Name: Ethos Capital Is Grabbing Power Over Domain Names Again, Risking Censorship-For-Profit. Will ICANN Intervene?
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Ethos Capital Is Grabbing Power Over Domain Names Again, Risking Censorship-For-Profit. Will ICANN Intervene?

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Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItEthos Capital is at it again. In 2019, this secretive private equity firm that includes insiders from the domain name industry the nonprofit that runs the .ORG domain. A huge coalition of nonprofits and users . Governments expressed alarm, and ICANN (the entity in charge of the internet’s domain name system) . Now Ethos is buying a controlling stake in , the largest operator of “new generic top-level domains.” Donuts controls a large swathe of the domain name space. And through a recent , it also runs the technical operations of the .ORG domain. This acquisition raises the threat of increased censorship-for-profit: suspending or transferring domain names against the wishes of the user at the request of powerful corporations or governments. That’s why we’re the ICANN Board to demand changes to Donuts’ registry contracts to protect its users’ speech rights.Donuts is big. It operates about 240 top-level domains, including .charity, .community, .fund, .healthcare, .news, .republican, and .university. And last year it , another registry company that also runs the technical operations of the .ORG domain. Donuts already has questionable practices when it comes to safeguarding its users’ speech rights. Its contracts with ICANN contain unusual provisions that give Donuts an unreviewable and effectively unlimited right to suspend domain names—causing websites and other internet services to disappear.Relying on those contracts, Donuts has cozied up to powerful corporate interests at the expense of its users. In 2016, Donuts made an with the Motion Picture Association to suspend domain names of websites that MPA accused of copyright infringement, without any court process or right of appeal. These suspensions happen without transparency: Donuts and MPA haven’t even disclosed the number of domains that have been suspended through their agreement since 2017.Donuts also gives trademark holders the ability to the registration of domain names across all of Donuts’ top-level domains. In effect, this lets trademark holders “own” words and prevent others from using them as domain names, even in top-level domains that have nothing to do with the products or services for which a trademark is used. It’s a legal entitlement that isn’t part of any country’s trademark law, and it was considered and rejected by ICANN’s multistakeholder policy-making community.These practices could accelerate and expand with Ethos Capital at the helm. As we learned last year during the fight for .ORG, Ethos expects to deliver high returns to its investors while preserving its ability to change the rules for domain name registrants, potentially in harmful ways. Ethos refused meaningful dialogue with domain name users, instead proposing an illusion of public oversight and promoting it with a slick public relations campaign. And private equity investors have a sordid record of buying up vital institutions like hospitals, burdening them with debt, and leaving them financially shaky or even insolvent.Although Ethos’s purchase of Donuts appears to have been approved by regulators, ICANN should still intervene. Like all registry operators, Donuts has contracts with ICANN that allow it to run the registry databases for its domains. ICANN should give this acquisition as much scrutiny as it gave Ethos’s attempt to buy .ORG. And to prevent Ethos and Donuts from selling censorship as a service at the expense of domain name users, ICANN should insist on removing the broad grants of censorship power from Donuts’ registry contracts. ICANN did the right thing last year when confronted with the takeover of .ORG. We hope it does the right thing again by reining in Ethos and Donuts.&nbsp;Share ItFormer EFF intern Shashank Sirivolu contributed to this blog post. Social media users who have sued companies for deleting, demonetizing, and otherwise moderating their content have tried several arguments that this violates their constitutional rights. Courts have consistently ruled against them because social media platforms themselves have the First Amendment...In a new round of talks this week to formulate a , EFF is calling for strictly limiting the scope of the convention’s international cooperation provisions and safeguards to ensure that states respect human rights when responding to legal assistance requests.EFF is among a group of ...Since the U.S. Supreme Court overruled a half century of precedent supporting the constitutional right to abortion access, numerous states have moved towards making abortion illegal and restricting additional reproductive health services. 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OFAC explained its sanction by saying “Tornado Cash (Tornado) is a virtual currency ...Even if you think that online intermediaries should be more proactive in detecting, deprioritizing, or removing certain user speech, the requirements on intermediaries to review all content before publication—often called “general monitoring” or “upload filtering”—raises serious human rights concerns, both for freedom of expression and for privacy.General monitoring is problematic...Government involvement in content moderation raises serious human rights concerns in every context, and these concerns are further troubling when the involvement originates with law enforcement. We recently filed a with the Meta Oversight Board urging it to treat this issue seriously.When sites cooperate with government agencies, it...Students should not have to fear expulsion for expressing themselves on social media after school and off-campus, but that is just what happened to the plaintiff in C1.G v. Siegfried. Last month, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the student’s expulsion violated his First Amendment rights.The UK government has had to revise its into a proposal that wouldn’t harm users’ basic rights. It has failed to do so, and the bill should be scrapped. The current bill is a threat to free expression, and it undermines...Share It

Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItEthos Capital is at it again. In 2019, this secretive private equity firm that includes insiders from the domain name industry the nonprofit that runs the .ORG domain. A huge coalition of nonprofits and users . Governments expressed alarm, and ICANN (the entity in charge of the internet’s domain name system) . Now Ethos is buying a controlling stake in , the largest operator of “new generic top-level domains.” Donuts controls a large swathe of the domain name space. And through a recent , it also runs the technical...

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Mitch Stoltz

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Ethos Capital Is Grabbing Power Over Domain Names Again, Risking Censorship-For-Profit. Will ICANN Intervene?

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