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The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org

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131–140 of 153 posts

Re: The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org

#131
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

It would add a lot of complexity, and any system has only a limited number of complexity cards to play. I'd rather play them on things that have a clear connection to HN's core. With features like this, the benefits are obvious while the costs are not. I fear those. That's not to say that tagging is always a bad idea—far from it. It depends on the system.

> I'd rather play them on things that have a clear connection to HN's core.

What have they been played on historically? Mostly behind the scenes stuff? Maybe I don't pay close enough attention but I haven't noticed much in the way new features/improvements over the past five years or more...(?)

Re: The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org

#132
post #32

Sigh, I am flabbergasted at my own lack of outrage. Not to long ago something like this would have me all up in arms, now it seems like just another nail in the coffin of democracy..

And the truly horrible part that this is working as intended. The public has to get loud every time, while from the other perspective, getting lucky once is enough.

Re: The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org

#133
post #14
post #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…

The problem is you can't move a domain once you've established it. I'm stuck on byuu.org for life. There's 15 years worth of links to it scattered across the web that would all go dark. Or more precisely, that would all suddenly point at spam. I could never get most of them updated. Even my subdomain from my previous host from 15 years ago is squatted to this day to serve up advertising. It's even aware of the softwa…

Or separate the entity from the address. If you move, the post office forwards correspondence for 6 months and you are free to communicate an updated address to people who send you things and visit you.

Whether this should be done and on what level will definitely be interesting. How sure am I that I want my old email address to be telling spammers where I 'live' now?

Re: The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org

#134
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect what the new gTLD program has really done is to make com/org/net seem even more trustworthy and premium because people can no longer keep up with the influx of new gTLDs ( all 1200 of them!).

I'm not generally sympathetic to the "domain investor" types, but this quote from domain investor Rick Schwartz I feel is spot on and has been my thought since "day one" of the new TLDs > "As we go into the seventh year of the new gTLD experiment, they are meaningless. They haven’t been adopted by almost anybody. Circulation is poor. So many registrations are questionable or penny-promotional. The majority are parked…

Mostly the new gTLDs (actually I think the ccTLDs are at fault, but I'm going to whine anyway) mean I no longer know where to put the dots in a domain name. Is it CoolBanan.as? CoolBana.nas? Cool.Ban.an.as? Fuck it, I'm going to the grocery store instead.

Re: The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org

#135
post #14
post #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…

The problem is you can't move a domain once you've established it. I'm stuck on byuu.org for life. There's 15 years worth of links to it scattered across the web that would all go dark. Or more precisely, that would all suddenly point at spam. I could never get most of them updated. Even my subdomain from my previous host from 15 years ago is squatted to this day to serve up advertising. It's even aware of the softwa…

If you want a new domain and to keep your backlinks you can 302 the old domain to the new.

> One answer in my view is to remove the maximum length of prepayment for domains. Let us buy a domain for 100 years.

Makes sense to me but I don't think I have seen anything more than 10 years.

Re: The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org

#136
post #14
post #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…

The problem is you can't move a domain once you've established it. I'm stuck on byuu.org for life. There's 15 years worth of links to it scattered across the web that would all go dark. Or more precisely, that would all suddenly point at spam. I could never get most of them updated. Even my subdomain from my previous host from 15 years ago is squatted to this day to serve up advertising. It's even aware of the softwa…

This is a case where incentives, in the way that HNers use the term "incentives", don't work.

The cost of a domain name is supposed to dis-incentivize buying up domain names simply to squat and/or serve ads, but clearly the price isn't high enough to dis-incentivize that. And we can't raise prices, because then it dis-incentivizes legitimate users. The problem is that the cost of domain names is a larger dis-incentive to legitimate users than it is to domain squatters.

If a domain is $10 and a squatter sells domains for $100, then they only have to sell 1 in 10 domains to break even, so risk is very low: they don't have to really be overly concerned with only buying domains that will sell. And that's a simplistic model: the reality is that squatters have much more sophisticated valuation models, and have therefore have much higher profit margins, keeping their risk even lower. Sometimes domains sell for tens of thousands of dollars.

