Cooperative Corporation of Dot-Org Registrants

Not dumb at all. As best as I can interpret from the FAQ they’re simply looking for a transparent process around any ownership change, at least for now.

Hi. I’m one of the CCOR board members, and I’ll try to answer any questions I can. No such thing as a dumb question.

Yes, the cooperative is of all .ORG registrants, and exists to protect our collective interests. There’s no way to have absolute unanimity among the better part of ten million individuals and organizations, but so far, we’ve heard from several tens of thousands of .ORG registrants, and only three (including ISOC and PIR) were in favor of having a non-competitive redelegation such as the proposed one from ISOC to Ethos.

So, CCOR has three objectives, one short term, one mid-term, one long-term:

In the short term, to stop this backdoor deal, which bypasses the established, multistakeholder, competitive process.

In the mid-term, to get ICANN to launch the multistakeholder-administered, transparent, open competition to select the next .ORG delegate.

In the long term, for the .ORG registrants ourselves to put forward the best possible proposal for operation of .ORG, in that competitive process. If the process is run fairly and we win, we control our own fate. If the process is run fairly and we lose, we still win, because it means that someone even better prepared to serve us than we are ourselves, will have won.

But this is a very mainstream proposal... it’s the established process for .ORG, and the outcome we’re looking for, self-governance, is exactly how .EDU works. Educause is the non-profit association of universities that runs .EDU by and for the educational community.

Democracy is called that because every vote is a person. People are finite, you can't just add more whenever you feel like it.

Voting of shareholders of a company can still be called a democracy because the amount of shares – what's weighing the votes – is finite.

But the supply of .org domain names is effectively infinite, and so any "voting" weighed by domain names would just become a bidding contest.

There are only like 10 million .org domain names. At this rate it will cost just a bit more than $100 million to pass any decision requiring a simple majority, and a bit more if a supermajority is required. This is notably cheaper than the $1.3B acquisition price.

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If we want to entrench status quo, one solution is to require broad consensus of a sizeable but finite number of large players representing customers including the ones you mentioned.

Actually, the whole point of choosing the cooperative form is to avoid doubt and risk in governance. We don’t have to make the choices you’re positing, because our rights are actually enshrined in law. Cooperatives are one of the oldest forms of collective enterprise, and there’s four hundred years of law governing them. The rights of cooperative members (every .ORG registrant, in the case of CCOR) are much more strongly guaranteed by law than are those of, for instance, shareholders of a corporation.

Every member of a cooperative gets an equal vote in all governance decisions, and it’s not possible for the board to change that, that’s guaranteed by law, not contract or charter or agreement or anything. It’s also not possible to create membership “classes” with different rights. Also, the rights of capital are subordinate. Creditors, for instance, get no say in what happens.

That’s governance. Finances are equally clearly defined, but instead of one-vote-per-member, they’re proportional. If the wholesale price of a .ORG domain remains $9.93/year, and the savings (which are the “profits” in a corporation like ISOC) are $4, those savings are guaranteed by law to be distributed back to the members proportionally with the amount of business they did. Someone with one .ORG domain will get $4 back at the end of the year, someone with ten .ORG domains will get back $40, et cetera.

We don’t have to debate these terms, because they’ve been inalienably guaranteed by law for the past four hundred years.

Which is why we picked a cooperative as the best form for self-representation.

.name was created (pretty late) for that purpose but it never really caught on.

That seems at odds with their mission:

> The Cooperative Corporation of dot-org Registrants, or CCOR, is the cooperative organization that seeks to embody and collectively represent the community of dot-org domain name registrants, who will be its members.

As a .org registrant that doesn't fit into their enumerated purposes, I don't see how they can claim to represent me.

It would also seem at odds with a further commitment:

> Ensure that the dot-org domain is not used as a point of control or censorship over the speech or conduct of its registrants or their constituencies.

In that it seems to promote the idea that some speech or conduct (such as running a commercial business) should not take place on a .org domain, because of some distinct purpose of the domain.

I'm not getting that impression. I own a .org that's neither commercial nor non-commercial; it's for my personal use and has been for the more than two decades I've owned it. Why in .org? Because .org has historically been where "not a business or one of the other domain types" has fallen.

The group's FAQ says .org was "originally intended to be run in the interests of non-commercial Internet users," which is true and, in my view, doesn't exclude individuals, even those who want to use a .org for commercial purposes. I read that statement as "we will prioritize the needs of the 'core' of .org users but everyone is welcome."

I would strongly doubt that people like Esther Dyson, Michael Roberts, and Katherine Maher got into this group to take .org domains away from individuals or to restrict individuals from using .org. Quite the opposite, I imagine; they, in my bet, want to keep it as it is now.

Not at all... .ORG has always been defined the same way, and that’s always included individuals, families, informal projects, just as much as formally-chartered charities, NGOs, and IGOs.

No change is being proposed here. Instead, a formalization and locking-in of existing rights, is being proposed.

In what style is JWZ a nonprofit?

Most countries have minimum citizenship requirements for board members, to avoid scams where a company does something bad and there are no board members within their jurisdiction to be held to account.

The U.S. is no different than most other countries in that regard, and CCOR has to be incorporated somewhere. The US has the strongest laws protecting cooperative members, and consequently hosts more cooperatives than any other country, so it’s a good place to get started, and a majority of the founding board members thus had to be US citizens. That can be changed through election if we succeed.