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Comment by rshnotsecure | Hacker News Reader

Ethos Capital is clearly a front company. There is widespread agreement on this.

I disagree with the other commenters on who is behind the front company. One is saying Putin, but Russia is very cash conscious and this is not their style.

I could be wrong but typically the Chinese have gone for the major overseas buyouts.

What is clear is that even if they succeed in buying the fallout will come soon. Maybe a year, maybe two, but it will be an easy win espionage investigation that is sure to net at least a few American citizens. The last time this happened was in 2016 so more frequent than one would think.

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> Ethos Capital is clearly a front company. There is widespread agreement on this.

Can you please cite a few reputable sources for this claim?

Some of the public information is summarized and sourced in Wikipedia:

> Ethos Capital was founded by Erik Brooks. Brooks is a former Managing Partner of another private equity firm Abry Partners. During his tenure at Abry, in September 2018, the company acquired Donuts, a domain name registrar with a wide portfolio of new gTLDs. In October 2018 former ICANN President of Global Domains Akram Atallah joined Donuts as CEO, while in December 2018 Donuts co-founder Jon Nevett joined Public Interest Registry as CEO.

> Other former ICANN staff members are involved in Ethos Capital itself. Former CEO Fadi Chehadé serves as an advisor, and former Senior Vice President, Development and Public Responsibility Programs Nora Abusitta-Ouri serves as Chief Purpose Officer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethos_Capital

But the whole deal is designed to be as opaque as possible – as explained in TFA we have no idea who will really control the .org when it's done. What we do know is that ICANN management desperately wants those specific people to be in control of and profit from .org for some reason, otherwise they would have gone about this deal very differently. You know, like at least having a bidding process.

Donuts is beyond shady. They literally demand protection money https://donuts.domains/what-we-do/brand-protection

(Basically you pay to block OTHERS from registering domains instead of registering it yourself).

At the creation of DPML it was assumed they could hose every major brand with this by threatening someone would register "bigbrand.dumbTld" and put porn up.

I recall previous HN posts which found likely ties between Ethos capital and some members of the ISOC board. Where it was suggested they were selling the .org domain to themselves.

Front companies are a well established method of operation certainly in spycraft (see the latest Crypto AG revelations), but also in internet hosting.

For example, Google requires their employees at certain data centers to only wear the badges of / pretend to be COPT employees [1].

Additionally, the Wikileaks AWS Atlas [2] showed show how yet another major company does this. I realize these are cloud data centers, but the similarity between them and hosting registrars, in terms of "internet power", is very complementary.

[1] - https://www.copt.com/ [2] - https://wikileaks.org/amazon-atlas/

What you are saying is interesting but unclear. Can you point to any reputable news sources? Also, I don’t understand the “easy win” netting American citizens.

What do the Chinese want with a .com domain?

Occam's razor: is it spycraft with a front company or a good old capitalist scheme for own profit?

How 'bout a little bit of both? Imagine the past year of US corporate simpering in regard to Chinese interests - but across the entire .com domain. Everyone better make sure they're using the CCP approved South China Sea maps, yes - it would get that silly.

A good old capitalist scheme for profit that's also compromised by nation state spycraft!

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