Meanwhile, the risk is very high for a legitimate user. If you have a company or a nonprofit, you basically have to choose a name that's marketable, memorable, relevant to your business/nonprofit, and unique, on the first try. This can literally make or break a business. And once you have that name, there's basically only one ideal URL for that name: yourbusiness.com or yournonprofit.org. So you have a supply of one and a demand of this might make or break my organization so cost can be pretty much "what is the maximum you can pay?". As such, if the max you can pay isn't enough for the domain squatter to want to sell, you just don't get the domain, and your organization gets a sub-standard web presence.

I don't think we can overestimate the impact of this problem. I've worked for a company which owns your-business.com rather than yourbusiness.com (these are examples obviously--it would be unprofessional to give out actual names). Their marketing is very explicit about the dash, and potential customers still end up at the squatted non-dashed domain, which is only getting more expensive as the company becomes more successful. Luckily their value proposition is large enough, and clients sophisticated enough, that the friction of actually getting to the site isn't as large enough barrier to prevent growth. But if your business is a lower-margin business with less sophisticated clients, that would be a big enough barrier to prevent success entirely.

Re: The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org

#137
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per RFC920[1], which defined the initial TLDs, the ORG domain was for "Organizations". It doesn't say anything about "ethos", not-for-profit status, etc. It's for "organizations". I'd love to see a citation re: this "not-for-profit" designation being codified somewhere by IANA. It's not supported by RFC 920. [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc920

I'd also love to see something indicating it is for big organizations only, which is patently false. Obviously it is irrelevant why it has that ethos as long as it in fact exists (if you want to pretend the general public doesn't see .org as generally indicating a service to humanity rather than a commercial venture, we can just agree to disagree). Also, in the doc you link it is clearly, evidently, for non-commercia…

I don't have a thing to say re: "big" vs "small" organizations using the ORG domain. Nor does the RFC say anything about it. (Perhaps someone else in the discussion was talking about organization size, but it wasn't me...)

re: public perception vs. definition - I'm not "pretending" anything. The RFC doesn't call out that ORG is for not-for-profits, or for organizations related to any particular "ethos" or philosophy. People can think what they want about it, and organizations can try to use the public perception of ORG to influence public perception of their organization however they want. That doesn't change what the RFC says, which was my only point. The RFC doesn't specify who it is for, beyond "Organizations". This notion that ORG was "reserved" for not-for-profits seems to be completely lacking in evidence.

Re: The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org

#138
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is you can't move a domain once you've established it. I'm stuck on byuu.org for life. There's 15 years worth of links to it scattered across the web that would all go dark. Or more precisely, that would all suddenly point at spam. I could never get most of them updated. Even my subdomain from my previous host from 15 years ago is squatted to this day to serve up advertising. It's even aware of the softwa…

If you want a new domain and to keep your backlinks you can 302 the old domain to the new. > One answer in my view is to remove the maximum length of prepayment for domains. Let us buy a domain for 100 years. Makes sense to me but I don't think I have seen anything more than 10 years.

> If you want a new domain and to keep your backlinks you can 302 the old domain to the new.

Which will only work as long as you keep paying for the old domain.

Re: The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org

#139
post #66

> ... and it could use its power to sell the browsing data of users of .orgs By what mechanism is this possible?

That's what I want to know. I would assume the article is talking about monitoring which IP's request which domains, but the overwhelming majority of requests that a registry sees have to be from downstream resolvers, right? In which case they don't know who's using the site, they only know that "somebody who uses this resolver" is using the site.

In most cases there are probably multiple levels of resolvers, so it might even be as coarse as "somebody on the west coast of the US is using this site," which isn't terribly useful.

Re: The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org

#140
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is you can't move a domain once you've established it. I'm stuck on byuu.org for life. There's 15 years worth of links to it scattered across the web that would all go dark. Or more precisely, that would all suddenly point at spam. I could never get most of them updated. Even my subdomain from my previous host from 15 years ago is squatted to this day to serve up advertising. It's even aware of the softwa…

If you want a new domain and to keep your backlinks you can 302 the old domain to the new. > One answer in my view is to remove the maximum length of prepayment for domains. Let us buy a domain for 100 years. Makes sense to me but I don't think I have seen anything more than 10 years.

This would actually be a legitimate use of 301 - except 301 is a flawed concept because if it actually worked as designed it'd allow creeping devastation of the URL space. Woops can't use `example.org/index.html` ever again - someone 301'd that to `example.org/index.php`
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