[ncdnhc-discuss] Board Positions on .ORG

[James Love]

I share the concern over the creation of a sham or front non-profit entity
that is really controlled and financed by a for profit registry operator.
There are some things that could be done to prevent this from being a
problem.

1.   The ICANN staff and board should not create extremely expensive and
overly burdensome requirements to enter the bidding.  That way a non profit
with substantial respect and ability could justify getting involved, without
having to "donate" lots of money to lawyers and ICANN, just to express
interest.

2.   The bid could mandate that the choice of registry "operator" made made
after the bid, among operators ICANN considers qualified if necessary.  A
two stage award would first select the non-profit, and then the non-profit
would then pick the technical operator.  The technical operator could then
be picked by a competitive bid or something.

3.  In the first stage of the bidding, to select the non-profit, attention
could be given to management model and qualifications for the non-profit
that were considered important.   For example, would the non-profit seek to
obtain low prices for registry services, or to fund good works?   How would
it deal with the  marketing of .org?   And if to fund good works, who would
decide who got the money?   Here I have suggested the .org domain holders
could vote on which non-profit they wanted to manage their TLD.    If voting
is something people hate (not me, I like voting), why not have the NCC
decide, subject to some conflict of interest rules on the NCC.  The NCC
seems the only body in ICANN who would have some reason to speak for the
.org domain holders.

 Jamie


----- Original Message -----
From: "Alejandro Pisanty - DGSCA y FQ, UNAM" <apisan at servidor.unam.mx>
> One of them addresses a concern expressed in the last few hours by Adam
> Peake, viz that a company interested in the business of .org set up a
> "front" organization. Only a couple of the efforts of this kind have been
> mentioned explicitly here. Some NCDNHC participants have been part of
> efforts to set up .org steering organizations with known business backing;