Comment by nikitaga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikitaga | Hacker News Reader

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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.

You could create a corporation with the rules (and problems) that you’re proposing, but in a cooperative the rules are fixed: one vote per organization. Your family .ORG domain gets the same one vote as Microsoft.ORG, as your kids’ soccer league, as the church down the street, regardless of how many domains they register.

Obviously a bad actor could try to game the system by pretending to be multiple organizations, but it wouldn’t buy them anything, because board members don’t have any rights that non-board-members don’t have, and the rights of the members to their financial interests are also guaranteed under law... the bird couldn’t, for instance, vote to pay themselves.

Is there a way to distinguish one organization registering 100000 domains (possibly using sub-entities) to get 100000 votes versus 100000 real separately controlled organizations?

Would controlling a large number of votes that way give them some kind of advantage?

Top 100,000 domains by age as determined by current owner? That's finite and maybe weighted to seniority of concern?

Wouldn't most of those domains be owned by speculators? I doubt very many legit organizations own more than a handful of domains.

Actually, there are a bunch of large non-profits that register one domain per local chapter, and have thousands of .ORG domains. There aren’t a lot of speculators in .ORG compared to other gTLDs, because there’s a perception, probably correct, that non-profits don’t have deep pockets to buy domains from speculators.

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