Up in the rarefied heavens of the Internet stands the temple called ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). Under its motto, “One World, One Internet,” it describes its mission:
to coordinate, at the overall level, the global Internet’s systems of unique identifiers, and in particular to ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet’s unique identifier systems. (www.icann.org)
In simpler terms, it ensures the stability and security of Internet operations by registering and managing Internet identifiers such as domain names. Without such domain names, we wouldn’t have email addresses or urls at all. It oversees countries’ and political unions’ Internet names, like .us, .jp, .uk, .de, .dk etc. using the ISO naming convention. While in the early stages of the Internet, it was the US Department of Defense (DoD) that thought up and activated names like .com, .net, .org, etc, over the following years, it became ICANN who activated .eu, .info, .biz and issued more domain names like .spa, .xyz, .Berlin, .nyc, .top, .law, .basketball, etc.
ICANN is listed as a non-profit organization. Obviously, just like a god who names the universe and its creatures, it doesn’t play favorites and shouldn’t be interested in human things like making money, tons of it— or at least, it can’t afford to look like it does so. Even with the fait accompli of arrays of powerful domain registries (eg Verisign, Afilias, DotAsia etc) now doing brisk business, this would bring up uncomfortable questions like “Who made them god anyway?”
Right below this heaven though, is a very earthly plain where top level domain managers form business alliances to bid for rights to manage and distribute the Top Level Domains ICANN issues. If you’ve ever had to apply and pay for your own email domain and imagine all the other people who have done the same thing, you know how much money such name-giving businesses more commonly called domain registries, can make. The potential for profit brings out the worst in us and over the years, ICANN has had to step in to manage disruptive practices like domain squatting and domain speculation. Just recently, Facebook/IG got egg on its face when it was called out for bullying an artist who had, much earlier, registered the name “meta.”
What happens then when the temple of heaven welcomes those of less-pure intentions into its ranks?
Enter Edmon Chung, philanthropist, ICANN politico, gladhander, all-around nice-guy and demigod of the Internet in Asia.
Edmon Chung, CEO of DotAsia was, surprisingly to those who thought they were in the know, recently chosen to be a director on the board of ICANN. Easily identifiable in prominent Internet events and their lavish parties, he is more than what he seems.
This website is here to reveal his long history of using his knowledge of and contacts in ICANN to take advantage of others— and to wonder aloud what happened to ICANN, whether it is still the temple of Internet stability or whether it has become a group of old boys now grown too complacent to bother with due diligence.
A Historical Digression (but not really)
The Roman Empire was one of the world’s most successful and powerful corporations. Under its Pax Romana, it gave the known Western World at the time a regime of stability and security, the same values cited in ICANN’s mission statement.
It also gave the world two pointed idioms relevant to this discussion:
Caesar’s wife: the dictum that good governance cannot afford even the hint of weakness or corruption among the empire’s top leadership.
Who shall guard the guardians?: The recognition that the empire’s weakest point is the possibility of corruption in its strongest force, the force assigned to provide security and stability for its leaders.
Indeed, when the Roman Empire fell centuries later, even though timelines cite the sack of Rome as a convenient marker, it fell not in one big cataclysm, but through the corruption and fractiousness of its ruling class and the incremental loss of respect its citizens had for it.
In the following pages, we hope to demonstrate how the assumption of Edmon Chung into the ICANN pantheon threatens its own credibility.
1. ROBIN HOOD OR ROBBING HOOD?
SETTING UP DOTASIA AS A PERSONAL MILKING COW
In 2007, three years after the .EU domain was launched, Edmon Chung convinced several Asian ccTLDs (country code top level domains, such as JP, TW, IR, CN etc.) to support the creation of the .ASIA top level domain. He appealed to both a sense of Asian pride and a more practical business sense given the vast market potential for .asia domains.
Presenting himself as a benevolent and visionary leader, he was the main advocate for a corporation called DotAsia.
As part of the deal, 8 of the 10 board seats were awarded to the ccTLDs. (See Item 39 of the Memorandum of Articles and Incorporation).
