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Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

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Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#91

Post by ajb »

Right. This guy was appointed to ISOC by IETF, unfortunately this year, so his term lasts until 2022. However there are 4 board members whose term is up in 2020 [1], one appointed by the IETF. According to BCP77 [2] The IETF will choose its appointee in January. Nominations for candidates for all 4 positions apparently close next week, Dec 6 [3] so anyone who has the time and interest to scrutinise the nominees (or even propose new ones) needs to act on this pretty soon.

[1] https://www.internetsociety.org/board-of-trustees/ [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/bcp77 [3] https://www.internetsociety.org/board-of-trustees/elections/...

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#92

Post by unreal37 »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #37

How relevant is a TLD anymore? There are so many options. Most people seem to use Google, and then after visiting the site, they use whatever the autocomplete in their address bar is. Or, they use an app. At least in India, I've seen most people doing this on their smartphones. Nobody likes to type in the address bar anymore.

Yes, this.

I don't get how anyone actually cares about a top level domain. There are so many. Pick another.

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#93

Post by 55555 »

IMO, putting "Ethos" in the name of your private equity firm makes it a little bit too obvious that you don't want people to realize that you care about nothing but money.

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#94

Post by C1sc0cat »

apple4ever wrote: post #64
icebraining wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to pay about $200k to ICANN just to submit a proposal for a new gTLD.

Because it costs so much to add a new gTLD /sarcasm

Its not cheap you have to commit to very high up times with massive redundancy eg survive continent failure

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#95

Post by pbhjpbhj »

"Hey guys, now we run the .org registry we're providing valuable security to the registry users through synergistically responding to key realtime threats. As such, in order to now return correct IP addresses _every_time_ we need extra funding and so there is now a $100 security fee per 100k requests. But, in keeping with our forthright policy to stimulate internet growth the domain renewal fee is only 10% higher than last year. We're also freezing all updating of equipment as it might introduce security vulnerabilities."

-- new .org registry owners, next year, probably

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#96

Post by dpau »

dpau wrote: post #74
simias wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is a frankly insane take for me. >For those who might be unfamiliar with the Internet Society, our mission is as follows: Nobody cares, that's utterly irrelevant as long as operating .org doesn't go against the Society's mission statement (which it clearly doesn't). By the author's own admission "While it's true that running .org provided a relatively steady income stream, it effectively staked most of our…

I also find it insulting that he belittles "leasing domain names" as beneath the mission of the Internet Society. Management of .org is actually extremely important to all of those who are involved in non-profits. So are we to assume that selling off .org to private equity for a quick cash grab is in line with their "mission"?

LOL

"The Internet Society supports and promotes the development of the Internet as a global technical infrastructure, a resource to enrich people’s lives, and a force for good in society.

Our work aligns with our goals for the Internet to be open, globally-connected, secure, and trustworthy. We seek collaboration with all who share these goals.

Together, we focus on:

Building and supporting the communities that make the Internet work; Advancing the development and application of Internet infrastructure, technologies, and open standards; and Advocating for policy that is consistent with our view of the Internet"

https://www.internetsociety.org/mission/

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#97

Post by VLM »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #37

How relevant is a TLD anymore? There are so many options. Most people seem to use Google, and then after visiting the site, they use whatever the autocomplete in their address bar is. Or, they use an app. At least in India, I've seen most people doing this on their smartphones. Nobody likes to type in the address bar anymore.

According to the general public the only TLD is .com

My kids school can't use a .edu domain because everyone insists on typing in variations on whatever.edu.com and its just too much of a headache.

My home town can't use a .gov domain because everyone insists on typing in variations on cityname.gov.com and its just too much of a headache. Even more hilariously my city name is my county name so there's a turf battle over name.gov. At least my hometown city name is rare, there are supposedly 88 cities named "Springfield" in the USA. They heavily market a .com domain for my city although it redirects to a ridiculous variation of city-name.gov. I honestly don't know the marketing domain for my county, but its probably a .com also.

I can think of insider sites on .org for IT and technical people; debian.org for example. The death of .org would hit IT and tech people kinda hard. I can't think of a popular general public site on the .org TLD, and even if there is one, well, it can just move to .com where the end users already assume it is anyway.

