of millions of registrants. The harm suffered by the average registrant is not great enough to motivate them to engage with ICANN. So registries exert their influence on ICANN, the registrants don't participate, and the result is that the registrants are harmed while the registries negotiate sweetheart deals. One of the few businesses where registrations are concentrated such that the harm incurred is high enough to make it worthwhile to engage at ICANN is domain investing. Domain investors are similarly situated with other registrants as to registrant rights issues. You may not like our business model. You may have other issues with us. But in the absence of engagement by the millions of registrants around the world who bear the brunt of ICANN's policies but aren't here to participate in the process, we are speaking out. You can think of us like the Lorax in the Dr. Seuss book, we speak for the trees when the trees can't speak for themselves. One might ask about the legitimacy of the participants in At Large to speak on behalf of the global Internet community. What are your interests here? I am friendly with Alexander. I know that he is a promoter of new gTLDs. It is no accident he has the excellent domain name Schubert.Berlin. Higher prices for legacy domain names, such as .org domain names at $100 or so, would make the new gTLDs he is promoting more attractive. Jonathan - I am fairly new here. You have strong opinions on these matters. What is your interest in these issues? As for your question about what shrill rhetoric may have motivated the nonprofits to comment, there is a blog post by NameCheap that they shared with their .org registrants that led many of them to comment, and some of them to use the form that the ICA created to facilitate comments. That blog post is here - https://www.namecheap.com/blog/keep-domain-prices-in-check/. I agree that the blog post raises the fear of sharply higher prices - "sky-high .org prices could be coming" and "Rather than a 10% increase to renew your domain next year, it could suddenly start charging registrars like Namecheap 100 times as much." You can read the post for yourself and form your own opinion. Yet what I wonder about is why are the opinions of the folks who joined this group - I mean, you even allowed a domain investor to join - more relevant that what the nonprofit community is saying loudly and clearly and consistently. To the extent that this group has any relevance at all, and actually has any overlap with its stated purpose of representing Internet users at large, shouldn't it be guided by the interests of the nonprofits as stated by those nonprofits themselves, rather than whoever wandered into this group for whatever unknown reason? Regards, Nat Cohen On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 4:15 PM Jonathan Zuck <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org<mailto:JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org>> wrote: Good point ________________________________ From: GTLD-WG <gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org>> on behalf of Alexander Schubert <alexander@schubert.berlin> Sent: Friday, November 22, 2019 4:12 PM To: 'CPWG' <cpwg@icann.org<mailto:cpwg@icann.org>> Subject: Re: [GTLD-WG] [CPWG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG Any price INCREASE up to about US $100 per year would be a POSITIVE: It scares scalpers away. The REAL risk we are facing is obviously the OPPOSITE: That PIR allows freebee “creates” (first year registrations) to hike the .org domain count. The result of such action: bad actors snatching up EVERY single generic term based .org; and expired domains. I am not afraid of rice hikes. I am afraid of the opposite: free “creates”. These monetization sites BADLY hurt the “.org” trust with Google. We shouldn’t ask ICANN for a “price cap” – rather for a guaranteed MINIMUM reg fee! Thanks, Alexander.berlin From: GTLD-WG [mailto:gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org>] On Behalf Of Jonathan Zuck Sent: Freitag, 22. November 2019 15:58 To: Kaili Kan <kankaili@gmail.com<mailto:kankaili@gmail.com>>; Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com<mailto:evanleibovitch@gmail.com>> Cc: CPWG <cpwg@icann.org<mailto:cpwg@icann.org>> Subject: Re: [GTLD-WG] [CPWG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG Yes, those are the same issues raised during the original discussion about .ORG but they are still pretty specific to folks in the secondary market if you go one layer down. I've got about a dozen .ORG domains registered which I suspect is more than most non-profits, and I'd be fine with the price quadrupling if it put a dent in the secondary market for confusingly similar, snapped up and turned into porn sites and just plain expensive domains. I've run an arts non-profit called DC Dogs for the past decade. I found it a LOT cheaper to get the .COM than the .ORG because the .ORG was being held by a domain investor. Several times a year, I get an email from a broker asking if I'm ready to buy the .ORG. And THIS year, I was breathlessly