The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org
prospect.org
prospect.org
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/14/icann_org_redacted/
TL;DR: Purchase funded by debt, includes another ex-ICANNer, will be done through four different companies.
Some highlights that I think are important from it:
Incredibly, the names of three directors of the organization that will buy the registry remain redacted in documents published by ICANN [PDF] this month, despite the three entities pushing the sale – PIR, ISOC and Ethos Capital – claiming that publication of the information is “unprecedented” and they are “strong believers in the power of transparency.”
The rationale given for the removal of director names is that it was based “on the principles set forth in ICANN’s Documentary Information Disclosure Policy (DIDP)” – a bizarre claim that has nothing to do with the issues at hand and which ICANN has refused to discuss.
As well as refusing to supply the names of those in overall charge, the three companies have also refused to publish the “underlying equity purchase agreement, sensitive financial information, corporate organizational information, draft organizational documents, documentation provided to governmental entities and certain supporting contractual documents.”
I think the underlying problem is that this is being allowed at all. domains that we've registered as .org and hence expected non-interference with, are now under the control of a private corporation.
I like everything about The Register but the cheezy headlines, nicknames, and bad photoshop are some of the best parts.
That and anything that uses the word “boffin”.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21931258 - The NRO Issues Inspection Request to ICANN Concerning .ORG Sale
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800085 - ICANN Delays .ORG Sale Approval
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21723682 - Why ISOC sold .ORG to VCs
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21689121 - The .Org Fire Sale: How it sold for less than half its valuation
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667355 - ISOC sold the .org registry to Ethos Capital for $1.1B
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656960 - Why I Voted to Sell .ORG
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21626677 - ICANN races towards regulatory capture: the great .org heist
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677 - Save .org
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592297 - Internet world despairs as non-profit .org sold to private equity firm
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21582622 - Private Equity Is Going to Ruin the .Org Domain System and Screw Nonprofits
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21557779 - ICA asks ICANN to block .Org private equity deal in damning letter
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21526982 - Private Equity company acquires .org registry
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20263561 - Regulatory Capture at ICANN
Did I miss any?
With features like this, the benefits are obvious while the costs are not. I fear those.
That's not to say that tagging is always a bad idea—far from it. It depends on the system.
What have they been played on historically? Mostly behind the scenes stuff? Maybe I don't pay close enough attention but I haven't noticed much in the way new features/improvements over the past five years or more...(?)
The simplicity you mention is worth a lot, though.
I wish we lived in a world where a company being kinda monopolistic to make a 67% profit margin was enough to get me angry. If I hadn't read this, I'd have assumed they were making a lot more than $100 million a year profit.
I see the real answer to this as the gTLD program: radically expand the number of domain-issuing entities and normalize companies operating on something other than .com.
Even my subdomain from my previous host from 15 years ago is squatted to this day to serve up advertising. It's even aware of the software that I used to host there.
One answer in my view is to remove the maximum length of prepayment for domains. Let us buy a domain for 100 years. Sure, that's $1,000. Maybe throw in a discount. But now we never have to worry about it again, as long as we live. Or at least, as long as the registry lives. It would never be squattable.
Your idea would turn into yet another way to extract even more money from customers without actually bringing additional value (or guarantees) to the table. :(
Not in the parachute selling business...
> One answer in my view is to remove the maximum length of prepayment for domains. Let us buy a domain for 100 years.
Makes sense to me but I don't think I have seen anything more than 10 years.
Which will only work as long as you keep paying for the old domain.
The cost of a domain name is supposed to dis-incentivize buying up domain names simply to squat and/or serve ads, but clearly the price isn't high enough to dis-incentivize that. And we can't raise prices, because then it dis-incentivizes legitimate users. The problem is that the cost of domain names is a larger dis-incentive to legitimate users than it is to domain squatters.
If a domain is $10 and a squatter sells domains for $100, then they only have to sell 1 in 10 domains to break even, so risk is very low: they don't have to really be overly concerned with only buying domains that will sell. And that's a simplistic model: the reality is that squatters have much more sophisticated valuation models, and have therefore have much higher profit margins, keeping their risk even lower. Sometimes domains sell for tens of thousands of dollars.
