PIR is a non profit and they can clearly waste millions given their 'investments'. Now they want to get rid of the (increasingly) lucrative property they were set up to manage in the first place?
I wonder if ethos would be so interested if the price caps still existed, and they would otherwise take 10+ years to recoup their investment?
Its clearly corruption.
As they say, "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely," and ICANN has absolute power over internet names.
It makes a good case for a non-human-involved way of managing the DNS root zone.
You are going overboard and using hyperbole with a statement like that. (And clearly? Seriously...)
> I wonder if ethos would be so interested if the price caps still existed
Price caps do exist. It's called the market. And non-profits can pay an increase in price just like they do when they buy every other thing they use (even trash can liners from Amazon).
Plenty of costs go up year after year and even if competition are impractical to switch vendors or sources. Nothing about a non-profit makes it so super special that it should have some special status.
One very important last thing. Trivial now for a non-profit to lock in 10 years of registration at the existing rate and then worry later about what happens.
I love the way this is always being poised as 'poor non profits feel sorry for them they are on a good mission they get special treatment and some kind of pass'.
Take a look at the money pissed away (all on file publicly) and then come back and tell me how bad it would be if the domain was $15 instead of $10 etc.
Coincidentely the price caps disappear by ICANN ruling and suddenly Ethos Capital is formed to buy a property from PIR - an organisation that was specifically set up to care for .org.
You seem to be confused about this whole situation. We arent talking about a registrar - we are talking about the registry. There is no market pressure affecting the price of a .org from the registry, so there is no "price cap". PIR is an NGO and they are happily cash-positive, so there is no direct reason for them to increase the prices.
It is only in Ethos interests that the price would be increased. Its literally a license to print money. They have even just announced that they would cap price increases to 10% a year for 8 years. That means that within 8 years the price would be over 2x what it is now, and after that, they can set it to whatever they like.
I dont get your rant about NGOs pissing money away. If you mean PIR, I already mentioned that they are happily cash-positive, and certainly waste money on stuff outside their remit.
No-one really cares about $10 vs $15 - which is kind of the whole point. This whole situation has come into existence for Ethos to be able to make a "generous-looking" 1 billion investment with guaranteed return within 6-7 years without even increasing the number of domains sold.
So yeah, its clearly corruption. There is no viable reason for PIR to sell .org. If they want 1 billion they should just raise the price caps 10% a year and in 6-7 years they will have it by doing nothing, and still have .org.