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Comment by jmccorm | Hacker News Reader

I can't tell if ICANN is trying to publicly clear their own name of any wrongdoing, or if all the added attention has woken them up to how seriously flawed this whole ordeal was (which either by policy or procedure they managed to miss) or both. None of those answers are satisfying. Here's hoping they do the right thing and kill the sale... but even then, I'd be concerned they'd restructure the deal and try again.

I thought ICANN was supposed to be the good guys? You know, the responsible managers of the Internet and providing solid governance which serves as the best argument against any kind of government intrusion? I'm hoping they didn't just grow bored with it and decide to get rid of it. As though it was some sort of dearly loved Google service with mild profitability and little-to-no opportunity for internal career development. ;)

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This is the old "announce an inquiry" ploy. This should be familiar to anyone who has watched "Yes, Minister" - or has paid any attention at all to anything ever made in public.

Basically, someone "blows the whistle" and suddenly something that should have gone relatively under the radar blows up on your face. People start asking a lot of difficult questions and making a lot of noise.

So what do you do? You announce a private inquiry (or, to put it in ICANN's terms "We will thoughtfully and thoroughly evaluate the proposed acquisition to ensure that the .ORG registry remains secure, reliable, and stable.").

The point of the inquiry isn't to find out any new facts or correct any problems - it's to stall until this goes out of the public eye (people have short attention spans, and we are in the Holiday season which always helps with "forgetting"), to clear up their names of any wrongdoing (because they reviewed everything thoroughly and found no cause for concern) and to bury the evidence (because some of it will be "accidentally" misplaced into a shredder).

In a month or so, a report will come out saying that there is some cause for concern, but that the danger is either overblown or that their hands are tied so nothing can be done due to this or that circumstance (legal, financial, etc). It will come with a stern paragraph warning that internal guidelines (you know, the ones the public can't see) must be reviewed sometime in the near future (i.e., around the year 2050) to prevent this from happening again, but it will conclude that everyone did their due diligence properly and we were all just victims of circumstances.

In short, better luck next time.

Why yes, people have called me a cynic, why do you ask?

> The point of the inquiry isn't to find out any new facts or correct any problems - it's to stall until this goes out of the public eye

Not always. It's quite often a way of giving the organisation a formal out, a way of admitting 'we dun goofed'.

Considering the (ex-)leadership of ICANN is behind both approving the sale and ethos capital, and effectively answer to nobody, I doubt they have much interest in genuine reform.

Without reform, that's literally the same thing.

ICANN has had problems for years. They even have been called out by the IETF by things.

This. In my view, the moment they turned into the "bad guys" (or more charitably, regulatory captured) was when they put the top level dns namespace for sale with the gTLD program.

Which was done by the former CEO of ICANN now advising Ethos Capital to acquire .ORG. Small world...

The world would be such a better place if we were prosecuting conflicts of interest with the same strength as drug sales (or just drugs uses).

The harm they do to society is on a much bigger scale.

Not to mention as Portugal showed us, criminalizing narcotics has zero positive effect. They decriminalized all drugs in 2001 and usage went down, and so did all negative consequences normally ascribed to drug use itself [1].

Time to do something worthwhile with that enforcement power.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...

Ironically that comes close to replicating the old British system, once world famous along with similar approaches in India, and elsewhere. It ran quietly and successfully for half a century. The tiniest remnants remain, despite the addition of the war on drugs, though it's very hard to get to these days - criminalisation takes priority.

It died with sustained US pressure at the UN as the last gasp of Harry Anslinger, supporter of prohibition who had already given the world Reefer Madness and a load of invented racist "evidence" for the harms of marijuana in the 1930s. His team brought sustained pressure for the globe to adopt a war on drugs. Oh, and there a doctor who single handedly prescribed tens of thousands of prescriptions making a bit of an impact, single handedly, in London sixties drug culture.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2010/08/...

It's usually forgotten that the situation improved mainly because of refactored health services around drug use, and not just because they were decriminalized. Simply decriminalizing is very unlikely to replicate the results anywhere.

