101–110 of 316 posts
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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
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I think it's worse than naive. His two points are in impossible conflict. He wanted a pile of money for the Internet Society, enough to "secure that work's future". But the only way selling .org is worth a pile of money is if it gets extracted from nonprofits. With plenty of profits left over to feed the investors who put up the initial cash. If the Internet Society wanted to secure their future, they should have rai…
Why could the Internet Society not have been the one raising prices by 10% ad infinitum. Need capital? Borrow it and pledge .org as security. There’s basically unlimited funds available in this manner because the .org cashflow stream is as reliable as anything. How naive indeed. What a shame.
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Its not cheap you have to commit to very high up times with massive redundancy eg survive continent failure
Does ICANN pay for that infra though or do you? Because if ICANN doesn't pay I don't see how that's relevant.
> Make .org domain names "accessible and reasonably priced for all", including limiting price increases to no more than 10% per year 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…
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.
PIR is a legal 501(c)3 nonprofit. You can’t really sell a nonprofit to a for-profit company except in unusual and rare circumstances.
In California, I know you need a letter from the state Attorney General to do so.
There are also federal restrictions on sales like this, particularly around self-dealing transactions. This transaction was obviously self dealing.
Someone seriously needs to dig into this. The PIR board members could be in big legal trouble. And also ICANN, which is a 501(c)3 nonprofit as well and is subject to self-dealing restrictions.
This is obvious, plain as day corruption. In the business world, not much can be done. But these are two nonprofits (PIR and ICANN), so something can and should be done. These kind of transactions aren’t normally legal.
Like, just read the examples of what an illegal self dealing transaction is in the eyes of the IRS:
https://boardsource.org/resources/private-benefit-private-in...
“Keep Our City Beautiful, a membership organization, plants a city alley with elaborate flowering bushes. The alley is not heavily traveled but the decorations increase the attractiveness of the city’s main restaurant whose owner is a member of the organization.”
ICANN clearly engaged in an illegal self dealing transaction by allowing their former CEO to enrich himself with a deal that would otherwise not be possible.
Edit: please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21658324 for a “what you can do right now”
> Make .org domain names "accessible and reasonably priced for all", including limiting price increases to no more than 10% per year 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…
Because that's worked out so frequently for humanity in the past.