Now it’s Europe’s turn to try to circumvent ICANN DNS policies

Many large American businesses – notably, Facebook and the intellectual property interests – are strongly interested in retaining free and unrestricted access to domain name registrants’ personal information (known as Whois data). As it became clear that ICANN’s multistakeholder process would restrict that access to comply with Europe's privacy regulation,...

ICANN, Whois and Global Data Governance

Although few people are aware of it, ICANN and the domain name system are on the front lines of the transnational data governance issues raised by the clash between European privacy law and American (and eventually Chinese and Indian) information industries. Prompted by Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ICANN...

No real winners in dot ORG decision

Yesterday the ICANN Board refused to approve the sale of the .ORG registry to Ethos Capital. This is being hailed as a great victory for the public interest by some, and as a lamentable “failure to follow ICANN’s bylaws, processes, and contracts” by the parties to the proposed sale. In fact, it is...