Edmon became CEO of DotAsia but — unknown to the ccTLD members — then inserted a clause in the founding Memorandum of Agreement (MA) that for all practical purposes, made him CEO for life. To replace him, 8 out of the 10 directors would have to vote AGAINST Edmon for the latter to be removed (M&A, Art 53).
Once this was accomplished, he created a contract with Afilias, giving it sole and exclusive rights to provide Backend Registry Services in perpetuity. (Art 7.1 of the contract)
This contract was massively overpriced then and remains massively overpriced now.
Here’s the math: It cost $4/year per domain in 2008 and is now $3.25/year per domain. A quick quote from an alternative supplier in 2021 yielded a price of $0.76/year. Yes, a whopping difference of $2.49/year/domain, or more than 4 times the fair market price!
Since DotAsia has about 220k domains under management, this would mean that, under this termless agreement, it is bound to overpay Afilias at $547k/year, given current pricing! It would not be far-fetched to imagine then Afilias’s equally boundless “gratitude” and “goodwill” to Edmon for handing them such a fat and immortal golden goose on the proverbial platter.
1.A. GOLDEN GOSLINGS: RIGGING THE AUCTIONS
Apparently, the goose not only lays golden eggs, it produces golden goslings as well.
Shortly after the formation of DotAsia in 2008, Edmon set up auctions for .ASIA via the auctioneer Pool dot com, so as to get top prices for premium .ASIA domains.
Auctions are a quick way for Top Level Domains to generate income at startup. Domainers (who make a living investing and selling domains) lined up far and wide to bid on the domains.
Imagine their confusion and surprise when they realized that over 50 premium names never went to auction! Instead, juicy names like porn.asia, dating.asia, insurance.asia, lotto.asia, stocks.asia, beer.asia, girls.asia, to name a few, were embargoed by the auctioneer himself. The details are documented by irate Domainers can be found here.
Obviously, these were some of the most highly valued and highly sought .ASIA names. The complete list is here.
The auctioneer and DotAsia [read Edmon] went to extreme lengths to hide the ownership of these domains, going as far as to create shell companies, including one in Barbados, whose ownership was hidden. Upon discovery of the scam by the domainers, and after some clever detective work, the linkage of the Barbados company to the auctioneer became known.
Edmon’s response to this bombshell was apathetic and unapologetic: “[the auctioneer] being a party related to a bidding party, … does not automatically create an issue”. Edmon found nothing wrong with his auctioneer stealing valuable premium names from DotAsia! In so doing, he redefined the Internet domain game as exempt from ethical business practice and declared that self-dealing is acceptable in the rarefied heights of Internet identifier auctions.
As this matter was completely ignored by the DotAsia board [read Edmon’s appointees] in 2008-2009, I raised the matter recently in a letter to the board. (I am a director of Dotasia). The request to investigate was completely ignored by its Chair, Maureen Hilyard (which I brought up to prevent a repeat with .SPA, fearing that .SPA was AGAIN about to give away premium .SPA domains to Edmon.
At any rate, from the data in the letter we see that 4 of the stolen ASIA domains were sold at an average of $18k, and that the average of the 50 stolen ASIA domains were (as projected from COM domain sales) worth an average of $51k. This would put the value of the stolen .ASIA domains at about 50 x $51k = $2.55M! That is the rough estimate of what was stolen from DotAsia by Edmon and the auctioneer. Despite this, Edmon would announce that the .ASIA auctions still yielded over $3M (from the domains not corralled by the auctioneer)!
Does ICANN’s inclusion of Edmon into its pantheon mean an endorsement of what lesser mortals would consider unethical practice?
2. .INC: THE ABANDONMENT OF OUR EQUITY
Flush with his success from this scam, Edmon then attempted to play similar games when ICANN launched its new gTLD program in 2012. A business plan was circulated, and my company, DotPH, was suckered into and invested 30% of the INC application, 30% of the SPA application, and 20% in a holding company called Namesphere (see item 37 of Edmon’s letter to the DA board confirming this investment).
