Private Equity Is Going to Ruin the .Org Domain System and Screw Nonprofits | Hacker News Reader

Private Equity Is Going to Ruin the .Org Domain System and Screw Nonprofits

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64 pointselorant25 comments

As difficult as it will be for Americans to accept, this whole scenario:

- ICANN lifting price-caps on .org - Connection between private equity firm and owners of .org - Sale of the .org to private equity firm

Reeks of corruption.

It made me question my decision to purchase future .org domains. I considered it a stable alternative to .com with a larger option of available "premium" names.

Sadly, the corruption will only get worse from here on out. They no longer are under oversight of the US Government which while doesn't mean too much, it did at least add some intimidation to prevent doing funny business.

Because do-nothing is an acceptable outcome for a body like ICANN (whereas for example it's a huge problem for the US Senate) it would be fine IMNSHO if ICANN had been given to the relevant specialized agency of the United Nations, the ITU.

The ITU is a slow unwieldy bureaucracy, each member is a UN Member State, ie an entire country - which means nothing will get done, which is fine and I argue largely desirable.

Ugh, this makes me worry about my purchase of imgz.org two days ago...

https://domainnamewire.com/2019/11/13/breaking-private-equit...

"Ethos Capital is a new private equity firm lead by Erik Brooks. Brooks was at Abry Partners until earlier this year. Abry Partners acquired Donuts and installed former ICANN President of Global Domains Akram Atallah in the top spot there.

Donuts co-founder Jon Nevett left to be CEO of Public Interest Registry.

The other person at Ethos is former ICANN Senior Vice President Abusitta-Ouri.

Ethos appears to have just been founded. It acquired the domain name EthosCapital.com at the end of October through Afternic.

[Update: The firm might be tied to former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé as well.]"

Sounds like there should probably be multiple ICAAN organizations. They have been a relatively benevolent monopoly but that is unlikely to continue forever.

Are there other top level domains that are at risk of this? What are the most stable ones?

The ccTLDs are ultimately controlled by the sovereign entity whose country code is represented. So you could make the usual rule-of-law arguments in favour of a variety of stable industrialised economies, the same way you would for where you'd house the legal entity for an international business.

But I don't see any indication that .org is likely to go away, they just intend to hike prices to make a nice profit, and that's totally inside the rule-of-law so there's no particular reason to think that, say, Canada, wouldn't do just the same if it saw the opportunity.

> ... so there's no particular reason to think that, say, Canada, wouldn't do just the same if it saw the opportunity.

.ca is run by CIRA, and they're structured as a non-profit:

* https://cira.ca/about-cira

They do run commercial services in an effort to diversify streams of revenue. For example they have an Anycast infrastructure that one can replicate to if you want better diversity for DNS:

* https://cira.ca/cybersecurity-services/d-zone-anycast-dns

> The ccTLDs are ultimately controlled by the sovereign entity whose country code is represented.

AFAIK, that is not generally true. ICANN delegates administration of ccTLD to some corporation (sometimes non-profit, sometimes for-profit), based on consultation with local internet community of that country. Such organization may have e.g. memorandum of understanding wit local government, but there is no requirement to be under its direct control.

Disclaimer: working for ccTLD registry, but speaking here for myself.

Maybe someone could explain this to me: aren't non-ccTLDs controlled by consensus? If some asshat decides to jack the prices of *.orgs, why can't the majors (Google, MSFT, ...) just point to another DNS?

> If some asshat decides to jack the prices of .orgs, why can't the majors (Google, MSFT, ...) just point to another DNS?

When you go to "www.example.org", you are really going to "www.example.org.". The extra period at the end is subtle, but important.

The path of a DNS query is "." -> "org" -> "example" -> "www". Before a DNS client can lookup "example.org", it has to know where the DNS servers for the "org" TLD are, and it gets those values from the root domain servers, ".".

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_root_zone

So how does a DNS client know how to find root domain servers? It's bootstrapped manually. Every DNS server has a static file that contains the values:

* https://www.internic.net/domain/named.root

Once it contacts the root servers, a DNS server can then fetch the pointers to all the TLD and ccTLD name servers:

* https://www.internic.net/domain/root.zone

* https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db

There is no practical way for anyone to change the "." -> "org" pointers. You can do it on your own server, but you can't force anyone else to.

> You can do it on your own server, but you can't force anyone else to.

That's exactly what thechao meant by 'consensus'. If we all agree to configure our computers to fail to resolve all domains ending with `.org`, there's no longer really a .org TLD.

Google could probably pull it off. Imagine if .org domains failed to resolve in Chrome, or resolved but triggered an ad banner saying This website is supporting an institution which is undermining the web, for profit. Not the kind of activism we'd realistically expect from Google, but they have enormous power over the web. Throw in cooperation from the other browser vendors, and you can kill .org pretty dead.

Unsanctioned DNS shenanigans aren't just hypothetical. Alternative DNS universes have long been a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root

Alternative DNS roots exist, but to my knowledge they don't have much traction.

It's good that they don't. It breaks the web if we have different 'namespaces' like that. URLs are means to be universal, after all.

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

Has .org always followed market prices? If so, this change shouldn't have much effect on the .org prices. If not, why hasn't the previous manager of .org been following market prices?

Historically .org had price caps. As the article explains, while PIR was sizing up to sell this they arranged for the price caps to be lifted by ICANN. They insisted at the time they had "No plans" to raise prices. And I'm sure if you were to dig into documents you'd find that's technically true, with "plan for selling to private equity firm" being the next topic on the agenda after "Announce we have no plans to raise prices".

Or we aren't raising them, they are.

Each TLD is a little monopoly, and folks who have branded on a .org for decades won’t want to change to another TLD and let a spammer take the .org for SEO black arts.

It’s not a free market. Never was.

Ah, so the yearly fees are more like property taxes. In that case, it's best for the managing organization to be public-serving.

So happy I have zero .org domains.

Can the title be any more exaggerated? Yes, it's bad but all the article is doing is making up assumptions.

Sensationalism at its best. Any non profit that cannot shell a couple of bucks for domain will have hard time doing anything of value anyway. Now it costs 12$, even quadrupling it to 50$ won't change anything.

I've seen registrars selling certain desirable domains at a premium. What if a non-profit's domain is suddenly considered premium and they want to charge thousands of dollars to renew? It becomes a ransom that you must pay in order to keep access to your email inbox, and everything that comes along with that.

> Any non profit that cannot shell a couple of bucks for domain will have hard time doing anything of value anyway

You are vastly undervaluing people with little money and a lot of time.

So, to make this into more than a logical fallacy: What is, in your view, the benefit of handing an additional 380 million dollars per year to the owners of the .org registry instead of spending those 380 million dollars on the charitable goals of the organizations that own these domains?

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