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