Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why ISOC sold .ORG to VCs

easydns.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 105 posts

Re: Why ISOC sold .ORG to VCs

#71

Post by ambernightcruse »

einpoklum wrote: post #47
jessaustin wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Administration can consume any amount of money, so long as it isn't getting in the way of the money coming in the door. Just look at universities in USA. They're not doing anything now they weren't doing in 1980, yet tuition inflation was 7% over for most of the period since then. Where did the money go? They hired more assistant administrators, to justify higher salaries for the top administrators. Also the perks ar…

I doubt even your numeric figure is exact; source? Anyway, supposing that it is - how do you know that's where the money went? And - how do you know the money went mostly to the same place in most universities? This sounds like a baseless generalization. PS - I'm not from the US.

This is a pretty general assertion on the rising cost of college, and in the US it's commonly understood that there are a lot of extra admins, but not a lot of extra professors for students; mostly adjunct faculty and never-tenured instructors. Your experience wil vary depending on the public/private, size, department, etc. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-grow...

Re: Why ISOC sold .ORG to VCs

#72

Post by joveian »

If the mission of the Internet Societies is to connect people to the Internet, one question is why they want to connect people to the Internet. The .org sale communicates that the reason is to extract as much money from them as possible. What they really have a problem with is the people extracting money paying to develop standards, so they strive to extract as much free labor as possible from people as their money is extracted.

Re: Why ISOC sold .ORG to VCs

#73

Post by nikolay »

walrus01 wrote: post #61
nikolay wrote: post #60

I haven't yet heard the point that if .org prices go up too much, nonprofits could abandon it and switch to .ngo, which is better anyway. Many will keep their .orgs even if prices go up 10-fold or more, but what percentage is that from all .orgs?

Why should organizations be forced to change their business cards, website address, all email addresses, letterhead, signage and such because the new venture capitalist vulture owners of .org are a pack of shady rent seekers? To quote Michael Bolton from Office Space: Samir: Hmm… well why don't you just go by Mike instead of Michael? Michael: No way. Why should I change? He's the one who sucks.

We've witnessed many companies abandon .ly and .io with time. Plus, .org means "organization". Commercial entities are also organizations, so, not sure why it was chosen for nonprofits. NPO and NGO are way more meaningful abbreviations anyway.

Re: Why ISOC sold .ORG to VCs

#74

Post by samstave »

TLDs are interesting, intriguing and hard.

TLDs serve as a classification structure for various aspects of human interest, knowledge, creativity and commerce...

Where should the canonical for TLDs come from?

Should a particular interest have its own TLD, regardless of topic - how to measure when to provide a TLD -- is it scale of interested people? is it ideologically based?

As such, should there be a .dem and a .gop? if so, then should them be a .socialist? .nazi? .zionist? etc?

Some of the current TLDs are silly, to me, but what is the barrier to entry and what is the criteria for approval?

And most importantly, WHO APPROVES? Like literally - the names of the people who actually make TLDs happen?

Re: Why ISOC sold .ORG to VCs

#75

Post by lallysingh »

wongarsu wrote: post #20
Rebelgecko wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that the price of a .org will almost certainly be going up soon, I think that $75m/year will soon be $82million. I don't think it's sustainable to pull that amount of money every year from a 1.1 billion endowment.

Back-of-the-envelope I would expect to pull a steady 50 million/year out of a 1.1B endowment. That's certainly less than 75 or 82 million. I guess the endowment gives you more security and flexibility.

I think that you can borrow a lot more against a dead-steady $50 a year than a variable $75.

Re: Why ISOC sold .ORG to VCs

#76

Post by lallysingh »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #12
herodotus wrote: post #4

If I understand the article correctly, ISOC took a reasonable decision based on (a) they are not supposed to be a registry operator; and (b) "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush". That is, the $75m/annum profit from .org may not last for long, but the $1.1135 billion will be a great endowment fund. The flip side is the implication (and I hope I read this correctly) is that a bunch of smart but possibly ethica…

Considering that the price of a .org will almost certainly be going up soon, I think that $75m/year will soon be $82million. I don't think it's sustainable to pull that amount of money every year from a 1.1 billion endowment.

It's easier for a PE firm to raise the price over ISOC, too.

Re: Why ISOC sold .ORG to VCs

#77

Post by iudqnolq »

jessaustin wrote: post #55
einpoklum wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've lived through the last US economic crisis you might not be that riled up about one-sentence dismissals of modern economics.

Did you "live through" it? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21725341

This is completely unfair because the last crisis had major world-wide effects even if the US (probably) caused it.

Re: Why ISOC sold .ORG to VCs

#78

Post by iudqnolq »

Retric wrote: post #53
iudqnolq wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what externalities are. Are you claiming the marginal social cost of everything is greater than the marginal social benefit?

I think the marginal cost of tobacco companies is clearly negative a negative sum, which is the strongest form of their argument. It’s also clear they are not suggesting the entire economy is zero sum. Do you feel the Tobacco industry is a net benefit to society? If not then it’s just a question of which industries make the list of net positives vs net negatives.

That's possibly plausible, but it's a lot more complicated a claim than just those industries being bad. To take the example of tobacco, you'd need to quantify the enjoyment smokers get from it, the harm to their lives, the harm to other's lives, the benefit to everyone in the supply chain (from farm workers to farmers to advertisers to executives), the harm to everyone in the supply chain (especially the exploitation of those who are do the actually picking of the tobacco and assembly of the cigarettes), all the politicians who get benefits from, all the harm they cause, and so much more.

It's also the wrong question to ask. It's asking if sum(negatives) > sum(positives). But not all those harms and benefits should be equally important under any rational more framework. For example, I don't think any reasonable person would count the benefit corrupt politicians get from tobacco companies slush funds to be an argument in favor of keeping tobacco legal.

In other words determining if what you said is true is extremely difficult and extremely pointless.

Re: Why ISOC sold .ORG to VCs

#79

Post by jessaustin »

iudqnolq wrote: post #77
jessaustin wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you "live through" it? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21725341

This is completely unfair because the last crisis had major world-wide effects even if the US (probably) caused it.

Yes, that's the point. We're here for reasoned discussion. Facile appeals to emotion are always unfair, and always OT on HN. No one was on Mars sitting out the last big economic event.

Re: Why ISOC sold .ORG to VCs

#80

Post by iudqnolq »

jessaustin wrote: post #79
iudqnolq wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is completely unfair because the last crisis had major world-wide effects even if the US (probably) caused it.

Yes, that's the point. We're here for reasoned discussion. Facile appeals to emotion are always unfair, and always OT on HN. No one was on Mars sitting out the last big economic event.

Well, I wasn't old enough to know what was going on, so essentially that.
Post reply on HN