Pretty sure its more to do with the fact that the bulk of the world's solution to seeing someone on drugs is to throw them in prison where the only source of happiness is more drugs, thus solving the problem once and for all. Addiction isn't something you solve by throwing people in prison.

Can someone explain "regulatory capture"? In the specific context how it pertains to ICANN?

Regulatory capture is the name for the phenomenon where some governing/regulatory body, charged with regulating/governing some industry for the public good, instead begins serving that same industry to the detriment of the public good.

In this case, ICANN is the body governing all domain names. There are individuals who have moved from employment at ICANN to those organizations involved in the sale of the .ORG tld. Link contains dramatis personae[0].

The movement of individuals between regulator entities and regulated entities (both directions), is often considered a sign of regulatory capture.

There is a common tension, perhaps inevitable, in regulation: Those most familiar with an industry, and therefore with the best knowledge to regulate it, are those who work in that industry. Thus, the best people for a regulator to hire are those who have worked in the industry.

Similarly, those most qualified to advise on matters associated with regulation are those who have crafted the regulation. Thus, the best people for an entity in industry to hire to manage regulatory compliance are those who have worked for the regulatory body.

This wicket becomes sticky quickly.

[0] https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2019/11/isoc-pir-...

> They even have been called out by the IETF by things.

Source? I'm interested in reading about this

ICAN'T is their nickname.

It reads to me like they are trying to kill the deal, but stay within their strict rules. The line: "The Registry Agreement requires a standard of reasonableness for ICANN’s determination." reads like they are gearing up for a way out.

I have to admit that the last 2 paragraphs do sound like they are trying to weasel out of responsibility though.

> I thought ICANN was supposed to be the good guys?

Through the lens of ultra-capitalism, "the good guys" are a market imbalance to be exploited. A variation on "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain"

In hindsight, the fragility of overall Internet governance was incredibly obvious. Even if this .org sale goes ahead, the governance is still fragile because there are many other aspects to the Web / Internet that are still run by "the good guys" and therefore likely to already be in the sights of the morally bankrupt.

The question is, what can we do about it? How do we react to the .org sale to ensure that inevitable future shenanigans will be met by increasingly profit-negating blowback?

The long term fragmentation effects this may have on the web are... difficult to predict.

>Through the lens of ultra-capitalism, "the good guys" are a market imbalance to be exploited.

That's actually through two lenses: it's the image through lens of ultra-capitalism through the lens of Marxist thought. The mainstream economic position would be that "the good guys" are neutral as far as the market is concerned, which is mainly interested in satisfying the average of the goals of whoever is spending money. In this case the domain owners are spending the money, so this scandal would be "uncapitalistic" in the sense that the buyers aren't being served.

> The mainstream economic position would be that "the good guys" are neutral as far as the market is concerned

Maybe if you look at the market "blueprints", a static template not taking into account the dynamics of the actual system.

There are at least two ways the markets will work to erase those moral values that do not directly contribute to profit. One, moral values held by people are strong preferences, and as such they'll be exploited, as GP said. An ethically sound option will command a premium over the default state, because people who want it value it more, for non-monetary reasons. Two, given a mostly amoral demand, companies that compromise morals to lower costs/increase profits have a competitive advantage over those with integrity, forcing the latter to either abandon their principles or risk getting outcompeted.

You can also connect those two points together by noting that individuals are also competing - against each other for status, against the ever rising costs of living. The end result is such a low ceiling on morality as we observe. You can't possibly, at the same time, care about or even afford getting clothing made without slave labor, food made without extreme animal cruelty, jewlery and electronics that don't have blood of innocents in their supply pipeline, smart technologies that don't abuse people's privacy and prop up surveillance. Also note note that, when people are willing to express their ethical stance on any of those issues, a whole mini industry pops up - willing to sell you purportedly ethical goods at huge markup.

Yes, the market is as morally neutral as an internal combustion engine is a hunk of metal that's carbon neutral when it sits on the shelf. Things change when you fuel it up and turn it on.

(Now, I'm not saying "markets are bad". But they do have perverse side effects that need to be kept in mind and accounted for, before they consume the very civilization they helped build.)