Less than 3 months after receiving DotPH’s cash, Edmon then quietly signed a contract with Jason Chapnik for INC which explicitly excluded Dotph’s ownership of 30% of INC — in direct violation of our agreement. (Note DotPH is not even a signatory, whereas Namesphere, whose share was less than DotPH, were. Even DotAsia, which is not a shareholder, was a signatory). Edmon did not even inform DotPH of the existence of this contract.
The contract with Chapnik further included restrictions that made it impossible for NS/DotAsia to transfer its stake in INC to DotPH. (See Restrictions on Transfer), effectively shutting DotPH out of INC.
Edmon did not disclose this contract to me until forced to do so in 2017, just a week before the INC auction was to begin. Edmon further covered up his deceit by repeatedly telling the board of DotAsia on several occasions that DotPh owned 30% of INC, when this was clearly no longer the case. (See Dec 2014, Oct 2016, Edmon powerpoint presentations to the Board of DA)
In 2017 Edmon finally revealed the contract with Chapnik, thus forcing DotPH out of the auctions for INC. Chapnik eventually won the bid for INC at $16M. (Namesphere did not join the bidding either) .INC now has sales of $7M/year and is easily valued at $105M or more (using 15x sales valuation).
DotPH, as an investor, lost $31.5M because of Edmon’s fraudulent actions. It is also important to note that the auction for INC was a private auction, and the losing 8 applicants for INC divided up the $16M winning bid into $2M each. DotPH and Namesphere were shut out of this $2M windfall too, due to Edmon’s machinations.
Edmon also abandoned Namesphere’s 20% stake in INC (worth $25.2M today). It was later discovered that even erstwhile ally Chapnik threatened to sue Edmon and thus would not allow Namesphere to participate in the INC auction.
Edmon’s relationship with Chapnik would eventually sour to the point that Edmon, in the ultimate double cross, decided to offer our 50% stake in the INC application as a peace offering to Chapnik.
Because of the games Edmon was playing with Chapnik, both DotPH and Namesphere both lost about $52.5M in the INC scam!
3. TURNING ON FRIENDS AND PARTNERS: BOX: THE LOSS OF OUR EQUITY
In 2015 Edmon received $1.5M from Jason Chapnik in exchange for 50% of BOX (item 33 of the SoC). Chapnik would then discover that, after more than a year, Edmon, after a series of disagreements about how to run the business, had not issued Chapnik’s shares!
Chapnik, after several acrimonious exchanges, then sued Edmon/DotAsia/Namesphere in 2018. In 2019, all this was revealed to the DotAsia board, and Edmon would blame ICANN, lamely claiming that ICANN policy forbade him from issuing shares to Chapnik!
Edmon wrote in his Feb 14, 2019 letter:
There are rules in the Applicant Guidebook (AGB: the new gTLD process) that disallows [shares to be issued]. In short, ICANN could potentially disqualify the application (in particular Section 1.2.1 and 1.2.7), therefore we do not believe it was prudent to make such change until the ICANN process is complete. The above chronology explains how the applicant entity was created and subsequently the AGB requirements explains why we have not made the shareholding change yet.
This was, of course, patently untrue. I asked former ICANN Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush to study the matter, and he directly shut down Edmon’s claim: (see items 64-68)
> 64. Mr Chung says in his email [..] that ICANN reserves the right not to approve changes to applications [..] and the Applicant Guide Book does do that. He says this is the basis for making no changes — but Mr Chung does not report that ICANN developed a substantial process for dealing with such changes during the life of an application.”
> 65. Changes in the applicant were a frequent case, given the resolution of contention sets by agreement and auction. ICANN created a special page dealing with “Change of control” requests.”
> “ 66. A list of the many TLD applications that went through this Changes of Control process is available here: https://www.icann.org/resources/change-of-control. It contains approximately 400 applications with changes starting in 2014.”
> “67. None of the corporate changes involved in the .Box scenario were of a type or scale, or out of the ordinary in any way, so as to attract adverse reactions from ICANN of the type suggested by Mr Chung.
