The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org
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The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org
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Re: The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org
#2It seems that over time any sufficiently well funded non-profit will eventually hire a financial engineer as CEO and transform into a Hedge Fund with some sort of charitable appendage.
Re: The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org
#3PIR (and, apparently, ICANN) are simply selling us out on this, and whether or not the sale goes through, they both have taken a huge credibility hit -- and ICANN, anyway, already had credibility problems to begin with.
In terms of its impact on the net, I see no upside to this at all. It's nothing but harmful.
Re: The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org
#4> Verisign controls the registries for .com and .net, two of the internet’s most popular. All it does is administer a database and collect small sums from website owners, but with computing power rising and practically no marginal cost to adding another website to the database, the entire enterprise is a license to print money. In the third quarter of 2019, Verisign showed operating income of $205.6 million on $308.4 million in revenues, a profitability margin of 66.67 percent. This makes Verisign one of the most profitable companies in the world.
I wish we lived in a world where a company being kinda monopolistic to make a 67% profit margin was enough to get me angry. If I hadn't read this, I'd have assumed they were making a lot more than $100 million a year profit.
I see the real answer to this as the gTLD program: radically expand the number of domain-issuing entities and normalize companies operating on something other than .com.
Re: The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org
#5This quote kind of summarises the effect of the attempted takeover:
"Nonprofit websites will be trapped: If they want to keep their longtime brand and their archives, they’ll pay whatever price. “When you buy a domain you own it, but after a couple years it owns you.”"
Hope this ends well for all .org owners!
Re: The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org
#6It seems that over time any sufficiently well funded non-profit will eventually hire a financial engineer as CEO and transform into a Hedge Fund with some sort of charitable appendage.
Absolutely true.
My buddy managed money for the kind of non-profits everyone has heard of at one time or another.
Tends to be that once they get big enough they find themselves recipients of endowments that they can invest however they see fit. They tend to put that capital to work in whatever yields the highest return.
Know what offers the best returns? Stuff that tends to cause the problems the non-profit might have been set up to stop.
Becomes a self sustaining ecosystem where the investments from the societally damaging corporations pays to sustain the cleanup effort.
Re: The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org
#7I found this article incredible (despite the tabloid-like headline) on this subject:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/14/icann_org_redacted/
TL;DR: Purchase funded by debt, includes another ex-ICANNer, will be done through four different companies.
Some highlights that I think are important from it:
Incredibly, the names of three directors of the organization that will buy the registry remain redacted in documents published by ICANN [PDF] this month, despite the three entities pushing the sale – PIR, ISOC and Ethos Capital – claiming that publication of the information is “unprecedented” and they are “strong believers in the power of transparency.”
The rationale given for the removal of director names is that it was based “on the principles set forth in ICANN’s Documentary Information Disclosure Policy (DIDP)” – a bizarre claim that has nothing to do with the issues at hand and which ICANN has refused to discuss.
As well as refusing to supply the names of those in overall charge, the three companies have also refused to publish the “underlying equity purchase agreement, sensitive financial information, corporate organizational information, draft organizational documents, documentation provided to governmental entities and certain supporting contractual documents.”
Re: The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org
#8Attempted? It already happened.
Re: The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org
#9I think these are the major related threads so far. In reverse order:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21931258 - The NRO Issues Inspection Request to ICANN Concerning .ORG Sale
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800085 - ICANN Delays .ORG Sale Approval
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21723682 - Why ISOC sold .ORG to VCs
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21689121 - The .Org Fire Sale: How it sold for less than half its valuation
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667355 - ISOC sold the .org registry to Ethos Capital for $1.1B
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656960 - Why I Voted to Sell .ORG
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21626677 - ICANN races towards regulatory capture: the great .org heist
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677 - Save .org
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592297 - Internet world despairs as non-profit .org sold to private equity firm
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21582622 - Private Equity Is Going to Ruin the .Org Domain System and Screw Nonprofits
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21557779 - ICA asks ICANN to block .Org private equity deal in damning letter
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21526982 - Private Equity company acquires .org registry
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20263561 - Regulatory Capture at ICANN
Did I miss any?
Re: The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org
#10Attempted? It already happened.
According to the article, no it didn't.
> ICANN must sign off on the deal in order for it to proceed. In December, it paused the sale for 30 days amid public outcry, expressing concern about the lack of transparency surrounding the deal.