Despite the fact that I have been involved in the domain name investment space for close to 15 years (full time for 12), I still don’t have expert level knowledge about the Domain Name System (DNS). I know enough about DNS to get by, but I would not consider myself anything close to an expert when it comes to DNS.
ICANN will be hosting a free webinar to help people learn more about DNS Fundamentals. The webinar was announced this morning on ICANN’s Twitter feed:
There has been quite a bit of coverage about the Ethos Capital acquisition of PIR (and the .org registry) for a reported sale price of $1.135 billion. Andrew Allemann of Domain Name Wire has done a particularly good job of covering this, as has Kevin Murphy of Domain Incite and several others. In addition, there has been mainstream coverage of the proposed deal in the Wall St. Journal, The Register, ArsTechnica, and other news outlets with considerable reach.
There has been a lot of coverage of the news that Public Interest Registry (PIR), operator of the .org registry, is going to be acquired by a private equity firm called Ethos Capital. Many of these articles have been highly critical of the announced deal. Here are a handful of the articles and blog posts I have seen that were written in the wake of the PIR / .org acquisition announcement:
Earlier this morning, Rick Schwartz posted an “Emergency Industry Alert in the form of a tweet to generate awareness for a proposal from an ICANN Working Group that could be problematic for domain investors. In his tweet, Rick issued a call to action to the Internet Commerce Association (ICA):
**EMERGENCY INDUSTRY ALERT!**#ICANN Proposal #15, would result in the suspension of an entire portfolio of #Domains if deemed a “repeat offender” with *2* #domain dispute losses! (not just the domains that were in dispute!)@ICADomains Please step in!https://t.co/7HeMjeRIsF pic.twitter.com/2LozRbDluN
— Rick Schwartz 👑 DomainKing® (@DomainKing) November 18, 2019
Brands & Domains 2019 is a domain industry event focused on .Brand domain names. The event is being organized by the Brand Registry Group (BRG), “an association of companies and organisations working together to champion the use of brand top-level domains.” Brands & Domains 2019 will be taking place in Montreal, Canada on November 7th at Le Westin Montréal. The event coincides with the ICANN66 meeting also being held in Montreal.
Here’s a description of the event, from the event ticketing page:
On a number of occasions, readers have asked what happens to a registry’s domain names should the registry go out of business. Domain registrants have a business relationship with a registrar, but the registry actually manages the extension. For instance, Verisign operates the .com registry and Donuts operates the .Ventures registry. ICANN has a back-up plan in place in the event a registry goes out of business or otherwise fails, and there are three registries that are approved by ICANN to step-in if/when necessary.
Nominet reached out to me to share a press release announcing it was re-appointed to serve as one of ICANN’s three EBERO operators. EBERO stands for Emergency Back-End Registry Operators. If a new gTLD registry fails, one of the three EBERO operators will be selected by ICANN to step in an take over the management of the registry.
