Chan Zuckerberg Initiative sunsetting science research platform meta.org
cziscience.medium.com
cziscience.medium.com
And today we see the domain points directly to their for-profit company which they may not have paid a "fair" price. I'm sure it wasn't so clearly planned, but it certainly seems like a conflict of interest.
These types of domains can go for 6+ figures which seems like a drop in the bucket for Facebook.
EDIT: I was mistaken. As several pointed out - The initiative is not a non profit at all. The domain is more of an opportunistic move.
I'm still not sure how happy I would be if my company was acquired with the promise of "making my research search engine free to all" only to be shutdown down and used to help Facebook PR problems and market cap 4 years later.
For a 6 letter .sh, also a dictionary word, I paid 250 bucks.
Good domains on .com or relevant local tld such as .co.uk are worth snapping up.
I agree on your assessment that it would likely have been 7 figures. 8 if they knew it was Facebook.
For reference, I have bought/sold ZipX.com, Pedal.com, Shotput.com, etc
Except for used cars, real estate, bonds and stocks... every other asset is "bought and not sold" these days.
Sellers of an asset which is not in the list above don't even have a platform to tell the world that they are selling that particular thing.
I worked in a medium sized municipality in Denmark, and when your budget is 9 billion Danish KR, well let’s just say that you treat expenses differently in enterprise, and we were still a small player compared to our bigger partners on the state level who could sign contracts larger than our entire budget without batting an eye.
(I’m not English, maybe batting an eye is the wrong expression, if so sorry!)
I’m not saying it wasn’t planned, but it may just be a “happy” coincidence.
Once you have made your guess as to the meaning, then and only then link to Wikipedia for a marvelous explanation from a not-so merry old England.
When we say "batting an eye", "opening an eye", etc it's clear that we're talking about eye lids since the alternative would be very painful and make no sense.
Colloquially, when we refer to "eyes", we're almost always referring to the facial structure through which the eyeball is visible and almost never the literal eyeball itself.
I mean, when you say somebody has attractive eyes, surely it's understood that you're not referring to the spherical ball of goo itself, but rather their facial structure.
There ought to be a meta.com shareholder suit.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-markzuckerberg-baby-idUSK...
They may have exploited the generally held assumption of being a public benefit organization to gain an advantage in the sale of the domain. For example if the Gates Foundation approached me about one of my domains and it later ended up in the hands of Microsoft, I'd be quite upset.
If you can afford some lawyers this is routinely done at varying degrees of morality and fairness.
If you have evidence otherwise, present it.
Let's be crystal clear here. While theoretical options exist for a charity to have its status revoked, in practice the IRS has not been able to use this authority except in the most narrow circumstances.
For example, a director of a hospital chain buys property for below market value, and the minutes say - "property worth $100M, to scam the IRS we will sell it for $1M". That's as clear cut as you can get it. The problem was - the blowback political and public impact in shutting down a major university, a hospital chain, the AARP, the NYSE, the animal shelter etc was just too high for the IRS to exercise this "death penalty" option. In theory the rule existed, but in practice it wasn't usable.
This is an issue generally with nonprofits, even when they do wrong, it can be very hard to go after them for political and other reasons. Steven Miller, acting commissioner of the entire IRS, lost his job pointing out that many tea party groups were political in nature.
As a result, the IRS came to a solution, called intermediate sanctions under Section 4958. This is actually a great solution. The insider who cheated the public is the one who has to pay in contrast to your demands that an entire nonprofit be shut down and thousands lose their jobs, and all the harm closing a hospital might cause.
They still claim they can revoke status and they can (maybe). But in practice even in blatent cases, this is rare / very unlikely because you punish the public relying on the charity, the employees etc, and revoking the status does nothing to get the $ back from the person who got the sweetheart deal.
You can read about it on the IRS's website if you care to:
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...
Separately, plenty of nonprofits sell major assets to related for profits or even turn into for-profits. And as I said, if you hire some attorney's and are not complete idiots, the IRS generally does not act, even when things get pretty close to the line.
