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

theregister.co.uk

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

#51

Post by echelon »

packetlost wrote: post #43
sebazzz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We shouldn't be surprised. The whole TLD debacle has been a bit cash grab, which hasn't been beneficial to anyone but a few. Take the subsequent acquired domain of ".dev" by Google for instance, which then reserved it for internal usage only.

.dev is available for public registration... I have one.

"vanity" domains are $200/yr or more

Including "{firstname}.dev"

Nonsense.

If Google's worried about domain squatters, it controls the TLD rules and can come up with a less moneygrab strategy. Perhaps require a Github account and limit to one domain per customer?

FCFS is fairer than extortion.

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

#52

Post by rasengan »

geofft wrote: post #46
rasengan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of internet traffic goes to the top sites in the world [1]. To address these concerns, Handshake actually allows the top 100k ranked Alexa sites to claim their tld on Handshake with a DNSSEC ownership proof [2]. Finally, everyone’s domains from the existing legacy system will also continue to resolve. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/265770/most-popular-us-w... [2] https://hsd-dev.org/guides/claim…

Why don't we simply petition the Internet Society to hold prices fixed for all existing .org domains in the Alexa top 100K? That should be a small part of the potential profits of running .org, and anyone else can just register a domain name on .party or whatever. That way we avoid the cost of a transition to a new system.

The problem isn’t just ISOC [1]. Further, there were both petitions and RFCs that were completely ignored by both ISOC and ICANN. I was a major donor to ISOC and even attempted to question this and was completely ignored.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/registrars-raise...

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

#53

Post by rasengan »

danShumway wrote: post #47
rasengan wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since TLD ownership will no longer be difficult (ICANN forces a 185k non refundable application fee just to see if you are eligible with no guarantees), people will have alternatives to .org, should .org continue to do what the people don’t want. The current ICANN system is essentially a monopoly that can raise prices to double revenue without paying mind to what the people of the internet have commented.

I can already migrate from .org to .com or other alternatives today. It's just that all of my links will break, my search engine placement will plummet, and users won't be able to find my site. If I'm using my domain as an identity indicator for email, it also opens the door for other people to impersonate me. The problem with the current system isn't that there aren't enough TLDs. There are tons of TLDs. The problem…

> Handshake doesn't solve that problem. TLD owners will still be able to rent-seek, and they'll still hold monopolies over anyone who buys from them.

This statement is cryptographically false. Handshake does give ownership of names in the form of TLDs to people and therefore, the owner of said TLD will not be subject to rent from name ownership.

That being said, you are right that someone could still take a TLD and rent seek. Handshake benefits from not being monopolized in this process - you can always get your own TLD if you want to avoid this.

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

#54

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

jerf wrote: post #45
sebazzz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We shouldn't be surprised. The whole TLD debacle has been a bit cash grab, which hasn't been beneficial to anyone but a few. Take the subsequent acquired domain of ".dev" by Google for instance, which then reserved it for internal usage only.

Well, I will say this about the TLD "debacle", when I recently went looking for a domain name made out of real words, but not in what you'd call the "A list" (i.e., not "drugs.com" or "money.com"), they have at least made it ineffectual now for squatters to squat on everything across all the useful TLDs. Someone wanted a couple $K for the .com variant but there were several other useful variants completely unregister…

Does anyone actually use or go to services on super-generic TLDs like that? I can't think of any billion-dollar businesses that exist at .com. I can't imagine they're as valuable as people make them out to be, because businesses have brands that aren't generic words like "money" or "drugs". There's "amazon" but the business has nothing do with rainforests, so it's not like they're benefitting from traffic from people wishing to learn about the rainforest (much like we might imagine money.com would offer a financial service, or drugs.com pharmaceuticals).

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

#55

Post by Wowfunhappy »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #54
jerf wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I will say this about the TLD "debacle", when I recently went looking for a domain name made out of real words, but not in what you'd call the "A list" (i.e., not "drugs.com" or "money.com"), they have at least made it ineffectual now for squatters to squat on everything across all the useful TLDs. Someone wanted a couple $K for the .com variant but there were several other useful variants completely unregister…

Does anyone actually use or go to services on super-generic TLDs like that? I can't think of any billion-dollar businesses that exist at .com. I can't imagine they're as valuable as people make them out to be, because businesses have brands that aren't generic words like "money" or "drugs". There's "amazon" but the business has nothing do with rainforests, so it's not like they're benefitting from traffic from people…

> Does anyone actually use or go to services on super-generic TLDs like that?

Well, I occasionally read CNET, which has the domain "news.com".

But, the fact that domain points to CNET rather than something more well-known (and general-interest) is itself great evidence of the unimportance of general domains.

Also, CBS Interactive bought CNET more than a decade ago, and the news.com domain with it. CBS has kept the domain pointed to CNET rather than, say, having it point to cbsnews.com.

