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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why OP tosses out 10% price hikes per year as reassuring. Maybe he’s too rich to make sense of small amounts of money like this. Even $10 is a nontrivial sum in some underdeveloped countries as is.

Also, this is just “what Ethos themselves have said about their intentions with regard to .org”, and we all know how good for-profit entities are at keeping promises that affect their bottom line.

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His argument seems to be:

1: The Internet Society does great work protecting the Internet 2: Ethos is a worthy successor to the Internet Society as the steward of .org.

This is incoherent. THis blog post can be summed up in one sentence: "I reckon its fine."

Thanks for voting to sell .ORG Richard Barnes. I know he thinks its fine, I think jacking the prices up 10% year over year is nonsense. What do the financials look like and what's the internet getting out of this?

A money grab looks like a money grab.

.org registry was already a pretty good cash cow. According to their tax return[1], in 2018 they grossed ~$93m over ~$33m registry administration expense, ~$7m employee compensation (interestingly there's a 30% year over year increase here), and some other smaller expenses. They raised $48.7m for Internet Society. Note that out of registry administration expense, $18.1m went to Afilias[2] (this should also be in the tax return), a for-profit technical registry provider. So every time you paid your $10 .org registration fee, at least $5 went to Internet Society as a mandatory donation, somewhere between $0-2 went to Afilias the for-profit contractor, some small amount went to GoDaddy for marketing, etc. Anyway, a non-profit printing $50m/yr without begging for donations is certainly nothing to sneer at, and under the control of a for-profit entity they should expect more even if the price stays the same. And you bet the price won't stay the same.

[1] https://thenew.org/app/uploads/2019/09/PIR-2017_2018-990.zip

[2] https://domainnamewire.com/2019/10/28/pir-org-slashes-regist...

As you said, according to the 2018 tax return revenues from PIR running .org resulted in $48,000,000.00 in cash grants handed over to the Internet Society.

How much is the sale worth? That $48M Grant was worth more than Internet Society's total revenue in 2016 according to wkipedia. ISOC just sold a sustainable $50Million revenue stream.

If LetsEncrypt copped a $0.10 fee per certificate, how much would it cost for Richard to rubber stamp a Symantec acquisition of LetsEncrypt?

> If LetsEncrypt copped a $0.10 fee per certificate, how much would it cost for Richard to rubber stamp a Symantec acquisition of LetsEncrypt?

Easy now, don't give him ideas.

Don't worry, they have your best interest at heart. With this extra money, we can fund our certificate mission for our own personal gain forever. It's very good for everyone.

Of course, the previous CEO Brian Cute of PIR (the non-profit) was previously "Vice President of Discovery Services" at Affilias, the for-profit that they are paying to do PIRs job.

Basically, everywhere you look, you see a bunch of blood-leeching ticks on the internets backside.

There's no argument. Everything in that post has been designed to be indexed online and published as some kind of counter-argument against criticisms but that's it.

It's all bogus and he knows it. He is to busy counting money to care.

It's the exponential growth bias too. Repeated price hikes like this work out to become vastly more than most people expect, very quickly.

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