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201–210 of 355 posts

Re: Save .org

#201

Some further background on what happened. I don't see how this can be interpreted as anything other than corruption, plain and simple. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/20/org_registry_sale_s... "Former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade personally registered the domain name currently used by Ethos Capital in May and it was registered as a limited company in the US state of Delaware on May 14. That date is significant becaus…

If we in the United States had a forceful, competent FTC or FCC, perhaps this would be investigated. I don't think a Sanders or Warren administration would ignore something like this entirely.

The SEC are both competent and forceful, and this smacks of self-dealing, which is within their remit.

Re: Save .org

#203
I mentioned in my last comment about this being outright corruption by the Americans involved.

Now it is time to mention the 1 positive that the USA has that other countries(visibly) don't:

> The willingness and ability to sue as a collective

.org is a domain used by everyone from Wikipedia, UN, Debian and your national dog shelter.

Private Equity cares only about one thing: making money. Anybody with a toe in the finance world knows that these are the same people that will do "hostile takeovers" to strip companies of their assets, pile on debt and push out a sale.

A class-action lawsuit targeting the PE firm(or parties involved in the sale of .org) and then pushing your State Attorneys to investigate these corrupt individuals at a personal level will have the desired effect that appeals to the moral high-ground won't.

Re: Save .org

#204
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that running an NIC for a major TLD almost has zero marginal cost: for each domain, you automatically interface with ICANN once in a while to update registration info, then serve some NS and associated A/AAAA records. So it’s kind of surprising to me that $10/yr is already a non-profit price. Am I missing something?

The $10 a year includes the markup of a profit making domain registrar which has marketing and support costs. This article suggests Public Interest Registry's costs for third party technical services were about half their revenue, with the beneficiary of the rest of the funds being the Internet Society https://domainnamewire.com/2019/10/28/pir-org-slashes-regist... Still, you can see why those kind of margins and the…

> The $10 a year includes the markup of a profit making domain registrar which has marketing and support costs.

I use Cloudflare Registrar these days for .com and .org. They claim to offer wholesale prices. My last .org bill was $9.90 + ICANN fee. And according to [1], Cloudflare directly work with PIR to offer .org, so unless they're lying, they are actually charged $9.90 per domain per year by PIR. Now, the article you linked to claims that PIR paid less than $2 per domain to the for-profit contractor who did everything technical for them (what's left? PR?). I wonder where the remaining $7.90 went...

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/tld-policies/

Edit: Apparently overlooked the beneficiary part. Not a fan of mandatory donations but at least the numbers sort of add up now.

Re: Save .org

#205
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posting from a throwaway account. I worked at one of the main TLDs for years and was on one of the ICANN boards and got to know the industry well. It is well know amongst the domain name community that ICANN is a poorly run organization, whose directors have in recent years have used their position of leadership to lead decisions from which they are afterwards benefiting themselves economically, in many cases by rush…

The process of mapping name=IP is not remotely technically difficult, and I'd dare say most people reading this message could implement the backend to such a system in a few days. Setting up the peering replication and nameservers around the world is considerably harder, but it's definitely not a $10 billion+ problem (the current value of registrars and certificate authorities.) A startup funded by YC could handle th…

namecoin is one of the oldest altcoins around and probably predates the existence of the term altcoin.

https://www.namecoin.org/

Re: Save .org

#206

Some further background on what happened. I don't see how this can be interpreted as anything other than corruption, plain and simple. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/20/org_registry_sale_s... "Former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade personally registered the domain name currently used by Ethos Capital in May and it was registered as a limited company in the US state of Delaware on May 14. That date is significant becaus…

Posting from a throwaway account. I worked at one of the main TLDs for years and was on one of the ICANN boards and got to know the industry well. It is well know amongst the domain name community that ICANN is a poorly run organization, whose directors have in recent years have used their position of leadership to lead decisions from which they are afterwards benefiting themselves economically, in many cases by rush…

Corruption and causing financial damages intentionally for having personal benefits on it - especially by abusing a position against the very community they represent - is punishable by law in most country. Aren't they subject of legal proceedings now by violating the law?

Re: Save .org

#207
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posting from a throwaway account. I worked at one of the main TLDs for years and was on one of the ICANN boards and got to know the industry well. It is well know amongst the domain name community that ICANN is a poorly run organization, whose directors have in recent years have used their position of leadership to lead decisions from which they are afterwards benefiting themselves economically, in many cases by rush…

The process of mapping name=IP is not remotely technically difficult, and I'd dare say most people reading this message could implement the backend to such a system in a few days. Setting up the peering replication and nameservers around the world is considerably harder, but it's definitely not a $10 billion+ problem (the current value of registrars and certificate authorities.) A startup funded by YC could handle th…

> The really hard, unsolvable part is the unwillingness of the browser vendors to support an alternative domain name system. If Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all supported a new TLD outside of ICANN's control as a public service (let's call it "Let's Resolve" which would offer free domains and would be funded through donations), it would be very successful.

Not sure I understand your proposal. Say every single browser in the world supports Let's Resolve. byuu.org is registered with ICANN; but someone now wants to register byuu.org with Let's Resolve. Do you let them? What about the other way round? And what if someone attempts to register byuu.org with ICANN, while another attempts to register byuu.org with Let's Resolve at the same time, causing a race. Who wins?

Also, unique, meaningful and memorable identifiers are a scarce resource. Offering free domains just open up the floodgate of squatting and hoarding (at unprecedented ease).

Edit: Parent suggested a new TLD; I read it as a whole alternative system. Well, the new TLD idea was already implemented as .bit AFAIK, and it's pretty crap.

Re: Save .org

#208

I've been thinking a lot about the sheer downsides of DNS overall. We need something different. Something decentralized, encrypted, something not reliant on a protocol that hasn't kept pace with security and privacy and we need something verifiable that provides accountability. As others have said TLDs have become a racket. Only the priveleged and nation states have the authority to use the system as a funnel of ridi…

All these Ethereum/Namecoin/Whatever solutions aren't really solutions. They're subject to namesquatting, arbitrary prices, arbitrary decisions regarding TLDs and they end up being centralized in the end for various reasons.

I think a good solution is to switch to using petnames instead of global names.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/02/petnames.html

Re: Save .org

#210
post #207
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The process of mapping name=IP is not remotely technically difficult, and I'd dare say most people reading this message could implement the backend to such a system in a few days. Setting up the peering replication and nameservers around the world is considerably harder, but it's definitely not a $10 billion+ problem (the current value of registrars and certificate authorities.) A startup funded by YC could handle th…

> The really hard, unsolvable part is the unwillingness of the browser vendors to support an alternative domain name system. If Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all supported a new TLD outside of ICANN's control as a public service (let's call it "Let's Resolve" which would offer free domains and would be funded through donations), it would be very successful. Not sure I understand your proposal. Say every single browser…

You probably need a system that allows both roots to function together. Maybe a different URL scheme:

http: and https: use ICANN, httplr: and httplrs: use LR

If not specified, browser tries LR first, then falls back on ICANN.

Doesn't feel as solid to me, but they could also register a placeholder TLD that would be use for redirecting requests to LR, or the other way around:

google.com.lrns would tell the browser to resolve google.com in the LR root (hardcoded), or google.com.icann would tell the browser to resolve google.com in the ICANN root. When falling back from one to the other, the browser would display the hostname with the fallback TLD on it.

Just some ideas off the top of my head, I haven't fully considered the implications yet.

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