291–300 of 316 posts
“Limiting price increases to only 10% per year” Let that sink in for a minute. In only 10 years, it’s going to cost 10x what it does today to register A NAME. Technology was supposed to prevent things like this, not enable it.
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Following unpopular laws is itself a consensus, one where abandoning the rule of law altogether is seen as more harmful than enforcing one unpopular ruling.
You've now defined "consensus" as "anything you don't stage an armed rebellion over" ... which doesn't seem like a useful definition at all.
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In practice, this says the same thing. There's no reason for registrars not to let their customers lock in the low price for 10 years. There's stiff competition among registrars and their margins on domain name sales are razor thin. They make their money by selling various add-on services. It's better for them if registry prices are low because that encourages people to buy more domains, and thus more add-on services…
The registrar can simply raise the registration price of Wikipedia.org to a million dollars a year, and keep the random ones the same price, to extract any value from .org websites that rely on their domain name. The 10% a year is not a legal commitment, just an easily breakable informal promise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In practice, this says the same thing. There's no reason for registrars not to let their customers lock in the low price for 10 years. There's stiff competition among registrars and their margins on domain name sales are razor thin. They make their money by selling various add-on services. It's better for them if registry prices are low because that encourages people to buy more domains, and thus more add-on services…
Their margins on new domain sales are thin, but the cost of changing domain names for a big owner of a prestigious .org domain could be huge. So jack up the renewal price to gouge existing domain owners, then drop the prices again to entice in new registrants.
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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.
If so much as one person still remembers and can prove it to everyone else, or it's documented somewhere on paper, then it would still exist. Likewise all Bezos would need is that documentation. Which is really how it works in practice. There are only a handful of people and documents concerned with exactly what someone owns. The large majority of people have no idea who owns an arbitrary piece of land or share of stock. The information comes from an authority, not a consensus.
Whereas if we're talking about the concept of property rights in general rather than specific ownership records then we're back to them being enforced by a government which it is in principle possible for them to do via superior force independent of popular support.
I'm kind of amazed that this website ( http://www.circleid.com ) is not served via https and even the login is posted to a http endpoint. There's even a redirect from https to http. You would think that "A World-Renowned Source for Internet Developments" would be on top of that.
Richard, maybe you could suggest such a place? /s
Considering "the lady doth protest too much, methinks" tone of the post, the inner conspiracy theorist in me starts to wonder if "Let's Encrypt" is as benign in the long run as it seems.
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>Have you ever heard of wikipedia.org? That's a pretty popular site on a .org domain. And no, not everybody assumes it's a .com. Sorry to say so, but that is not a particularly valid point, since https://www.wikipedia.com/ redirects to https://www.wikipedia.org/ and actually both are registered to Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
But then when there’s a price hike on .org and Wikipedia has to give up their domain? There will be millions of broken links.
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Changing domains is not easy, but if you bring up 20+ year horizons, then it is definitely viable to change domains to deal with rising costs.
What costs? They have to run some DNS and WHOIS servers, plus collect money. This isn't rocket fusion, this is something every country, no matter how tiny, manages to deal with for their own national domain. If they're in way over their heads maybe they should out-source components of it, but retain control over things like pricing. Or, sure, sell it off. I'm sure nothing bad will happen like when .com went evil.
OP meant that current .org clients can ditch .org if/when costs for them (profits for .org) gets too high.
> ...
Many countries just contract some registrar/registry/regperson to provide the service.
But of course, it's dead simple. (The complications arise if you are .com and thousands of squatters try to catch dropping domains, etc.)
> 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…