I'm noticing more and more of a sort of "reddit" style of comment on HN. Very strong held, demanding, providing no evidence or speaking pretty clearly without any profession or other background in a field. It's eye rolling frankly. If anything, insider deals have unfortunately been increasing pretty dramatically in the last 5 years because IRS enforcement staffing for things like exempt entities, especially after tea party issues, has fallen through the floor. So right now we have horrible abuses occurring (syndicated conservation easements come to mind as a total scam in my book).
Remember, the IRS is something like a year behind even getting to their tax exempt mail. Check the notice here for period after which they may not have even looked at anything.
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/tax-exempt-organiz...
It often seems like the ability to sell companies isn’t in the best interests of a very large number of people.
Since his wife is involved it still seems like corrupt self-dealing. What kind of public corporation owns a "Wife-Founder Initiative"? Are these monarchies?
Only on HN is this "corrupt self dealing".
Do you think a corporate treasury could be used to directly throw a CEO's daughter a wedding celebration?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary#Fiduciary_duties_und...
"The duty of loyalty requires control persons to look to the interests of the company and its other owners and not to their personal interests. In general, they cannot use their positions of trust, confidence and inside knowledge to further their own private interests or approve an action that will provide them with a personal benefit (such as continued employment) that does not primarily benefit the company or its other owners."
You may be confusing spending corporate money on an initiative with the stock used to setup CZI (which was Zuckerberg's to do with as he wished).
BTW - in CA which is a community property state, this type of thing is not uncommon - all sorts of trusts, business etc take donated shares (sometimes unsold for tax reasons).
In terms of facebook - worth noting that Zuckerberg controls the voting power.
This came up when facebook "overpaid" for instragram by giving a small company of 13 employees $1B, which was unheard of at the time.
This was a major corporate governance scandal in some circles because the board wasn't consulted. So I read plenty of notes like yours! Outrage!
"CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the company’s largest acquisition ever without consulting his board of directors, according to an account in today’s Wall Street Journal."
I mention this because you would be amazed at what even companies without voting control in one person's hands will let an executive do if the executive claims it will advance the interests of the company.
Own race cars or teams, lease jets, start a research institute. All allowed in most cases even in other companies (and yes, spouses are often in the mix).
Anyways, there will be another case soon on this - Tesla shareholders (some) are suing claiming Elons plans / purchase of solar and doing the solar energy business was self dealing (Solar City was basically bust, but Elon wanted to move fast, knew and trusted many of the solar city folks, so bought them instead of some chinese company that might have been better on paper). I think the case is weak, but we will see.
The disclosure here that matters potentially is a warning to purchasers of Facebook shares:
"As a stockholder, even a controlling stockholder, Mr. Zuckerberg is entitled to vote his shares, and shares over which he has voting control as a result of voting agreements, in his own interests, which may not always be in the interests of our stockholders generally"
This metaverse thing is going to be another bet not everyone would go along with, and independent investors ALREADY voted Zuckerberg off as board chair - which made no difference as he could ignore their wishes.
For private foundations self dealing with disqualified people (directors / officers etc) is prohibited - even if the transaction is "fair". This is because it can be hard to say what is fair.
But for public charities you can have self dealing transactions if they are "fair". This is where the problem is. By the time you have attorney's / appraisers etc involved - and you are paying all of them, there often is not someone in a position to challenge the results who cares about the transactions. And the IRS (which folks keep refering to here) is way WAY behind and this is bottom of their list stuff as they don't get much money from this (vs billions they could get elsewhere).
This is not the case in all states. The IRS is way behind, but places like California have very active charitable oversight. In California you can go to the AG's office, tell them of the deal. They then have 2 years to complain or you can ask them to approve the deal in advance. If you DON'T request approval or give notice the AG's office has 10 years to sue you if they think the deal was unfair.
Uninteresting as it may be, I take the reason for the shut down at face value. From what I saw, meta.org never did as well as was expected, and other competitive services were doing better, notably Semantic Scholar.
To be sure, the exact timing probably had something to do with FB’s announcement, and the shared ownership of the two organizations probably helped the domain sale go smoothly.
Sometimes, perception is reality.
but honestly you re describing a system that would be self-annihilating if one has no legal recourse from money. I don't think that's the case or else america would be a bad place for business
The rest of the world doesnt depend on US courts. Apple has lost trademark battles before.
