“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” ― George Orwell
Forge Global, a private securities marketplace, revealed in a recent SEC filing that it had acquired the forge.com domain name in the third quarter of 2021 for USD $2,202,000. This was documented on pages F-96 and F-97 of the filing.
Forge Global announced in September its intention to go public in a $2 billion SPAC deal.
ICANN has a public comment period that ends today for “Proposed Revisions to the ICANN Documentary Information Disclosure Policy.” Below is a PDF of my full submission, which begins as follows:
Dear ICANN org,
In the Harry Potter series of books and films, access to the Marauder’s Map was granted by saying the phrase “I solemnly swear that I am up to no good” after tapping the map. I imagine that the ICANN staff who crafted these proposed changes to the Documentary Information Disclosure Policy (DIDP) had that quote in mind, either explicitly or implicitly, when they sat down to edit the existing version of the DIDP.
[read the rest in the following PDF]
In mid-October, I sent an open letter to the ICANN Board regarding IGO protections. Today, they responded with the following letter (which should find its way to the ICANN Correspondence page shortly):
In response, I wrote the following:
BY EMAIL ONLY
December 9, 2021
Dear Mr. Botterman,
I have received your letter of today, responding to my prior correspondence.
I am encouraged by your statement that “it will not be appropriate to
provide greater protection to IGOs than what exists under
international law”. However it’s a fact that current policy already
provides greater protection to IGOs than what exists under
international law. Similarly, the current EPDP’s work threatens to go
much further, thereby harming domain name registrants’ rights by
providing IGOs with greater rights than exist under international law.
If your statement that “it will not be appropriate to provide greater
protection to IGOs than what exists under international law” is
correct (and it’s a statement I agree with), then ICANN should
terminate the EPDP and roll back the policies that exceed the actual
rights of IGOs under international law.
As for the “Reply Period Public Comments”, it is not correct that
their discontinuation in 2014 represented any “improvement” of the
process. Furthermore, that change continues to violate the Bylaws,
which literally require a reasonable opportunity to reply to the
comments of others. If a comment is submitted on the final day, for
example, or even in the last 30 minutes of a comment period, it is
unreasonable to require the public to respond within that same day or
within 30 minutes, as the case may be. Indeed, your own reply to my
short correspondence took nearly 2 months, which demonstrates that the
public generally needs weeks to read and consider their own responses.
Sincerely,
George Kirikos
416-588-0269
http://www.leap.com/