notified that there had been a HUGE price decrease so I could now pick it up for the low low price of $7,500! Another time, I switched from competitivetechnology.org<http://competitivetechnology.org> to actonline.org<http://actonline.org> and unfortunately allowed competitivetechnology.org<http://competitivetechnology.org> to lapse. It was immediately purchased and turned into a porn site, capitalizing on the traffic WE had established so to buy it back, I had to match the revenue it was making for the domain investor, something close to $10k. It's a little ironic to talk about non-profit management of .ORG when so many of the second level domains are in the hands of the most for profit actors in the market. We should also remember there are safeguards and PICs in the new contract that legacy domains do not need to implement and we have not evaluated their relative value to end users. As end users, we're most certainly not automatically for limiting IP rights, for example, because of the high correlation between infringement and malware. If we don't like the safeguards, we have a role to play in improving them which will go a LOT further than any reliance on someone's non-profit status to protect us. There are PLENTY of very greedy non-profits in the world whos executives make a great deal of money. I think the PIR CEO pay is something like $750k so before we cry a river over their loss, let's have a real discussion about how best to protect our interests in this. All this said, I have nothing against domain investors and they are simply a reflection of a free market (that will exist with, or without PIR) and I myself once sold activate.com<http://activate.com> for much more than I paid for it. However, I do not believe the internet community owes them anything and should not concern ourselves with their interests. Consequently, when they are the primary driver behind an initiative to control pricing, we should be wary of their motives. Yes, they managed to generate a lot of comments and yes, Nat, I'm sure those comments were legitimately from the organizations listed but we know little of how the problem is being described to those organizations or how shrill the rhetoric about domain takedowns, etc. What we DO know is that domain investors are the group with the MOST to lose here whereas doubling the price of innovatorsnetwork.org<http://innovatorsnetwork.org> will make a lot of cash for Ethos and not make a bit of difference to the Innovators Network Foundation. So Evan, I make no statement about the best outcome, because I have not yet studied it and I have NO problems with strange bedfellows if we're on the right side of something. I'm just not ready to ASSUME this is a bad development because folks with an entirely unique stake tell me so. All I ask is that we spend the time to discuss it. Jonathan ________________________________ From: Kaili Kan <kankaili@gmail.com<mailto:kankaili@gmail.com>> Sent: Friday, November 22, 2019 3:12 PM To: Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com<mailto:evanleibovitch@gmail.com>> Cc: Jonathan Zuck <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org<mailto:JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org>>; Dev Anand Teelucksingh <devtee@gmail.com<mailto:devtee@gmail.com>>; CPWG <cpwg@icann.org<mailto:cpwg@icann.org>> Subject: Re: [CPWG] [GTLD-WG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG After reading the letter signed by over 20 NGOs, I find it going beyond far potential price increases. The following are their listed concerns: -- The power to raise .ORG registration fees without the approval of ICANN or the .ORG community. A .ORG price hike would put many cash-strapped NGOs in the difficult position of either paying the increased fees or losing the legitimacy and brand recognition of a .ORG domain. -- The power to develop and implement Rights Protection Mechanisms unilaterally, without consulting the .ORG community. If such mechanisms are not carefully crafted in collaboration with the NGO community, they risk censoring completely legal nonprofit activities. -- The power to implement processes to suspend domain names based on accusations of “activity contrary to applicable law.” The .ORG registry should not implement such processes without understanding how state actors frequently target NGOs with allegations of illegal activity. If these are true, it seems that we have even more reasons to act. Kaili On Sat, Nov 23, 2019 at 3:56 AM Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com<mailto:evanleibovitch@gmail.com>> wrote: I am somewhat comforted by the observation that the Free Software Foundation and Electronic Frontier Foundation have signed on to the site, neither of which is associated with being corporate proxies. I share your concern about ICA. However, at various points in history we've partnered with many different parts of the ICANN ecosystem and this time we happen to be on the same side as an organization we often consider as an adversary. Strange bedfellows indeed but why not? I maintain my position that PIR