Meanwhile, the risk is very high for a legitimate user. If you have a company or a nonprofit, you basically have to choose a name that's marketable, memorable, relevant to your business/nonprofit, and unique, on the first try. This can literally make or break a business. And once you have that name, there's basically only one ideal URL for that name: yourbusiness.com or yournonprofit.org. So you have a supply of one and a demand of this might make or break my organization so cost can be pretty much "what is the maximum you can pay?". As such, if the max you can pay isn't enough for the domain squatter to want to sell, you just don't get the domain, and your organization gets a sub-standard web presence.
I don't think we can overestimate the impact of this problem. I've worked for a company which owns your-business.com rather than yourbusiness.com (these are examples obviously--it would be unprofessional to give out actual names). Their marketing is very explicit about the dash, and potential customers still end up at the squatted non-dashed domain, which is only getting more expensive as the company becomes more successful. Luckily their value proposition is large enough, and clients sophisticated enough, that the friction of actually getting to the site isn't as large enough barrier to prevent growth. But if your business is a lower-margin business with less sophisticated clients, that would be a big enough barrier to prevent success entirely.
Whether this should be done and on what level will definitely be interesting. How sure am I that I want my old email address to be telling spammers where I 'live' now?
I would wager that 95% of web users do not even know that IA exists, let alone that they can use it.
> Does it matter than what the current namespace is?
As long as it's the only thing a browser will consider to retrieve information, yes. Which is why cool URIs don't change.
You are far too optimistic. It's probably more like 99.999999%
That would mean only 80-odd people know about IA, which seems a tad low :P
That would mean only 80-odd people know about IA, which seems a tad low :P
I suppose that means that for most people, 99.9999% of the world's population don't know they exist. Interesting thought. I wonder which living person is known of by the largest percentage, and what that percentage is?
But branding, let alone domain names, is proof that namespaces matter. And have immense market value.
> "As we go into the seventh year of the new gTLD experiment, they are meaningless. They haven’t been adopted by almost anybody. Circulation is poor. So many registrations are questionable or penny-promotional. The majority are parked and not in use nor will they ever be. And 99.9% of the people on this planet could not name a single one of them! Not a one!"
Full article: http://domainincite.com/25103-di-leaders-roundtable-4-big-pr...
.io seems to have been accepted by the tech community, as the place to go when you can't get your .com or .net. Maybe .ai too. Are there any new gTLDs gaining acceptance in the wider community?
So anyone who thinks .io is as good as .org is probably not price sensitive, and might be contributing to the worry that .org will go the same way eventually.
.ai is even more expensive, but I haven't noticed .ai domains being used for things I visited, only heard that they are used.
However, that has another problem in that it increases the opportunity for fraud via. The benefit of a small number of tlds is that the most memorable part is typically the most unique and provides human-distinguishable identity, but that's out the window if you've normalized mybusiness.com, mybusiness.biz, mybusiness.business, mybustiness.bz, mybusiness.bus, etc. Typosquatting still exists with .com, but it's far more manageable that the above.
Alternatively, I like the concept of Tor onion services, where the "domains" are acquired in a permissionless fashion. Names are just randomly generated ed25519 strings so there's no squatting and your address never expires. If you want a vanity domain, you just commit compute time to brute force something human-readable. [1] The obvious drawback is that you have to be a Tor client, but if you manage your own DNS, you could use Tor's DNSPort mode as a kind of forwarding target for non-Tor clients on your lan. [2]
1: https://www.jamieweb.net/blog/onionv3-vanity-address/
2: https://www.grepular.com/Transparent_Access_to_Tor_Hidden_Se...
Yes the registry is incredibly cheap to run, it’s the name servers themselves that are so expensive (from what I understand this is partially due to uptime requirements.)
I believe most people, when executing a name look up, will usually just end up talking to one of a battery of ISP provided DNS servers. So while the registry's name servers need to feed those servers (and probably be heavily redundant and reliable) they wouldn't actually end up handling an insane amount of traffic. I'm actually a bit curious now if there are any sorts of requirements on how much traffic registrars need to be able to support or if everyone just over-resources and still makes enough money that the question has never been deeply investigated.
Your right you have to have multiply redundant systems in four continents with everything running on HA kit with auto switch over diverse routing for power and data and I think hot standbys as well.
There are a ton of ISPs, and many of them run regional recursive servers. Each of those servers is going to see a ton of different domains that they need to query at the registry servers. Most registries are serving glue records with a 1-3 day TTL, but ISP caches may not have enough memory to keep the long tail names in cache for that long, and the long tail is long. There's millions of domain names to query the registry servers for.
