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Comment by the_angry_angel | Hacker News Reader

The simplified timeline (as I understand it, willing to be corrected if I'm wrong);

1. PIR, or someone very close, seems to have lobbied to have price restriction of .org removed. My understanding is that PIR made the argument that they're a non-profit, they have no reason to raise pricing extortionately

2. This was passed, despite a large number of comments against the idea, Ethos was incorporated the following day

3. PIR sold itself to Ethos, a for profit company

The people involved seem to be moving between ICANN, PIR and private firms.

Given all these things I don't think it's unreasonable that people are deeply sceptical. Especially with the ambiguity of "no more than 10% per year" being throw around.

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You forgot the part where Ethos is the same people who controlled PIR. It’s just a sleazy trick to take off the non profit veil, so they can start skimming the profits. Does anyone really believe the non profit PIR and ISOC couldn’t exist on their $90 million a year .org tithes?

Yeah I’d completely missed this part. Makes it even worse

This is what is more properly called incestuous relations between corporations. This will only serve those companies and people be-bopping between them with shadow titles. I don't know if this guy owns part of those companies and is benefiting or one of his bros at those companies convinced him with his "for the greater good" bullshit that MBAs learn in school.

10% per year is much, though. Even with this it's an unreasonable price hike.

For domain names it feels kind of double edged sword.

Higher prices cost you money, but keeps the domain sharks a little further away.

Keeping domain sharks away is nice.

You don’t need high base pricing to keep domain sharks away. Some throwaway alternatives that are less workable, but already seem fairer:

You could limit numbers of domains per entity, or increment the price for each new domain you buy.

If you try to buy a domain using a company with human directors it is 10x the price.

If you buy a domain with non-person owners (e.g. a shell company) then its 100x.

As an aside: I wish more things were taxed or priced higher based on the obscurity of the entity purchasing the item. It’s no cakewalk, but it still feels too easy for those with the resources to use company and legal structures to be able to act with a disproportionate lack of public scrutiny.

Seems about right to me, this stinks of whatever the non-profit version of regulatory capture is. I wonder how hard it would be to make a parallel ICANN.

I guess this is naiive, but how can a non profit sell itself to a for-profit, it seems all sorts of wrong.

I'm not skeptical, I'm outraged.

This is corruption plain and simple. I hope OpenNIC forks the .org registry and lobbies DNS to accept their records instead.

> despite a large number of comments against the idea

Despite virtually ALL comments being against the idea.

Yeah, and the fact that Ethos is run by a former CEO of ICANN is incredibly shady.

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