should be given more leeway to set prices. That's not the issue to me. The change of PIR from nonprofit to for-profit has far deeper implications for trust that price increases will be reasonable and serving an interest beyond maximizing revenue. I had trust that a nonprofit PIR would treat the removal of price caps with prudence. I have no such confidence in a profit-maximizing PIR. ___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56 On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:50 p.m. Jonathan Zuck, <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org<mailto:JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org>> wrote: I confess I’d be interested to see who is behind this site. The talking points are very similar to those with which we were bombarded by ICA during the original discussions around .ORG. Deep down, we ALL know that the only ones truly harmed by a price increase are volume registrants. It was you who suggested that a price hike might actually be pro-consumer. Let’s not lose site of all that because we’re pissed at ISOC. Let’s try to keep from being manipulated again and do a reasoned analysis of the situation. From: GTLD-WG <gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org>> on behalf of Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com<mailto:evanleibovitch@gmail.com>> Date: Friday, November 22, 2019 at 1:41 PM To: Dev Anand Teelucksingh <devtee@gmail.com<mailto:devtee@gmail.com>> Cc: CPWG <cpwg@icann.org<mailto:cpwg@icann.org>> Subject: Re: [GTLD-WG] [CPWG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG Have a look at https://savedotorg.org Interesting list of signatories. Perhaps ALAC should endorse? ___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56 On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:16 p.m. Dev Anand Teelucksingh, <devtee@gmail.com<mailto:devtee@gmail.com>> wrote: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/nonprofit-community-stands-together-pr... _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org<mailto:CPWG@icann.org> https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). 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Again, Nat. I’m simply putting forth arguments for both sides. If my assumptions are wrong, as you suggest, I’m happy to be better educated. I am truly only preaching we spend some time on this rather than make a knee jerk decision. I make only two points: 1. A non-profit is not necessarily a better steward of .ORG 2. The interests of individual end users might not be in perfect alignment with domain investors or non-profit registrants for that matter. I leave room for either outcome but a rush to judgement, heavily influenced by a campaign managed by a for-profit industry association that stands to lose the most, seems imprudent, that’s all. Surely you can see that. As for your other points. I don’t consider what’s happened to DC Dogs to be domain abuse. It’s simply the free market for domains. That said, it does point to the flaw in the notion that a non-profit registry is well equipped to protect non-profits from profiteering and it’s probably not in the interests of consumers or their trust in the internet that DC Dogs had to settle for a .com because the .org was in the hands, not of a competing non-profit, but a profiteer. The porn site thing IS a form of abuse, I suppose, but there would certainly be less of it if prices were higher, a notion put into my head by Evan who is now really pissed at ISOC and with good reason but that doesn’t detract from the logic of his original analysis. If feel as though your argument that you are not profiting off “established non-profits” to be a distinction without a difference. So you’re not profiting off of the non-profits that are already worth millions but you are off of new entities just trying to get started? So it’s somehow worse that an established non-profit might have to pay $20 for a domain name than that a new one might have to pay $5k, for example? I’m missing the logic. Why are .ORG names even available to for profit registrants? The “we” in my previous email was “individual end users,” the constituency represented, however imperfectly, by the ALAC. I honestly don’t know if my strawman arguments here are better than those advanced by EFF and others. As we go through the process of evaluating them, we might very well reach the conclusion that the free speech arguments should prevail and I would certainly find those more persuasive than the price concerns which seem overblown. I would just like us to stay focused on the interests of individual internet users and endeavor to be rational in the evaluation of those interests. Jonathan From: Nat Cohen <ncohen@telepathy.com> Date: Friday, November 22, 2019 at 10:01 PM To: Jonathan Zuck <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org> Cc: Alexander Schubert <alexander@schubert.berlin>, CPWG <cpwg@icann.org> Subject: Re: [CPWG] [GTLD-WG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG Jonathan, Thanks for this response. I'm sorry you had that poor experience