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The simplified timeline (as I understand it, willing to be corrected if I'm wrong); 1. PIR, or someone very close, seems to have lobbied to have price restriction of .org removed. My understanding is that PIR made the argument that they're a non-profit, they have no reason to raise pricing extortionately 2. This was passed, despite a large number of comments against the idea, Ethos was incorporated the following day…
10%/year should be reaping quite some profit after a while. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a pump-and-dump kind of deal, where PE substantially raise prices and then sell the entity at a big profit, given the effectively locked-in forward profits.
Ethos will squeeze every last drop out of this opportunity.
This immediately stuck out to me as a really bad deal.
Rising with inflation, somewhere between 1 and 4% per year, would essentially keep prices stable. This is tricky when selling internationally, but roughly possible.
Rising by 10% each year is significantly faster than inflation, and would result in a $20 domain name doubling in price in 7 years, or 6x in 20 years.
This is the internet we're talking about, 20 year time horizons are important and yet still short sighted. In 100 years we're talking $275,000 rather than the $400 that inflation would get us to.
> Ethos has said that their plan is to "live within the spirit of historic practice,"
This is not what Private Equity does. It cuts costs and quality, raises prices, strips assets, and seeks to significantly increase profits. I think it's naive and short-sighted to take them at their word, as this article admits they are doing.
There is nothing reasonable about the current prices. It’s literally a few hundred bytes of data mostly static data.
“10% per year” means it will double every seven years. “Up to” means they will be doing it at the maximum. And unless this is legally codified I doubt they would adhere to that either.
What it comes down to is the board wanted a large pile of cash so they could do more of whatever it is they like doing, which apparently is not what many of us think their core mission should be. I look forward to reading how much the board members are being paid now, and how much they will be paid in a years time.
Most non-profit boards pay $0. The Internet Society is one of them, with Barnes taking $0 from the organization (as board members, they also have to disclose if a related organization pays them): https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/54165... There are a few exceptions to the boards-get-paid-$0, but they're rare and doubt personal financial motivations are part of the decision.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/331...
A large part of his motivation appears to be delusions of grandeur within an organization, the Internet Society, which, up to now, has been of no relevance whatsoever, and which has only now achieved a degree of prominence through an act of apparently naive stupidity.
This author is just outright naive. >Even in the worst case, if Ethos considers dramatically increasing prices (which, to be clear, we do not expect them to do!), the Registry Agreement for .org requires a 6-month notice period during which domain owners can lock in a 10-year registration at pre-increase rates. This should seriously discourage Ethos from doing this, because it would take 10 years for the new high rat…