Spurious Justifications for Eliminating Price Caps on .org and Legacy Domains
circleid.com
circleid.com
First, why does ICANN keep insist on picking on .org? In 2004, or thereabouts, .org owners saw a proposal to restrict that gTLD to just not-for-profit and community groups. Considering .org was originally listed as the gTLD for "this doesn't fit into any of the other categories" (back when we actually enforced that .net be a network operator and .com be a business), this would have booted a whole lot of individuals and unorganized groups out of the space. It was also the first gTLD to be foisted onto Verisign, though it got moved to Public Interest Registry in 2003.
Which brings up the second question, why would PIR want price caps to be removed for the .org gTLD? PIR is, supposedly, not-for-profit itself and is owned by the Internet Society, a very not-for-profit group. Shouldn't PIR be pushing for .org fees to be as low as possible to sustain its mission of effectively operating the .org gTLD for as many people as it can? Shouldn't PIR be acting more like a credit union and less like a Verisign?
My summary of that article is that the article assumes that the Internet Society (which owns PIR and was given .org as a way to fund ISOC's activities) has grown large enough--or may eventually grow large enough--that it considers its current funding levels inadequate and wants the price caps removed so it can receive even more funding. That article also points out that one non-profit, ISOC, is largely being funded by payments from other non-profits since .org is wildly popular in the non-profit space.
They have a monopoly position on .org, and so are able to do so if they choose.
Seems like the right response is to cap price increases to 0%, or at most inflation, rather than the current 10%.
Dawut? We might not be able to run a profit, but we can certainly make sure to spend ever dollar spuriously.
1) Base take-home salary is typically a million dollars for the CEO or similar senior positions. 2) A senior position also allows for massive additional sources of income.
Not-for-profits actually have far fewer legal restrictions than for-profits. For-profits run with a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value (source: extended conversations with a lawyer specializing in wealth management). If a not-for-profit engages in research to benefit a board member's business, or the not-for-profit launches a for-profit subsidiary, or otherwise, all that seems to be kosher. See Clinton and Trump foundations for an example of how most not-for-profits work.
As for this:
> Even back then, .Net and .Com were never enforced for a particular purpose.
Maybe we had a different experience but I was actively turned down twice for .net domains because the listed organization wasn't a network operator. One time was for a local computer company that wanted a name ending in "NET" and the second was for a small co-operative ISP (and the rejection said to go to .org, funny enough). You could be right about .com; I wasn't ever turned down for registering in that zone but I only remember people caring back when having a .com wasn't "cool" because it meant you were "commercializing the InterNet."
This was relatively interesting since I've never seen a politician participate in such a niche request for comment process.
[1] https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/comments-org-renewal-18mar19/...
For one, obviously, establishing a monopoly does not allow the market to discover prices.
But also, if they really wanted the market to discover prices, they would establish a market. Namely, they would allow potential registrars to bid on the yearly registration price, and then give the lowest (qualified) bidder a contract to run the domain for a few years, with that fixed registration price.
As it is, this is like handing over the street network of a city to a private owner "for better prices discovery". It's just crazy.
This is sort of how it used to work. NSF created and funded InterNIC and contracted its operation to Network Solutions. The cost of registering a domain was $0.
I lived in the third world and this was so common there. Some company would infiltrate neutral arbiters or government offices and those places would then pass off public goods to the company under some spurious excuse. That company then immediately gets billions of dollars in value.
That's insane. It's straightforward corruption.
There are more than 100M .com domains. An average price of $100/year would leave sites with no other option than to pay.
So, that's a $10bn/year business with very very high margins. Worth 100s.
Or rather, maybe not ignore it, but simply add a secondary recognized authoritative zone that gets asked when ICANN's registrar returns an NXDOMAIN? Then, the Red Cross, say, could simply use trademark law to prevent ICANN's registrar from handing out the domain to anyone, and register it themselves through the alternate registrar at a reasonable price?
Clicking the button to submit a comment does literally nothing. :(
.org: comments-org-renewal-18mar19@icann.org
.info: comments-info-renewal-18mar19@icann.org
.biz: comments-biz-renewal-03apr19@icann.org
That's probably it. Definitely don't have my web browser set up for that.
Still, detection or no warning or anything is weird. :/
I have a .org domain, but I don't know much about the Domain Name System at all so I did Google search and found that article quite helpful. Maybe someone else will too?
Would it be in the company's interest to sue ICANN at that point?
Make not mistake: I hate ICANN so much right now for their idiotic "we need to let the marker regulate the prices" for a product in which there IS no marketplace (you can't buy the same thing from someone else for less, domains are unique) but if the grounds are to be discrimination, that's the situation we currently have, and this decision by ICANN would be the result of a lawsuit brought against them on those grounds.
This is not at all correct. ICANN must not do this!
Matt Levine likes to write about different concepts of business ownership, such as...
- You own all the company's stock.
- You are legally listed as the owner on a piece of paper somewhere.
- You know all the company passwords.
- Everyone at the company recognizes your authority.
- You have the keys to the office.
All of those are more or less independent of each other and give you different kinds of control.
In a very real sense, if you resolve the namespace, then you own the namespace.
Seems like it should be easy to show in court. Am I missing something?
Modern anti-trust law isn't about punishing monopolies per se. Its primary focus is on consumer harm (direct or indirect). It is not against anti-trust law to exploit a monopoly. Microsoft, Google, Intel, Cisco, eBay, Google, Facebook, SiriusXM, and a thousand other companies (at various sizes at the local, regional and national levels) in the US do exactly that every day.
An anti-trust case would need to prove a given action is particularly harmful. The extent of the monopoly exploitation and harm is where the case is argued. It's very much a subjective doctrine and always has been. Any company raising prices will argue that they're doing so in a very reasonable manner, and then will set out to demonstrate that it's reasonable (based on any favorable comparisons they can make).
These people should probably be in charge of icann / everything currently in icann's domain.
This is exactly how you get foul play. Far from a vote, this process stinks of all kind of potential for corruption.