with regard to dcdogs.org<http://dcdogs.org> and the other domain name you mentioned. That is not the behavior of professional domain investors, yet certainly there are opportunities for that kind of abuse online. I do disagree with your statement that it is the ICA's business model to profit off of the same non-profits whose interests we claim to advance. We are not profiting off of established non-profits. They already have their domain names and do not need to buy them in the secondary market. The ones profiting from established nonprofits are the ones overcharging them for registering and renewing their existing domain names. As to the comments made in your previous email - I am impressed with the public spiritedness of many people in this group. What does it mean to evaluate interests logically? If one starts with faulty assumptions, and then applies logic, one arrives at faulty conclusions. I'm not sure why you are so intent on trying to justify the removal the price caps on PIR and hesitant about condemning the sale of PIR to Ethos Capital, when the nonprofits who are most affected by these developments are so adamantly opposed to them. It is possible that Ethos is buying PIR with the intention of not raising prices a cent, as you suggest - but not very plausible. Before the .org agreement renewal was approved, you made a "counterintuitive" argument in favor of raising prices: "However, the strongest, albeit counterintuitive argument for the removal of price caps is that we actually WANT higher prices. It became obvious to the CCT Review Team that the caps represent a price point with which it is difficult for new entrants to compete and that an increase in the median price of gTLDs would likely be good for competition." (https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/cpwg/2019-April/001116.html) Who is the "we" in that statement? Are you speaking as a steward for the interests of the end users here? On what basis should we prefer your rationales above to the reasons offered in the EFF letter circulated today, and the comments of National Council of Nonprofits, the ASAE, the AARP, the National Geographic Society and so many others, made earlier? Regards, Nat On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 9:29 PM Jonathan Zuck <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org<mailto:JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org>> wrote: Oh I guess this IS the same thread. Sorry about that. Nat, thank you for your thoughtful note here and who doesn’t love a good analogy to Dr. Seuss? Back when George Kirkos was part of At-Large, he made many of the same points about registries as service providers, property managers rather than landlords, etc. and it’s a strong point. Of course, it’s a bit simplistic as we have increasingly placed other responsibilities on them beyond “running a database” that involve market making, security, stability, PICs, etc. I don’t know how to value all of that but that’s the case for all the registries now. I’ve been on the side of the secondary market in fights with Ticketmaster making many of the same arguments. Of course, the challenge is when the secondary market becomes the primary market because of automation, etc. so that a concert is sold out minutes after tickets go on sale. While, thankfully, that’s not quite the case here, we do have some interesting challenges when a tiny arts non-profit needs to pay $7,500 for a domain that should only have been available to a non-profit to begin with and another has to pay $10k just keep orphaned links from going to a porn site. Both of these are quite a bit more of a hit to a non-profit than having to pay $20 instead of $10. You see my problem here? What if, instead, it was much more expensive to buy a domain? They’d still be the cheapest part of a brand but there might be fewer prospectors, fewer phishing scams, less typo squatting and dcdogs.org<http://dcdogs.org> might only cost $35 dollars to register instead of $7,500. Now that’s not just the cast for registrants but for individual ends users as well hoping for a more predictable experience on the web. When we look at the rights management stuff, the same issue arises. Avoiding consumer confusion, fraud, malware is easier to do with good IP enforcement in the domain space as well. Any consumer protection agency will tell you that’s true. And yes, I have read the blog and I’ve seen a few emails that were used to get folks on board for the initial campaign against PIR and the rhetoric does seem a bit extreme to me, given the practical implications. I find it a bit difficult to see the ICA as the Lorax when it is, in fact, their business model to profit off those very same non-profits whose interests they claim to advance. Again, after careful consideration, we may end up at the same place for different reasons. I’m retired now. I used to run a trade association that was very aligned with trademark and copyright holders and served as part of the IPC to try and advance those interests. These days I concern myself solely with the focus and