Peter Sunde was one of the key people behind The Pirate Bay in the early years, a role for which he was eventually convicted in Sweden.
While Sunde cut his ties with the notorious torrent site many years ago, he remains an active and vocal personality on the Internet.
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Sunde is also involved with the domain registrar Sarek, which caters to technology enthusiasts and people who are interested in a fair and balanced Internet, promising low prices for domain registrations
As a business, everything was going well for Sarek. The company made several deals with domain registries to offer cheap domains but there is one element that’s missing. To resell the most popular domains, including .com and .org, it has to be accredited by ICANN.
ICANN is the main oversight body for the Internet’s global domain name system. Among other things, it develops policies for accredited registrars to prevent abuse and illegal use of domain names. Without this accreditation, reselling several popular domains simply isn’t an option.
ICANN Denies Accreditation
Sunde and the Sarek team hoped to overcome this hurdle and started the ICANN accreditation process in 2019. After a long period of waiting, the organization recently informed Sunde that his application was denied.
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“After the background check I get a reply that I’ve checked the wrong boxes,” Sunde wrote. “Not only that, but they’re also upset I was wanted by Interpol.”
The Twitter thread didn’t go unnoticed by ICANN who contacted Sunde over the phone to offer clarification. As it turns out, the ‘wrong box’ issue isn’t the main problem, as he explains in a follow-up Twitter thread.
“I got some sort of semi-excuse regarding their claim that I lied on my application. They also said that they agreed it wasn’t fraud or similar really. So both of the points they made regarding the denial were not really the reason,” Sunde clarifies.
ICANN is Not Comfortable With Sunde
Over the phone, ICANN explained that the matter was discussed internally. This unnamed group of people concluded that the organization is ‘not comfortable’ doing business with him.
“They basically admitted that they don’t like me. They’ve banned me for nothing else than my political views. This is typical discrimination. Considering I have no one to appeal to except them, it’s concerning, since they control the actual fucking center of the internet.”
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Making matters worse, ICANN will also keep the registration fee, so this whole ordeal is costing money as well.
Source: ICANN Refuses to Accredit Pirate Bay Founder Peter Sunde Due to His ‘Background’ * TorrentFreak
Yup. ICANN. It’s an autocracy run by no-one but themselves. This is clearly visible in their processes, which almost led to the whole .org TLD being sold off for massive profit (.org is not for profit!) to an ex board member.
Robin Edgar
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