ICANN announces extension to review .org sale submission

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced that it has agreed with PIR over a 30-day extension of ICANN’s time to review PIR’s submissions concerning the .org sale. Under the org registry agreement, PIR must obtain ICANN’s prior approval before any transaction that would result in a change of control of the .org registry. PIR sent a formal notification to ICANN of the proposed .org transaction in November 2019 (it then refused to allow ICANN to publish the notification). ICANN asked for additional clarifications in December 2019; PIR submitted confidential responses to ICANN on 20 December, and in January 2020 ICANN published a redacted version of those responses, as submitted by PIR.