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Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

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Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#301

Post by astrodust »

pas wrote: post #299
astrodust wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> costs 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.)

The costs of a .org domain should be proportional to the cost of providing a .org domain. What costs are there for running a registry that require a huge price-tag?

There are wholesale registrars that will provide white-label service for a couple of bucks a domain per year. The costs can't be that high.

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#303

Post by jacob-malthouse »

ISOC CEO does not consider the public reaction or petition significant. He stated that a mere 10,000 signatures when there are millions of .orgs indicates lack of public concern or any serious opposition to the deal.

Ethos Capital paid $1.135 billion for total, unconditional, purchase of the PIR from ISOC.

ISOC just "grabbed the opportunity when Ethos presented it,"

ISOC have reviewed Ethos’s governance plans and approved them, but will have no means to enforce compliance with those plans.

The deal must be approved by the end of the 1st Quarter 2021 or it fails. The exact date is still confidential.

It must be approved by two bodies – ICANN and the Pennsylvania Orphans Court, which is a specialist court for estates and trusts.

The PIR is incorporated in Pennsylvania and this court must approve changes in the PIR charter in order for Ethos Capital to take ownership.

This is because “the Orphans’ Court judge is the ultimate defender and protector of the fund in question, and the Orphans’ Court will protect that fund and ensure that the fund is distributed to the correct beneficiary”

There is a good introduction to this court at https://www.skhlaw.com/pennsylvania-orphans-court-101-all-th...

This means that if the Pennsylvania Orphans Court has not reached a determination by 1st April next year, or if that decision is being challenged in a manner which delays implementation, the deal fails.

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#304

Post by wpietri »

ada1981 wrote: post #242
ppf wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In the short term, sure. But in the long term, they have a pile of cash they're not giving back and somebody else (who doesn't give a shit) takes the blame.

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#305

Post by wpietri »

tptacek wrote: post #145
wpietri wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Help me understand what you mean by "worse than naive" here. Richard Barnes isn't going to see a dollar of this money and wouldn't need it anyways. I understand people disagreeing with him, but, despite being automatically disinclined to extend good faith to anything published at CircleID, I don't understand where anyone derives bad faith from this piece. I thought it was tremendously useful, if only to understand wh…

I mean what I say: I don't think he can possibly be as naive as this piece suggests, and I don't think any of the plausible alternatives interpretations (e.g., incredibly negligent, corrupt, a fool) is better than this babe-in-the-woods confection.

If you'd like to assert that he's really this naive, feel free to make a case for it. Or if you have some interpretation that's better, I'd be glad to read that as well.

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#306

Post by wpietri »

jfim wrote: post #205
gwd wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Help me understand what you mean by "worse than naive" here. "Naive" in this context generally means they were overly trusting when there was no evidence to suggest trust was warranted. I'd interpret "worse than naive" as saying that they are actually evidence to the contrary. The logic presented is, "We need more money, so we sold it to this private equity firm. But don't worry, they're not going to try to squeeze…

Your scenarios are not mutually exclusive. To maximize their expected value, you say that they could: 1. Earn less than IS would 2. Charge more than IS would It's actually: 1. They could earn less than IS would, because they're generous, incompetent, or some other reason 2. They could earn more than IS would, because they increase the prices, run PIR more efficiently than IS would, increase the number of registration…

If you have some evidence that this is the case, feel free to give it. But they've already outsourced the running of the registry to somebody else, so any obvious efficiency gains have presumably already been taken. And if they haven't, there's no reason to think a fresh-minted PE company would do any better than hiring a competent manager.

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#307

Post by jjoonathan »

somebodythere wrote: post #195
tlb wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PE companies are very much in the business of valuing a revenue stream that goes up 10% per year highly. This article doesn't show thinking beyond 10-20 years, but most of the economic value comes even farther in the future. In 50 years, it could be 14000x the current price! If you plug a 10%-growing revenue stream into a net-present-value formula with a discount rate less than 10%, you get infinity. The future reven…

1. The price cap is an informal agreement, not legally binding 2. The domain name market would probably not bear a 14000x increase.

So they run price discovery to figure out who gets $10 domains and who gets soaked for millions.

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#308

Post by kortilla »

IshKebab wrote: post #246
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…

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…

> But you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who supports arbitrarily stripping someone of their (current) property.

Isn’t that what the Warren wealth tax is?

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#309

Post by Iv »

zrm wrote: post #201
ptest1 wrote: post #107

I 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…

OpenNIC is actually a parallel organization to the ICANN and they manage a register that is in sync but with a bunch of additional TLDs.

They could decide to fork .org and lobby ISPs and DNS to use their register instead.

Re: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

#310

Post by Iv »

the_angry_angel wrote: post #9

The 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…

I'm not skeptical, I'm outraged.

This is corruption plain and simple. I hope OpenNIC forks the .org registry and lobbies DNS to accept their records instead.

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