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Comment by herodotus | Hacker News Reader

If I understand the article correctly, ISOC took a reasonable decision based on (a) they are not supposed to be a registry operator; and (b) "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush". That is, the $75m/annum profit from .org may not last for long, but the $1.1135 billion will be a great endowment fund.

The flip side is the implication (and I hope I read this correctly) is that a bunch of smart but possibly ethically challenged individuals infiltrated ISOC (a non profit) in order to create investment opportunities for themselves down the road.

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> That is, the $75m/annum profit from .org may not last for long

Why wouldn't it? .org is one of the most well-known TLDs, and I see know reason why there would be an exodus away from it (well, apart from this sale itself!) - it's as sure a thing as there can be.

I'm convinced that TLDs will slowly fade away. They're not very intuitive, especially if they're not a .com and the user is not very technical. I know Google would love for search to basically replace the need for them but I doubt that'll entirely happen. But I don't think they are long for this world.

I agree with your analysis that TLDs are mostly useless. But I doubt that's enough reason to believe they'll go away - if history is any indication, IP will seldom go away, whether useful or not, since whole industries tend to spring up around it.

Tell that to Telex, AOL keywords, fax, long distance telephone networks, cassette tapes, pager numbers, the BBS, film developing, etc. There are whole areas of IP and technical ecosystems that --- while they have not completely disappeared --- have become obsolete and their daily use and commercial value has plummeted.

What do you think will take their place? Do you think something will replace DNS?

That's the tough part. People overwhelmingly just search for the site they want and go to it that way so it's hard to figure out what would take its place other than some form of search. But a lot of people seem to be thinking about this (I remember Google announcing a while ago that they were looking at how DNS could be replaced).

I don't know what a good answer is. From the user perspective it'll likely look more like a search. but technically? Honestly it could remain DNS just abstract away from the TLDs to make them not mean as much.

At least that's my opinion.

The article argues that nothing is forever. There may be technology changes in the future that make DNS providers obsolete. So that money is less guaranteed over time than an endowment.

Considering that the price of a .org will almost certainly be going up soon, I think that $75m/year will soon be $82million. I don't think it's sustainable to pull that amount of money every year from a 1.1 billion endowment.

From the article (not my view): "And yet, those of us in the technology business understand viscerally that nothing lasts forever. What seems like a steady cash cow today may be obsolete sooner than anybody suspects. Personally I think even DNS will be disrupted in the future by some kind of distributed ledger technology beyond even blockchain, like hyperledger or hashgraph or some post-singularity quantum foam."

Well, after that sale the odds of something disrupting DNS grew a lot.

What a bunch of hand wavy bullshit. TLDs are like property. No one will buy into a system where they lose their valuable property. Facebook, Google, etc. aren’t interested in a decentralized, Wild West internet. The only way they get onboard with an alternative is if they control it and that’s way worse than the current system.

Today they sell .org claiming it’s not forever. Tomorrow they’ll be doing an IPO claiming it’ll be around for eternity.

Back-of-the-envelope I would expect to pull a steady 50 million/year out of a 1.1B endowment. That's certainly less than 75 or 82 million. I guess the endowment gives you more security and flexibility.

I think that you can borrow a lot more against a dead-steady $50 a year than a variable $75.

It's easier for a PE firm to raise the price over ISOC, too.

If "they are not supposed to be a registry operator", why did they bid on the contract?

Both can be true:

- That ISOC was reasonably justified in taking a lump sum rather than operating a registry.

- That the sale of the registry was corrupt and not in the public's best interest.

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