Correct
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=fin&q=NASDAQ:+QQQ&stick=H4...
My buddy managed money for the kind of non-profits everyone has heard of at one time or another.
Tends to be that once they get big enough they find themselves recipients of endowments that they can invest however they see fit. They tend to put that capital to work in whatever yields the highest return.
Know what offers the best returns? Stuff that tends to cause the problems the non-profit might have been set up to stop.
Becomes a self sustaining ecosystem where the investments from the societally damaging corporations pays to sustain the cleanup effort.
Some of the biggest nonprofits also have the biggest endowments and/or asset holdings - colleges/universities, hospital systems, religious leadership, etc etc.
Fundamentally, most non-profits are still run like a for-profit corporation and provide services in exchange for money, they just don't have publicly traded shares, dividends, etc. Think Harvard or hospital systems, not ACLU or Red Cross.
"Our organization does good work with the money we have."
"We could do more good work, or better work, with more money."
"Therefore investments/endowments we receive should be invested inwards, to increase the amount of money we have available with which to do good work."
You can see, of course, how this kind of cycle could become more about the money than the good work.
"This transaction will put that bigger mission on a solid footing — so that the Internet Society can provide much more substantive help to nonprofits than merely leasing domain names, and with more continuity over time. While it's true that running .org provided a relatively steady income stream, it effectively staked most of our revenue on a single business, and required a certain amount of our resources to be spent managing that business, distracting from the broader mission. Especially as PIR has grown over time, this situation has become increasingly untenable. Establishing a more diverse portfolio of investments will allow us to have more predictable revenue over time, and to take a longer-range perspective when it comes to achieving our mission. "
http://www.arrl.org/news/millions-of-amprnet-internet-addres...
“The joke about Harvard is that it’s a hedge fund with a university attached to it,” Mark Schneider tells me.
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-harvard-should-be-taxed-...
I think there isn't an easy answer to this question and just letting the ball of cash grow bigger honestly might be the only "safe" decision we've left open to universities... that said pumping it into mutual funds managed by the president's husband or giving steep raises to administrators also looks terrible from the outside.
https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2020-01-21/ba...
ISOC didn't "buy" the rights to administer .org in the first place. They were given it. Along with $5 million actually; they paid, like, negative for it, they were paid to take it.
Now they get to sell it for $1.1 billion? How does that make any sense at all?
We're literally at "Russian oligarch-type" transaction here. America!
1. Specifically all those users who use the default assigned DNS, which is the vast majority.
"Nonprofit websites will be trapped: If they want to keep their longtime brand and their archives, they’ll pay whatever price. “When you buy a domain you own it, but after a couple years it owns you.”"
Hope this ends well for all .org owners!
Date: Friday, January 24, 2020 Time: 9 am – 11 am Location: ICANN, 12025 Waterfront Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90094
https://savedotorg.org/index.php/savedotorg-protest-at-icann...
https://mobile.twitter.com/russforce/status/1220789586554523...
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/nonprofits-worry-s...
Viewed uncharitably, it looks like ICANN built a separate entity to admin .org, built a separate entity to buy it, and then claimed that the purchase was just normal business, even as they were self-dealing to sell to friends. Is this accurate, or is the purchase by Ethos actually something like market-rate? In that case, even if I dislike the capitalization of .org, it doesn’t seem illegal?
In terms of its impact on the net, I see no upside to this at all. It's nothing but harmful.
I'm really just disappointed and angered that this happened.
Part of me hopes every TLD gets hit by this so that the exploitation becomes unbearable and people are forced to create a better system. Hopefully we'll end up with something that can't be subverted by these corporates.
Everyone tends to forget that sociopaths adapt
I suppose non-profit organizations can still go bad, so transparency in operations, and some kind of oversight mechanism that can replace the directors if necessary, would be needed.
In a capitalist system, power is more distributed between the government and private organizations. The government alone doesn’t get to decide who gets what resources. while these private organizations will collaborate with the gov and vice versa at times, there will always be some tension between the groups since they are constantly competing for power, which results in an adhoc system of checks and balances vs a system of near absolute power
IMO we’ve already tried that experiment. It doesn’t work. Pure socialism and pure capitalism only work in ivory towers
Just paying recurring fees (e.g. paying rent to your landlord) does not match the definition of rent-seeking.