In short, if .org is squeezed, a couple insiders and IT people will angrily leave to .com, and the general public will not notice, other than its a little easier to find them, because "all domains end in dot com" as I've been told many times over the years. Insider sites will go to specialty TLDs that the general public do not realize exists and are thus quite cheap, .mobi or .name or .biz or similar.

Presumably the private equity firm figured this out during due diligence. By analogy, they MUST know they did not buy the one monopoly cable modem provider for a region which they could squeeze for all its worth ... they knowingly bought the equivalent of one food truck in a highly competitive market. If they destroy .org for fun or whatever, well, its not really a big deal to switch, so knowing they won't make much money off the destruction, why bother destroying .org? By analogy you can make a lot of money by destroying Iraq, so there was intense corporate media pressure to destroy Iraq, and Iraq was destroyed. However, you can't make a lot of money destroying Clipperton Island, and as such there is not much big corporate media pressure to invade or bomb Clipperton, and its unlikely it'll ever be destroyed (at least, not for profit, LOL).

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#98

Post by oefrha »

cartoonworld wrote: post #63
oefrha wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why OP tosses out 10% price hikes per year as reassuring. Maybe he’s too rich to make sense of small amounts of money like this. Even $10 is a nontrivial sum in some underdeveloped countries as is. Also, this is just “what Ethos themselves have said about their intentions with regard to .org”, and we all know how good for-profit entities are at keeping promises that affect their bottom line.

His argument seems to be: 1: The Internet Society does great work protecting the Internet 2: Ethos is a worthy successor to the Internet Society as the steward of .org. This is incoherent. THis blog post can be summed up in one sentence: "I reckon its fine." Thanks for voting to sell .ORG Richard Barnes. I know he thinks its fine, I think jacking the prices up 10% year over year is nonsense. What do the financials lo…

.org registry was already a pretty good cash cow. According to their tax return[1], in 2018 they grossed ~$93m over ~$33m registry administration expense, ~$7m employee compensation (interestingly there's a 30% year over year increase here), and some other smaller expenses. They raised $48.7m for Internet Society. Note that out of registry administration expense, $18.1m went to Afilias[2] (this should also be in the tax return), a for-profit technical registry provider. So every time you paid your $10 .org registration fee, at least $5 went to Internet Society as a mandatory donation, somewhere between $0-2 went to Afilias the for-profit contractor, some small amount went to GoDaddy for marketing, etc. Anyway, a non-profit printing $50m/yr without begging for donations is certainly nothing to sneer at, and under the control of a for-profit entity they should expect more even if the price stays the same. And you bet the price won't stay the same.

[1] https://thenew.org/app/uploads/2019/09/PIR-2017_2018-990.zip

[2] https://domainnamewire.com/2019/10/28/pir-org-slashes-regist...

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#99

Post by 55555 »

tehlike wrote: post #77
greatgib wrote: post #34

So much bullshit and so littke valid argument in this big post. But don't worry 'Make .org domain names "accessible and reasonably priced for all", including limiting price increases to no more than 10% per year' It can ONLY increase of 10% per year. Like if it is a low number...

And i dont think this is written on a contract, sounded like a mere intention.

1. We know that there's no limit in the contract, because if there was, they would just say that.

2. The reason there isn't a limit in the contract is because Ethos don't actually intend to limit themselves to 10% yearly. If they did, they would have agreed to write it into the contract, which would have let them pay less for .org

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#100

Post by DubiousPusher »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #78
simias wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is a frankly insane take for me. >For those who might be unfamiliar with the Internet Society, our mission is as follows: Nobody cares, that's utterly irrelevant as long as operating .org doesn't go against the Society's mission statement (which it clearly doesn't). By the author's own admission "While it's true that running .org provided a relatively steady income stream, it effectively staked most of our…

How did they get to being in a position to make that decision if they are naive about such things?

Because he's not naive. Humans are self justification machines and he's just exercising the semi-delusional post decision making process we all frequently exercise ourselves.
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