integrity of the ALAC and make every effort to ensure we explore the logical interests of individual end users with some rigor. I don’t have an opinion on where we should end up on this discussion; simply on how we get there. Hope that makes sense. Jonathan From: Nat Cohen <ncohen@telepathy.com<mailto:ncohen@telepathy.com>> Date: Friday, November 22, 2019 at 5:18 PM To: Jonathan Zuck <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org<mailto:JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org>> Cc: Alexander Schubert <alexander@schubert.berlin>, CPWG <cpwg@icann.org<mailto:cpwg@icann.org>> Subject: Re: [CPWG] [GTLD-WG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG This discussion has taken an interesting turn - "very greedy non-profits", "turned it into a porn site", "any price INCREASE up to about $100 would be a POSITIVE". There's a lot to unpack here. I am a domain investor. I recognize it may seem odd for domain investors to care about how much nonprofits are paying for their .org domain names. Indeed, the primary focus of domain investors is .com domain names. .Org domain names represent a negligible holding in most investors' portfolios. Domain investors are first and foremost registrants. We care about registrant rights. We care about our ownership rights in our domain names. We want registry service providers to act like service providers. We don't like it when registries attempt to usurp the value in entire namespaces when those name spaces are legacy name spaces that they did not create nor nuture to maturity. As registrants, do registrants own their domain names, or do the registries own those domain names? That is a key question. The right to charge any price to renew a domain name is the right of an OWNER, not a contracted service provider. The right to tell EFF, ICANN, the Girl Scouts, and the registrants of ten million other .org domain names that their right to continue using their long term home on the Internet depends on paying PIR whatever price PIR wishes to impose, conveys to PIR the right of an owner. PIR runs a database. Actually they outsource the running of a database. The marginal cost of adding or renewing a domain name is a fraction of a cent. Yet PIR charges over $9 for performing that service - or rather for hiring someone else to perform that service - for an average cost of under $2 per domain name. As others have pointed out, the benefits from these agreements are concentrated in a couple of registries, in particular PIR and Verisign, while the harm is diffused across tens of millions of registrants. The harm suffered by the average registrant is not great enough to motivate them to engage with ICANN. So registries exert their influence on ICANN, the registrants don't participate, and the result is that the registrants are harmed while the registries negotiate sweetheart deals. One of the few businesses where registrations are concentrated such that the harm incurred is high enough to make it worthwhile to engage at ICANN is domain investing. Domain investors are similarly situated with other registrants as to registrant rights issues. You may not like our business model. You may have other issues with us. But in the absence of engagement by the millions of registrants around the world who bear the brunt of ICANN's policies but aren't here to participate in the process, we are speaking out. You can think of us like the Lorax in the Dr. Seuss book, we speak for the trees when the trees can't speak for themselves. One might ask about the legitimacy of the participants in At Large to speak on behalf of the global Internet community. What are your interests here? I am friendly with Alexander. I know that he is a promoter of new gTLDs. It is no accident he has the excellent domain name Schubert.Berlin. Higher prices for legacy domain names, such as .org domain names at $100 or so, would make the new gTLDs he is promoting more attractive. Jonathan - I am fairly new here. You have strong opinions on these matters. What is your interest in these issues? As for your question about what shrill rhetoric may have motivated the nonprofits to comment, there is a blog post by NameCheap that they shared with their .org registrants that led many of them to comment, and some of them to use the form that the ICA created to facilitate comments. That blog post is here - https://www.namecheap.com/blog/keep-domain-prices-in-check/. I agree that the blog post raises the fear of sharply higher prices - "sky-high .org prices could be coming" and "Rather than a 10% increase to renew your domain next year, it could suddenly start charging registrars like Namecheap 100 times as much." You can read the post for yourself and form your own opinion. Yet what I wonder about is why are the opinions of the folks who joined this group - I mean, you even allowed a domain investor to join - more relevant that what the nonprofit community is saying loudly and clearly and consistently. To the extent that this group has any relevance at all, and actually has any overlap with its stated purpose of