Replace "ultra-capitalism" with "morally untethered profitability opportunism" if you'd rather.

>I thought ICANN was supposed to be the good guys?

You could say that about every government, yet there's widespread corruption in most (or all) countries[1]. There's even corruption in democratic governments that are directly accountable to their citizens every few years (via elections). Given the way the ICANN board is appointed is... indirect at best, thinking that ICANN are the "good guys" is wishful thinking at best.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

To be clear are you suggesting the private sector would do a better job managing this? After all, we're criticizing their transfer of the TLD to the private sector. They can't be both the hero and the villain in the same story can they? Surely I'm missing something?

At least the goal of the public sector is to serve the public whereas the goal of the private sector is to serve the interests of there shareholders.

If this was a private company on both sides wouldn't we just be hailing it as a big win for shareholders and/or demanding the government step in and intervene?

There are some people who think when it comes to DNS ICANN should basically be frozen - no new gTLDs, no wildcard DNS, no supporting domain name seizure, no price or policy changes, and so on. Just delegating to each TLD's providers, and maybe some policing of providers' behaviour.

If you believe that, hypothetically the best choice would be some sort of private nonprofit, independent of the government but bound to inaction by charter.

Whether being directly controlled by government would be an improvement is somewhat debatable - would lawmakers be reasonably hands-off, like they are with things like GPS and NIST time services? Or would the opportunity to block pornhub/piratebay/wikileaks prove irresistible?

> bound to inaction by charter

That's probably too extreme, but I love it as a starting point / baseline!

What's the problem supposed to be with new TLDs?

You can read more at [1] - in short, critics of the new gTLDs would argue that:

1. It doesn't deliver the claimed increase the supply of domain names, as no-one would build a business or brand on whatever.info without securing whatever.com

2. It does shake down domain registrants for cash - if you already own whatever.com you'd better get whatever.info and whatever.sucks before someone else squats them.

3. These factors mean .info domains and suchlike are a stereotype of sketchy sites, which is a negative feedback loop.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ICANN&oldid=93014...

> At least the goal of the public sector is to serve the public whereas the goal of the private sector is to serve the interests of there shareholders.

Goal, yes. In the abstract. Unfortunately, humans run everything. Most humans are decent and will try to uphold the public good. Some get into positions of control and decide they can profit off of it, so why not?

Society's constant struggle is to keep these greedy F*'s from screwing the rest of us. Just like freedom must be paid for, so must we constantly root out corruption and greed.

I fully agree that there are varying degrees of corruption in every government and organization, but using CPI to support this is kinda pointless because it measures perception of corruption, not actual corruption (much harder to measure). It stands to reason that even if there’s absolutely no corruption in a government, people who’re unhappy with living standards, resource allocations, etc. will still perceive corruption (and on the contrary, satisfied people may not perceive corruption where it exists).

> You could say that about every organisation, yet there's widespread corruption in most (or all) organisations[1].

> There's even corruption in democratic governments that are directly accountable to their citizens every few years (via elections).

Imagine if this kind of 'accountability' was applied to the rest of society. Oh, you robbed a bank? Well, you're banned from this branch for 4 years! Don't do it again!

If you don't know anyone in an organization that holds your interests then you cannot expect for your interests to be considered.

It is very unreasonable to expect any set of people in any setting at any time, whose views you don't know, to hold your interests or expectations.

"Good people" would be very different to you and a self interested opportunist.

If the rules have changed such that it is broken and the sale goes through then great. If that is what it takes to bring awareness to prevent the next. Sitting and hoping that your interests are considered never ever works.

I don’t know any traffic engineers but I expect the, to be basically right rpwith speed limits and road construction rules which are in my interest. Etc.

I don’t think it’s really possible to live one’s life with a completely zero-sum cynical-interest model.

Speed limits are established with the intent of road safety and have measurements that can be audited such that they can be modified to find the best fit. That is not applicable here.

What can ICANN or any of us measure here that would block the sale? Trust? Former ICANN CEO is likely trusted is he not?

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