Because of Edmon’s misrepresentation of ICANN Policy, Chapink sued Edmon, DotAsia, and Namesphere for passing himself (Edmon) off as an “ICANN expert” (See item 19,44 of the SoC) and causing $2M in deliberate delays in the issuance of .BOX shares (item 37 of the SoC).
Chapnik had also discovered that Edmon had agreed to a usurious $3/domain-year deal with ARI, when in fact a $1/domain-year deal was offered by Uniregistry. (item 38 of the SoC). Edmon was trying to pull the same stunt he had achieved with Afilias and DotAsia in 2008, but this time with ARI and .BOX. And this stunt seems to have been caught by Chapnik!
The UniRegistry deal was ready for signature in April…[Yet] you stepped in and fucked around endlessly till it went away. That is not opinion. It is fact.” — Jason Chapnik, Sept 2016
All requests to Edmon Chung for updates by this Namesphere shareholder on the BOX case have since been unanswered since 2019. Online ICANN records show, however, that BOX is now 100% in the hands of Intercap — Jason Chapnik’s company, perhaps indicating that Edmon/DotAsia/Namesphere have lost the lawsuit against Chapnik. Edmon has not revealed whether he has in fact lost the lawsuit. In fact, Maureen Hilyard, Chair of Dotasia and Edmon have refused to reveal the details as to what has happened, and Maureen has said that I would have to take DotAsia to court just to find out what has happened with the .BOX lawsuit.
4. NAMESPHERE (NS):
FIGHTING FOR OUR SHARES IN CHUNG’S PHANTOM PIGGY BANK
I then proceeded to check, in early 2019, if DotPH shares in Namesphere had been issued, only to get the same lame reply from Edmon that he could not issue DotPH shares as he was prevented from doing so due to ICANN Policy! I then consulted with former ICANN Chair Peter Dengate Thrush, who proceeded to correct Edmon’s erroneous assertions.
Edmon then wrote back to confirm our shares in NS:
> 19. First of all, when Joel (DotPH) asked if the shares can be issued, our consistent response is that yes they can be issued… Nevertheless, I believe the DotAsia Board and myself remains [sic] committed to upholding and honouring the investment from DotPH and looks [sic] to the issuance of the shares in question.”
> 20. We remain committed to upholding DotPH’s investment and to initiate the process to issue the shares upon the request from Joel and DotPH”
> 21. No founder shares were issued.
> 28. There is no unwillingness to issue the shares in Namesphere to Joel/DotPH. We have repeatedly explained and in documents presented to the DotAsia Board maintained that we can initiate the process to issue the shares anytime at this time.
> 29. It appears that Joel may have confused my answer to his 2 distinct questions. The 1st question was why the shares were not issued immediately in April 2012, and the 2nd question was can the shares be issued now. The answer to the 1st question is related to the uncertainties with the ICANN process in 2012; and the answer to the 2nd question is yes they can be issued now at anytime.”
No shares were issued. His reply above was mere and more doubetalk. The promises were pure lip service. They were not kept.
In frustration, we finally had to file a lawsuit against Edmon and DotAsia in 2020 for our Namesphere shares. Only then did Edmon issue our shares, but then he decided to also issue founder shares to 1) DotAsia and 2) to himself!
The lawsuit continues to this very day, as Edmon justifies the issuance of founder shares due to “sweat equity” (whatever that means, as the term does not exist in the incorporation papers or bylaws). In other words, no agreement to even allow this exists among the shareholders. Edmon just made this up unilaterally.
In the meantime, Namesphere has racked up more than $1.5M in expenses, despite the fact that it has no active TLDs or employees. It has not sold any domains; yet salaries have been paid to Edmon Chung, his wife, his sister, at least one DotAsia director, etc. No bank account has been created. All attempts to get information about the company’s P&L, Balance Sheet, or the receipts for its expenses have been denied.
5. SPA: THE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING EQUITY MAGIC TRICK
Now faced with threats of a lawsuit for the non-issuance of the NS shares, and the realization that he could not play the same games with SPA as he was playing with BOX, Edmon then proceeded to arbitrarily give away DotPH’s 30% equity in SPA and Namesphere’s 20% equity in SPA to his friend, William Ng, who owns ASWPC.