Operations spending is required, but does not generate any long term wealth. You keep cleaning a hotel ever day and it does not get ever cleaner over time the way an actual investment does when you keep investing more money.
operators of a domain are essentially stewards of that domain and ensure that it's operated correctly, that there are no duplicates, and that it can be trusted. They do create value in the same way the American bar association does, by establishing and maintaining trust between end-users and providers of a service.
It's textbook economic rent.
People do not expect the new owners will operate the domain correctly, meaning ensure that the TLD remains available at reasonable prices and conditions to the current types of users.
I do too, but everything that the players involved in this have said and done strongly indicates that "playing nice" or even behaving relatively responsibly isn't in their DNA.
well said
In NDN, you don't request data from a specific host, hence no need to specify the receiving machine's IP, indeed, you send the packet to a p2p network, another with certain data / signature can answer your request.
Instead of sending a HTTP GET on 'https://news.com/what-is-NDN.html', which must be answered from the server 'news.com' with https cert for prove.
You'll send an interest package '{title: what-is-NDN, type: news, cert: a-public-key}', which can be answer by any node having the data. Be the data source or someone that already got it (like BT download-and-seed sharing)
(The cert is optional, if you can trust an information from anyone)
*if?
This is basically never going to happen. TCP is too entrenched.
By what mechanism is this possible?
In most cases there are probably multiple levels of resolvers, so it might even be as coarse as "somebody on the west coast of the US is using this site," which isn't terribly useful.
I mean
Switching out a computer's DNS root zone is a small operation.
Managing a substitute to ICANN, how much could that really cost? A few million a year?
Is this possible? Can all top-level domain name owners view all browsing data on their domain?
> ICANN must sign off on the deal in order for it to proceed. In December, it paused the sale for 30 days amid public outcry, expressing concern about the lack of transparency surrounding the deal.
NGOs and non-profits have money. Paying $100 a year to maintain a verified "I'm not a company" status might be a good idea. Keep in mind that non profits aren't necessarily good -- many are essentially tax shelters.
This article feels anti-capitalist. Nothing in the article makes a principled argument for how .orgs should operate. What's the argument for allowing anyone to buy a .org for $10 per year?
However, the reading club with 20 members and yearly income of 300€ cannot afford a 100€ .org.
.org and the PIR had a dedicated purpose.
Correct, I already seen that happen where smaller club shut down their web page because a hosting provider was unreliable. Since the lack of funds and expertise to move their WP site they now use facebook instead.
let me turn the question around: why should Ethos get .org? make them drum up support for some new TLD. This is purely, purely a cash grab, allowed by regulatory capture, and it should be stopped.
Well, let's say that a mission driven for profit corporation could ensure that .org owners aren't for-profit -- and do a better job than the current committee. Should they be allowed a .org? In my world, I'd say no, since I'd prefer that .orgs are actually restricted to non corporates.
Fair point. The "restriction" was really a recommendation (from RFC 920 in 1985, in a more polite time on the nascent "internet").
> [...] Should they be allowed a .org?
Who cares? The cat is out of the bag. As of today there are 1514 TLDs [0]. .mil and .gov should still have some requirements, but .org, .net, .com (and almost all the other TLDs) are all effectively the same thing.
ORG = Organization, any other domains meeting the second level requirements.
I see nothing about not-for-profit or money mentioned at all in RFC 920. There are occurrences of the word "commercial", but they're all in reference to the COM domain. The ORG domain is only referred-to as being for "Organizations".
Why should it be? The size of the orgs has never been a criteria in the past, and the majority of nonprofits using a .org domain are small.
But I also feel like it would make sense to have a domain extension that meant something. Right now it seems like it does, but it doesn't.
On which basis would you restrict registrations from country x, where founding some organization is free or even comes with tax benefits while you'd allow registrations from countries requires some kind of operating income?
It doesn't make any sense.
I'd love to see a citation re: this "not-for-profit" designation being codified somewhere by IANA. It's not supported by RFC 920.
re: public perception vs. definition - I'm not "pretending" anything. The RFC doesn't call out that ORG is for not-for-profits, or for organizations related to any particular "ethos" or philosophy. People can think what they want about it, and organizations can try to use the public perception of ORG to influence public perception of their organization however they want. That doesn't change what the RFC says, which was my only point. The RFC doesn't specify who it is for, beyond "Organizations". This notion that ORG was "reserved" for not-for-profits seems to be completely lacking in evidence.
That being said, it's not like .org has, in practice, ever been exclusively for non-commercial entities or non-profits.