Internet Society told to halt .org sale by its own advisory council

Given the conversation we had on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22312014, I think this claim is leaving out a lot of information. Handshake is not optimized for ordinary people to buy TLDs the same way they buy .com domains.

- There's no market information I can find about what a TLD will cost on average.

- Purchasing a TLD will take at least 5 days at a minimum, with no guarantee that you're going to get the TLD at the end.

- Auctions are blind, so you have almost no guarantees at all -- you'll just have to guess what the market value is.

- The intention is still for TLD owners to be able to sell access to subdomains, which will enable the exact same rent seeking and exploitation. The only difference is that there'll be no regulation on the rent seekers.

- Given that subdomains allow us to repeat names (myname.com vs myname.org vs myname.io), having one TLD system is going to be a decrease in the number of available domains, not an increase. The increase comes from the fact that we'll have a ton of TLDs and people will rent subdomains on them (see above).

That's not to say Handshake might not still be a good idea in the sense that it increases competition overall, but I think it's borderline deceptive to say that everyone is just going to own a TLD. Registering a TLD in Handshake may end up being significantly more complicated and significantly more costly than buying a .org domain today -- especially once the good names get used up and new users are effectively forced to rent from existing owners or compete in blind auctions over much more limited resources.

I'm a little bit irritated at this comment, because I've followed Handshake for a while and it's been really hard to get concise, clear information about how it works, even from the main project website. People don't understand the product being offered, and Handshake advocates keep posting very vague statements about how problems are just 'solved'. And whenever I dig into those claims and try to find out how they're solved, I find out that the implementation details aren't as clear cut.

I want a project like Handshake to succeed, but y'all need to be a lot more up-front about the tradeoffs.

It’s significantly easier than the process is today. It’s very hard to get a TLD from ICANN as the process consists of a non refundable application fee of 185k with no guarantees you’ll be approved.

> There's no market information I can find about what a TLD will cost on average.

Rather than artificial set costs, the market will dictate this.

> The intention is still for TLD owners to be able to sell access to subdomains, which will enable the exact same rent seeking and exploitation.

People can either register their own TLDs or choose one owned by someone who doesn’t want to gouge people.

> Auctions are blind, so you have almost no guarantees at all -- you'll just have to guess what the market value is.

Yes, and every bidder will have to be serious about wanting to win a domain instead of squatting every last domain.

I appreciate your comments, and understand your concerns. I would be irritated too if I couldn’t find information about how this worked. Unfortunately, all the details (like Bitcoin was at the beginning) are buried in technical papers and developer docs. Luckily, Handshake is a community owned, community run project, and comments like yours help to propel the project forward and bring the explanation that people deserve.

Thank you for your help and questions, and please keep them coming!