While Edmon would confirm our equity in a “without prejudice” letter to the board and to former ICANN chairman of the board Peter Dengate Thrush on June 11, 2019, yet he was somehow able to hoodwink the DotAsia board to give away DotPH’s and Namesphere’s equity in SPA, against the corporate interests of DotAsia itself:
> 33. Once we create the entity for .SPA as anticipated, we will be able to issue the shares [of DotPH in .SPA] as agreed upon.”
> 37. Hence, for both .INC and .SPA, Joel/DotPH had invested US$60,000 but the agreed upon shareholding stake was 30%”
> 114. DotPH invested US$60,000 and confirmed for 30% stake overall to the profits from the TLD operations …
Surprisingly, only three months after writing this letter to the board, Edmon was able to arrange a clandestine meeting on Sept 18, 2019, where compliant members of the board voted to essentially abandon our combined 50% equity in SPA:
1) ASWPC owns the sole rights as an applicant of the .SPA TLD
2) DotAsia Organisation needs to concentrate more on “.asia”.
3) Namesphere should cease negotiations with ASWPC … and seek the way to allow ASWPC to be free to find another partner. “
How Edmon does this, despite the assurances he gave earlier, speaks volumes about Edmon’s modus operandi. He recruits compliant and suspiciously apathetic board members with promises of junkets and all-expense-paid trips to foreign countries where ICANN or IGF (Internet Governance Forum) conferences are being held. Otherwise, these board members are unpaid, so they have neither the time nor the motivation to study documents presented to them. The game is clear: they are there purely to follow Edmon’s words.
A few days later, SPA was awarded in September 2019 to Edmon’s partner, a Malaysian organization known as ASWPC . We have since launched a lawsuit to retrieve our equity in SPA. Strangely enough, in the court proceedings, DotAsia denies that they have given away their rights in SPA, despite records/minutes of the board meeting indicating that they have abandoned SPA.
How Edmon can lie in public and say an entirely different thing in the courts is not just astounding, it is a cause for alarm!
Here is the statement of DotAsia:
> 40…. DotAsia and its related companies would continue to serve and retain a stake in the .SPA TLD.
Fearing a repeat of 2008, where ASWPC could this time issue Edmon some premium .SPA domains, we filed a petition to block the sale of premium SPA domains, only to see Edmon insert himself in DotAsia proceedings that did not involve him or DotAsia (remember: he had already given away all his equity in SPA).
Why else would he do this, if not to repeat his shenanigans of 2008?
In this filing of March 31, Edmon pleads that his testimony be included in a restraining order that only involved ASWPC. Why else would Edmon do this, for a TLD that had already been given away to ASWPC, if a deal had not been hatched to exchange premium domains (in favor of Edmon) for equity (50% in favor of ASWPC)?
DotAsia, in its current form, for all intents and purposes, exists for the benefit of Edmon Chung, while giving the illusion that it exists for the benefit of its members, mostly ccTLDs in ASIA. Only 1% of its sales go towards projects approved by its ccTLD members. DotAsia employs Edmon’s wife as Chief Financial Officer, and his sister as “Director of Corporate Knowledge(!?).” On the other hand, board directors are unpaid. And while said directors are elected by the members, the directors are told that they do not represent said members, or the ccTLDs in whole, but are only to represent themselves. What does this Orwellian doublethink even mean?
Further, their hands are tied by NDAs and they are ordered by Edmon’s lawyers to not disclose board proceedings to the membership at large. Note: its articles of incorporation require that DotAsia books be available for inspection, yet all requests for receipts and additional financial information have been denied by Edmon and his wife Rebecca. Since the directors are unpaid, there is very little motivation in policing the activities of Edmon Chung. DotAsia is, in effect, a captive corporation of a conjugal corporate dictatorship.
The question then is whether ICANN can afford its association with this man whose several schemes have been denounced by members of ICANN and the domain community itself, whose actions now being litigated are hidden from view by the convenience of non-disclosure agreements.
— Joel Disini, CEO, DotPH