I'm in full agreement regarding their coopting of the word meta.
So, summing it up, Facebook has just been renamed to Meta, but until March 31, 2022 it will coexist with Meta[.org], which is led by Zuckerberg's wife, who has coincidentally decided to shut her project down a few days Meta was announced.
Eventually meta.org will probably be sold to meta.com, but the price will be lower because it isn't in use.
I love how that is the default assumption when international companies often just screw the law outright and then try to obstruct both court decisions and their enforcement for decades.
From there, "to sunset" something seems a fairly logical next step.
Having the domain is one thing, having the rights to use the brand name another if it's the same niche (which is certainly the case here). Or do rights to the brand name expire once companies get aquired?
If they still hold the rights they could try to block their future main competitor in the AR space..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer
First:
> In 1986, Apple Computer added MIDI and audio-recording capabilities to its computers, which included putting the advanced Ensoniq 5503 DOC sound chip from famous synthesizer maker Ensoniq into the Apple IIGS computer. In 1989, this led Apple Corps to sue again, claiming violation of the 1981 settlement agreement.[2] The outcome of this litigation effectively ended all forays at the time by Apple Computer into the multimedia field in parallel with the Amiga, and any future advanced built-in musical hardware in the Macintosh line.
This is ludicrous! Whatever harm the british Apple Corp had through a computer with a sound chip, this doesn't compare to the hinderance of the Mac.
Second:
> In 1991, another settlement involving payment of around $26.5 million to Apple Corps was reached.[4] This time, an Apple Computer employee named Jim Reekes had included a sampled system sound called Chimes to the Macintosh operating system
I don't agree that putting a system sound in System 7 is "going into the music business".
Interestingly, when Apple got into the music business they won:
> On 8 May 2006 the court ruled in favour of Apple Computer,[8] with Justice Edward Mann holding that "no breach of the trademark agreement [had] been demonstrated".[9][10]
Anyway, after that Apple Inc finally was able to buy Apple Corp out for allegedly $500 Million.
Whatever you think about trademark conflict, it did cost Apple Inc heavily.
scite.ai (I am co-founder) semantic scholar
Meta.org is a thing that was supposed to "...give researchers, patient communities, science societies, and research organizations more ways to discover the research they need." Being involved in research I have never once heard of this thing.
What connection does this have to the rebranding of Facebook? It's the elephant in the room that this article lacks the common sense or courage to address.
Is that really a science? And does it mean beginning of the war between Truth.Social and Meta (Facebook)?
On a more serious note, it's not likely that the Meta name will have any bigger impact than Google and it's Alphabet branding.
I don't see Facebook.com going away, just the amount of links alone will keep it alive for many years to come.
It's not like we all use search.com. Having an on the nose name doesn't necessarily mean having a good one.
Fortunately for Meta they already have a market leading VR product and a $10 billion annual budget to maintain that lead. As someone who has spent several thousand hours studying names and recently bought FB stock, I am delighted with the change.
"Meta" the bar or art gallery actually makes far more sense than "Meta" the tech company. Search would be a great name for a bar too. Generic industry terms make far more immediate sense when used outside the industry.
Meta just feels like a company in 1999 naming itself "Internet."
But, it doesn't matter because Facebook has the resources to make any bad idea stick.
This is it. Moneymaking in 21 century. Surveillance capitalism in its finest. Manufacturing consent with "science" and "there is no other option" narrative.
The next logical step after "collecting" users data and "normalizing" biometrical surveillance is Genetic Capitalism. 23andme is one of this "outlets" of future like Gattaka.
Bibliometrics spans multiple scientific fields of research , eg, philosophy of science, and an important practical area that emerged are tools like Google scholar that are one of the key tools to how scientists work today.
A scientist might skim 50+ papers for the background needed into every 1 paper they the write (and many more abstracts), so STEM researchers spend a LOT of time in tools like Google Scholar. Likewise, part of the job of a scientist is to disseminate their results to other scientists, so part of the writing process is to carefully adhere to bibliography conventions explicitly so tools like these can help make your work more accessible.