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

#56

Post by rasengan »

jude- wrote: post #38
rasengan wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since TLD ownership will no longer be difficult (ICANN forces a 185k non refundable application fee just to see if you are eligible with no guarantees), people will have alternatives to .org, should .org continue to do what the people don’t want. The current ICANN system is essentially a monopoly that can raise prices to double revenue without paying mind to what the people of the internet have commented.

The problem here isn't the lack of alternatives to .org, it's the rent-seeking on .org (brought about by a corruption). It sounds like Handshake does not address this problem.

The problem isn’t just .org but instead you’ll have to look one step up - ICANN and the US government [1].

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/registrars-raise...

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

#57

Post by danShumway »

rasengan wrote: post #50
danShumway wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In Handshake, rather than renting your domain from .org or .com, you own your tld. 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 wi…

> Registering a TLD in Handshake may end up being significantly more complicated and significantly more costly than buying a .org domain today 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 avera…

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

But you're coming into this conversation claiming that Handshake is going to democratize TLDs, that anyone will be able to buy one. We don't really know that the average cost of a TLD won't spike up to a thousand dollars, right? We don't know that every fortune 500 company in the world and every government in the world won't step in and snatch up every auction that gets posted. By design, there's no way for us to stop them from doing that.

There are very plausible scenarios here where ordinary people will not be able to buy TLDs under Handshake. Meanwhile, the worst case pricing scenario for the .com domain market, even with all of the centralization problems, is that it ends up costing $10-20 more per year over the 5-10 years.

I'm not saying that there aren't advantages to letting the market decide, and I'm not saying that the worst-case scenario will necessarily happen. It might be great. But I am saying that people learning about Handshake for the first time are looking at it as a drop-in replacement for .com, and it's decidedly not. I'm skeptical anyone has any idea what price or availability is going to be.

> or choose one owned by someone who doesn’t want to gouge people.

Without protocol-level migration tools between TLDs this is still centralization. I'm still stuck relying on a rented product owned by a private individual that I can move away from.

Remember, when .com and .org came out, they were also owned by an organization that didn't want to gouge people.

The decentralization benefits of Handshake are entirely encapsulated in ordinary people owning their own TLDs. We really shouldn't be talking about rented subdomains at all, rented subdomains are the problem that Handshake was advertised as solving.

> Unfortunately, all the details (like Bitcoin was at the beginning) are buried in technical papers and developer docs.

For what it's worth, Handshake isn't the only project of its type that struggles with this. It was similarly difficult to find out how projects like IPFS really worked.

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

#58

Post by danShumway »

rasengan wrote: post #53
danShumway wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can already migrate from .org to .com or other alternatives today. It's just that all of my links will break, my search engine placement will plummet, and users won't be able to find my site. If I'm using my domain as an identity indicator for email, it also opens the door for other people to impersonate me. The problem with the current system isn't that there aren't enough TLDs. There are tons of TLDs. The problem…

> Handshake doesn't solve that problem. TLD owners will still be able to rent-seek, and they'll still hold monopolies over anyone who buys from them. This statement is cryptographically false. Handshake does give ownership of names in the form of TLDs to people and therefore, the owner of said TLD will not be subject to rent from name ownership. That being said, you are right that someone could still take a TLD and r…

Only for TLD owners.

The moment I'm renting a subdomain under another person's TLD, the problem stops being solved.

> people will have alternatives to .org, should .org continue to do what the people don’t want.

Handshake does not address or solve the problem of domain migration in any way. If you rent a subdomain from a Handshake TLD owner, and they turn out to be evil, you are in the exact same position as you would be under a centralized system.

If you want to get rid of that problem, the TLD registration needs to be robust enough that everyone -- even high-school kids, even poor people, even weirdos who own dozens of websites -- can buy their own TLDs for all of them. The "you'll just rent subdomains" argument for Handshake needs to go away.

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

#59

Post by jude- »

rasengan wrote: post #56
jude- wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here isn't the lack of alternatives to .org, it's the rent-seeking on .org (brought about by a corruption). It sounds like Handshake does not address this problem.

The problem isn’t just .org but instead you’ll have to look one step up - ICANN and the US government [1]. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/registrars-raise...

I can tell that you really want me to believe that ICANN and the US government are the problem, and that Handshake is the solution. But you still have not addressed how Handshake solves the three main problems I have with the .org sale:

* The .org owners should not be allowed to rent-seek, but instead continue to provide the same level of service and fees that we have come to expect.

* The control and governance of TLDs should be handled by a non-corrupt governing body with the powers to ensure that only well-behaved operators may control TLD domains (where "well-behaved" can mean "will not rent-seek").

* To enforce this in the face of corrupt actors, the governing body for TLDs needs to be able to take back control of a TLD from a corrupted operator.

You have not convinced me that Handshake will address any of these things. Therefore, Handshake is not germane to the discussion of what to do about .org.

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