This is nonsense; it ignores the huge conflicts of interest and the obvious elephant in the room: nobody is going to pay a lot of money for something unless they expect to get a lot of money out of it, and the only way to get a lot of money out of .org is to extract it from the largely non-profit .org domain holders.
Why I Voted to Sell .ORG
281–290 of 316 posts
Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG
#282> 10% per year
AKA doubling every 8 years.
Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
The current Supreme Court is hard right and currently under Executive Mandate, I wouldn't put anything past them if their overlords demand something of them.
Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG
#284I don’t understand how this “sale” is legal in the first place. 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 d…
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…
It's been tried and failed.
If I recall correctly it was OpenNIC which established some TLDs independent of ICANN. ICANN stomped on one of them, and ultimately won, with OpenNIC conceding control of the TLD. (Everyone peered the ICANN data and no one the OpenNIC, and OpenNIC stopped registering or serving the conflicting domain themselves.)
Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG
#285Earlier 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…
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…
I agree, even the current political elites aren't so daft as to say if 80% of the population is vehemently opposed to any US citizen having say more than 1 billion dollars in wealth, the Congress can surely enact taxes to insure that happens. Lucky for Bezos there is only a (large) minority that would like to see that happen so his Billions are currently safe.
Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG
#286> 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…
It is a bad deal. No way a for-profit company bought rights to .org without having an intention to make a profit on it. I have confidence in capitalism and it always, always seeks to maximize profit.
Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG
#287The 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…
You forgot the part where Ethos is the same people who controlled PIR. It’s just a sleazy trick to take off the non profit veil, so they can start skimming the profits. Does anyone really believe the non profit PIR and ISOC couldn’t exist on their $90 million a year .org tithes?
This is what is more properly called incestuous relations between corporations. This will only serve those companies and people be-bopping between them with shadow titles. I don't know if this guy owns part of those companies and is benefiting or one of his bros at those companies convinced him with his "for the greater good" bullshit that MBAs learn in school.
Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
However, a sufficiently large mob can easily take everything Bezos has, no matter what any court says. Property is absolutely based on consensus, property beyond anything you control with your direct person is very much one of those polite fictions society collectively agrees to, like money and laws. If the large majority of people, for whatever reason, decided to stop agreeing, such fictions would cease to exist.
A thing doesn't exist by consensus just because a consensus against it could destroy it, because a consensus against pretty much anything could destroy it. What makes it exist by consensus is that a rough consensus in favor of it is required to sustain it. This isn't true of things like property rights which could be sustained even with only minority support provided the minority had a sufficient military advantage.…
If tomorrow somehow everyone's memory got wiped so they could no longer remember say, Mt. Rushmore, It would continue to exist.
If the same thing happened with Bezos's wealth, it would cease existing, or at least the concept of him owning it would cease existing.
That's the difference. Ownership of property is entirely within people's minds.
Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG
#289This 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…
"The foxes have assured us that they will limit their consumption in the hen house for a ten year period"
This is the best summary thus far, lol
Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG
#290This 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…
Without explicit agreements/laws in place I have to sadly agree, and any natural monopoly will get abused at some point if owned by profit-seeking companies. That's just how it is. Doesn't matter if they are now sweet-talking you into doing this deal, the fact is that once they are in the position of power, they can do whatever they want. Of course there are some limits what the customers can take, but when their end…
Yes unless it's regulated, any monopoly that is "for profit" will want to maximize profits. So they will walk the balance beam between raising prices and buying lawyers and lobbyists to insure congress critters don't regulate them.