representing Internet users at large, shouldn't it be guided by the interests of the nonprofits as stated by those nonprofits themselves, rather than whoever wandered into this group for whatever unknown reason? Regards, Nat Cohen On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 4:15 PM Jonathan Zuck <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org<mailto:JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org>> wrote: Good point ________________________________ From: GTLD-WG <gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org>> on behalf of Alexander Schubert <alexander@schubert.berlin> Sent: Friday, November 22, 2019 4:12 PM To: 'CPWG' <cpwg@icann.org<mailto:cpwg@icann.org>> Subject: Re: [GTLD-WG] [CPWG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG Any price INCREASE up to about US $100 per year would be a POSITIVE: It scares scalpers away. The REAL risk we are facing is obviously the OPPOSITE: That PIR allows freebee “creates” (first year registrations) to hike the .org domain count. The result of such action: bad actors snatching up EVERY single generic term based .org; and expired domains. I am not afraid of rice hikes. I am afraid of the opposite: free “creates”. These monetization sites BADLY hurt the “.org” trust with Google. We shouldn’t ask ICANN for a “price cap” – rather for a guaranteed MINIMUM reg fee! Thanks, Alexander.berlin From: GTLD-WG [mailto:gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org>] On Behalf Of Jonathan Zuck Sent: Freitag, 22. November 2019 15:58 To: Kaili Kan <kankaili@gmail.com<mailto:kankaili@gmail.com>>; Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com<mailto:evanleibovitch@gmail.com>> Cc: CPWG <cpwg@icann.org<mailto:cpwg@icann.org>> Subject: Re: [GTLD-WG] [CPWG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG Yes, those are the same issues raised during the original discussion about .ORG but they are still pretty specific to folks in the secondary market if you go one layer down. I've got about a dozen .ORG domains registered which I suspect is more than most non-profits, and I'd be fine with the price quadrupling if it put a dent in the secondary market for confusingly similar, snapped up and turned into porn sites and just plain expensive domains. I've run an arts non-profit called DC Dogs for the past decade. I found it a LOT cheaper to get the .COM than the .ORG because the .ORG was being held by a domain investor. Several times a year, I get an email from a broker asking if I'm ready to buy the .ORG. And THIS year, I was breathlessly notified that there had been a HUGE price decrease so I could now pick it up for the low low price of $7,500! Another time, I switched from competitivetechnology.org<http://competitivetechnology.org> to actonline.org<http://actonline.org> and unfortunately allowed competitivetechnology.org<http://competitivetechnology.org> to lapse. It was immediately purchased and turned into a porn site, capitalizing on the traffic WE had established so to buy it back, I had to match the revenue it was making for the domain investor, something close to $10k. It's a little ironic to talk about non-profit management of .ORG when so many of the second level domains are in the hands of the most for profit actors in the market. We should also remember there are safeguards and PICs in the new contract that legacy domains do not need to implement and we have not evaluated their relative value to end users. As end users, we're most certainly not automatically for limiting IP rights, for example, because of the high correlation between infringement and malware. If we don't like the safeguards, we have a role to play in improving them which will go a LOT further than any reliance on someone's non-profit status to protect us. There are PLENTY of very greedy non-profits in the world whos executives make a great deal of money. I think the PIR CEO pay is something like $750k so before we cry a river over their loss, let's have a real discussion about how best to protect our interests in this. All this said, I have nothing against domain investors and they are simply a reflection of a free market (that will exist with, or without PIR) and I myself once sold activate.com<http://activate.com> for much more than I paid for it. However, I do not believe the internet community owes them anything and should not concern ourselves with their interests. Consequently, when they are the primary driver behind an initiative to control pricing, we should be wary of their motives. Yes, they managed to generate a lot of comments and yes, Nat, I'm sure those comments were legitimately from the organizations listed but we know little of how the problem is being described to those organizations or how shrill the rhetoric about domain takedowns, etc. What we DO know is that domain investors are the group with the MOST to lose here whereas doubling the price of innovatorsnetwork.org<http://innovatorsnetwork.org> will make a lot of cash for Ethos and not make a bit of difference to the Innovators Network Foundation. So Evan, I make no statement