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Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

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Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#241

Post by PaulHoule »

ccjnsn wrote: post #196
PaulHoule wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that "nonprofit" = "good". See https://newint.org/features/2005/10/01/keynote/ we might be better off if Oxfam's domain name was sold off to somebody else. People who liked that "phenomenon of bullshit jobs" essay might think that "working for a nonprofit" is "meaningful", but people who work for non-profits frequently suffer from moral injury, get burned out, underpaid, and wind up questioning their va…

>Particularly in the developing world, people would benefit from for-profit organizations that are responsive to their needs as opposed to non-profits who work for rich donors and mindless governments. If there was profit to be made there would an business filling that need. A foodbank in Detroit or non profit school in Ethiopia for girls are there because business and the like aren't.

The definition of "undeveloped" is that institutions haven't been developed to meet a need.

People an an "undeveloped" area are going to have a bad year now and then when Oxfam will come and tell everyone what an important thing they are doing.

If an area becomes "developed" then for-profit businesses have been created to fulfill people's needs and they don't need Oxfam.

If the rich tip the scales so that all the money ends up in their pockets, they give a little bit to Oxfam. In a fair system, people would create the institutions that they need and we wouldn't need Oxfam.

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#242

Post by ada1981 »

ppf wrote: post #104
ttul wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because it's harder to justify being the person who raises prices that much, while claiming to "enable the internet for all" or whatever their mission statement is. With the right PR, you can sell out and try and keep a straight face.

Seems like they missed the right pr then?

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#243

Post by VMG »

zrm wrote: post #226
wwweston wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s correct enough to say that DNS is an application of consensus, but rather than considering that a distinction vs property, one might consider asking themselves in what sense property itself isn’t consensus.

Property is not based on consensus. Even if millions of people think Jeff Bezos has too much money, with nowhere near consensus that he should have it, a court will still convict anybody who tries to take his stuff. The DNS really does operate on consensus. There is nobody forcing everybody to do it a particular way. We get real consensus because everybody has a strong interest in not creating global namespace confli…

> a court will still convict anybody who tries to take his stuff

the ruling will be enforced if there is a consensus that it is a just ruling

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#244

Post by gorgoiler »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #225
zrm wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, isn't there a sense in which a TLD is not actually property at all? The DNS operates by consensus. There are a bunch of root server operators who all agree who operates the .org TLD and then list those NS records in their root servers. What stops people from getting together, agreeing that a private equity firm would be a poor steward of the .org TLD, choosing somebody else to operate it instead, and p…

Who owns the root DNS servers? Can those owners be convinced to stage such a coup? If not 100%, then you have forked a TLD.

Edit: sorry, re-reading your coup plot I see you wanted the owners of {A..M}.ROOT-SERVERS.NET to collude in direct action. It’s not an implausible idea at all, if the worst comes to the worst, even if it’s quite extreme. My original comment misses your point a bit...

...

If you want to fix this by direct action on the root servers, rather than ORG’s nameservers, the it doesn’t matter who owns the current root servers.

Their config is baked into your resolver’s installation files or source code, and my naive understanding is that it takes only one patch to change each one:

https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/bind9/blob/master/lib/dn...

...though the changes would be fragmented until the patch had been rolled out to 100% of resolver codebases and all instances of each resolver updated and restarted. Not an easy solution without coordinating people as well as software.

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#245

Post by ada1981 »

techsupporter wrote: post #210
Thorrez wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This should seriously discourage Ethos from doing this, because it would take 10 years for the new high rate to even take effect for existing registrants, and new registrations would likely fall off right away. It's the exact opposite of that. As soon as you announce a price hike, you don't get a giant loss of money, you get a giant flood of money as tons of people pre-pay for 10 years.

You even kinda get the best of both worlds, a cash infusion and more money in the long run. The org TLD has 14 million registrations in it right now. If Ethos announces a 50% price hike (increasing the base charge from $9 to $13.50), my guess is 2% of the domains would be immediately renewed for the 10-year max at the old price. So right off the bat, Ethos have 280,000 domains * ($9 * 10 years) = $25,200,000 in new c…

Also keeping in mind that if one locks in the domain for 10 years, they are going to be much more likely to renew at whatever the ungodly sum is when the 10 year period is over.

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#246

Post by IshKebab »

zrm wrote: post #226
wwweston wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s correct enough to say that DNS is an application of consensus, but rather than considering that a distinction vs property, one might consider asking themselves in what sense property itself isn’t consensus.

Property is not based on consensus. Even if millions of people think Jeff Bezos has too much money, with nowhere near consensus that he should have it, a court will still convict anybody who tries to take his stuff. The DNS really does operate on consensus. There is nobody forcing everybody to do it a particular way. We get real consensus because everybody has a strong interest in not creating global namespace confli…

If everyone agrees that Jeff Bezos has too much money and that we should make an exception to normal property laws and strip him of his assets, that's exactly what would happen!

But most people don't think that. They wish they had as much money as him, maybe they think society is unfair to allow someone to have so much money. But you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who supports arbitrarily stripping someone of their (current) property.

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#247

Post by zrm »

VMG wrote: post #243
zrm wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Property is not based on consensus. Even if millions of people think Jeff Bezos has too much money, with nowhere near consensus that he should have it, a court will still convict anybody who tries to take his stuff. The DNS really does operate on consensus. There is nobody forcing everybody to do it a particular way. We get real consensus because everybody has a strong interest in not creating global namespace confli…

> a court will still convict anybody who tries to take his stuff the ruling will be enforced if there is a consensus that it is a just ruling

> the ruling will be enforced if there is a consensus that it is a just ruling

The Supreme Court regularly makes rulings that are contrary to popular opinion. I see no evidence that the rulings are not being enforced despite the lack of consensus that they were just. They also regularly make rulings that align with the slight popular majority but the popular opinion is still about evenly split with no clear consensus one way or the other, and those rulings are enforced as well.

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#249

Post by IshKebab »

archi42 wrote: post #68

"While it's true that running .org provided a relatively steady income stream, it effectively staked most of our revenue on a single business, and required a certain amount of our resources to be spent managing that business, distracting from the broader mission." So, now they don't have any significant income stream anymore? Great! So once they run out of money from the sell, they're closing down? That is, unless th…

Yeah this makes zero sense. If Ethos are going to keep the prices reasonable (yeah right), they'll make the same amount of money as PIR did, so they won't have paid more for it than PIR would earn anyway.

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#250

Post by ddevault »

dogcow wrote: post #240
ddevault wrote: post #112

IRS Form 13909 can be used to submit complaints about non-profit organizations to the IRS. Here are two pre-filled Form 13909's, one for ICANN and one for ISOC. Just print it out, add your personal information to both, and mail it to the address listed on the bottom of the form. https://yukari.sr.ht/dotorg-form-13909.pdf Alternatively, this file can be opened with LibreOffice Draw to make edits and prepare your docum…

Thanks for this. Additionally, it might be beneficial for folks to file complaints with the Washington, D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs [1], since the Internet Society is incorporated in D.C., and with the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services [2], since its principle place of business is Virginia and is registered as a foreign corporation there. [1] https://dcra.dc.gov/ [2] http…

I also wrote this letter to the Attorneys General of VA and CA:

https://yukari.sr.ht/ag-letter.pdf

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