about the best outcome, because I have not yet studied it and I have NO problems with strange bedfellows if we're on the right side of something. I'm just not ready to ASSUME this is a bad development because folks with an entirely unique stake tell me so. All I ask is that we spend the time to discuss it. Jonathan ________________________________ From: Kaili Kan <kankaili@gmail.com<mailto:kankaili@gmail.com>> Sent: Friday, November 22, 2019 3:12 PM To: Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com<mailto:evanleibovitch@gmail.com>> Cc: Jonathan Zuck <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org<mailto:JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org>>; Dev Anand Teelucksingh <devtee@gmail.com<mailto:devtee@gmail.com>>; CPWG <cpwg@icann.org<mailto:cpwg@icann.org>> Subject: Re: [CPWG] [GTLD-WG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG After reading the letter signed by over 20 NGOs, I find it going beyond far potential price increases. The following are their listed concerns: -- The power to raise .ORG registration fees without the approval of ICANN or the .ORG community. A .ORG price hike would put many cash-strapped NGOs in the difficult position of either paying the increased fees or losing the legitimacy and brand recognition of a .ORG domain. -- The power to develop and implement Rights Protection Mechanisms unilaterally, without consulting the .ORG community. If such mechanisms are not carefully crafted in collaboration with the NGO community, they risk censoring completely legal nonprofit activities. -- The power to implement processes to suspend domain names based on accusations of “activity contrary to applicable law.” The .ORG registry should not implement such processes without understanding how state actors frequently target NGOs with allegations of illegal activity. If these are true, it seems that we have even more reasons to act. Kaili On Sat, Nov 23, 2019 at 3:56 AM Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com<mailto:evanleibovitch@gmail.com>> wrote: I am somewhat comforted by the observation that the Free Software Foundation and Electronic Frontier Foundation have signed on to the site, neither of which is associated with being corporate proxies. I share your concern about ICA. However, at various points in history we've partnered with many different parts of the ICANN ecosystem and this time we happen to be on the same side as an organization we often consider as an adversary. Strange bedfellows indeed but why not? I maintain my position that PIR should be given more leeway to set prices. That's not the issue to me. The change of PIR from nonprofit to for-profit has far deeper implications for trust that price increases will be reasonable and serving an interest beyond maximizing revenue. I had trust that a nonprofit PIR would treat the removal of price caps with prudence. I have no such confidence in a profit-maximizing PIR. ___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56 On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:50 p.m. Jonathan Zuck, <JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org<mailto:JZuck@innovatorsnetwork.org>> wrote: I confess I’d be interested to see who is behind this site. The talking points are very similar to those with which we were bombarded by ICA during the original discussions around .ORG. Deep down, we ALL know that the only ones truly harmed by a price increase are volume registrants. It was you who suggested that a price hike might actually be pro-consumer. Let’s not lose site of all that because we’re pissed at ISOC. Let’s try to keep from being manipulated again and do a reasoned analysis of the situation. From: GTLD-WG <gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org<mailto:gtld-wg-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org>> on behalf of Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com<mailto:evanleibovitch@gmail.com>> Date: Friday, November 22, 2019 at 1:41 PM To: Dev Anand Teelucksingh <devtee@gmail.com<mailto:devtee@gmail.com>> Cc: CPWG <cpwg@icann.org<mailto:cpwg@icann.org>> Subject: Re: [GTLD-WG] [CPWG] EFF : Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG Have a look at https://savedotorg.org Interesting list of signatories. Perhaps ALAC should endorse? ___________________ Evan Leibovitch, Toronto @evanleibovitch/@el56 On Fri., Nov. 22, 2019, 1:16 p.m. Dev Anand Teelucksingh, <devtee@gmail.com<mailto:devtee@gmail.com>> wrote: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/nonprofit-community-stands-together-pr... _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org<mailto:CPWG@icann.org> https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). 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You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on. _______________________________________________ CPWG mailing list CPWG@icann.org<mailto:CPWG@icann.org> https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg _______________________________________________ By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.