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How We Saved Dot Org

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Re: How We Saved Dot Org

#131

Post by breck »

ineedasername wrote: post #128
breck wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no one single problem or threat vector to internet freedoms There is one and only one problem: #ImaginaryPropertyLaws. What do all of the companies and organizations the EFF is constantly battling have in common? They all derive their power from #ImaginaryPropertyLaws and would all be disrupted without them.

How is a domain imaginary property? Only one person can use it. Whether you call it property or something else, the end result is the same. How is internet censorship related to property? No more so than speech out in the real world is related to property rights. I'm not saying you're even wrong: You've simply made an extremely vague claim without explanation of what you mean or, in response to my comment, what singl…

> How is a domain imaginary property?

You are right about this one, the ".org" registry is orthogonal to IP laws and in fact, there's nothing wrong with having centralized registries (which trademarks sort of are) as long as anyone can start one, which anyone can here. I would say the only connection to this specific issue is that I believe we've stagnated in protocols the past 30 years since the Web and EFF both came out due to copyright laws. We're stuck in a more centralized place, and less decentralized where we could move to if information could move freely.

Internet censorship is handsdown completely dominated by having copyright laws. If you abolish copyright laws, you'd open the flood gates of peer 2 peer information sharing. those p2p connections would grow very, very strong (what fires together wires together), and it would become near impossible for centralized censorship orgs to work.

Very fair points! Hope that clarifies my stance a bit. People say "the world is not black and white." I say "no, it's black and black^2". Abolishing #ImaginaryProperty in my mind is black^2, the current status quo is far inferior from every angle (except for people whose most important metric is to be in the .1%).

Re: How We Saved Dot Org

#132

Post by ethbr0 »

grenoire wrote: post #110
alsetmusic wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m literally wearing (for the first time, by coincidence) my new handy dandy 30y-of-EFF tshirt that I got for supporting them last month. I usually donate to causes and pass on goods because I don’t care for the merch (plus want the money to go all the way). EFF is a brand I want to wear. They’re awesome. I first joined their mailing list ~1996(?) when DMCA was being hashed out. I was too young to know if I was on t…

Oh man, thanks for the heads up! I didn't know they had a merch shop, just snagged the sick DEFCON 26 tee.

https://supporters.eff.org/donate

https://supporters.eff.org/shop

Testing this new A tag I heard about.

Re: How We Saved Dot Org

#133

Post by codesections »

yzmtf2008 wrote: post #34
brandur wrote: post #21

Another great win for the EFF. We shouldn't forget how much time and effort fighting this kind of thing takes, and we are very lucky to have an organization who's willing to put in the legwork from which all of us are huge beneficiaries. ( Edit: just donated. ) I guess it was implied by the article, but wasn't perfectly clear to me: does this mean that .org just stays with its current holders, ISOC? (Internet Society…

> In return, they were well compensated as they managed .org registrations over all these years, which is more or less a license to print money. Clearly, there’s more to managing a domain than a “license to print money”. Otherwise, who would want to sell it?

> Clearly, there’s more to managing a domain than a “license to print money”. Otherwise, who would want to sell it?

I know this is a bit pedantic/not the point, but any "license to print money" -- that is, any claim on an infinite stream of recurring income -- actually has a fixed value at which you _should_ sell it. See https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/06/22/how-to-calculate-t...

Re: How We Saved Dot Org

#134

Post by AsyncAwait »

Daho0n wrote: post #90
wahern wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's precisely how ICANN was set up, as a public benefit corporation with articles of incorporation that required it to promote "the global public interest in the operational stability of the Internet." But if you control the board, in the long term you can accomplish pretty much whatever you want. Relying on regulators to give such an organization sufficient attention isn't a good strategy; their attention is spre…

What needs to happen is for ICANN to be replaced by an international body outside the US.

Preferably with a rotating board.

Re: How We Saved Dot Org

#135

Post by AsyncAwait »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #111
hetman wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely agree in the short term, but having profitable assets might attract the wrong kind of people to the organisation so I don't know how I feel about it in the long term.

Shouldn't GNU count as profitable assets already? I think the GCC was valued at something like a billion dollars.

RMS is too strong of an ideolog, (in the good sense), for him to go astray, others am less sure of.

Re: How We Saved Dot Org

#136

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

zrm wrote: post #41
yzmtf2008 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In return, they were well compensated as they managed .org registrations over all these years, which is more or less a license to print money. Clearly, there’s more to managing a domain than a “license to print money”. Otherwise, who would want to sell it?

It's a license to print a specific amount of money every year. So the party who would want to sell it is the party who wants an enormous pile of money right away instead of a large amount every year indefinitely. It's inherently suspicious when that party is supposed to be a non-profit, because they should generally want to keep doing their work going forward instead of cashing out like some kind of for-profit corpor…

They could have set aside 5% every year and ended up with an endowment and retain control of a continuous revenue stream. Responsible non-profits would do this as a matter of course.

Re: How We Saved Dot Org

#137

Post by RamRodification »

ethbr0 wrote: post #132
grenoire wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, thanks for the heads up! I didn't know they had a merch shop, just snagged the sick DEFCON 26 tee.

https://supporters.eff.org/donate https://supporters.eff.org/shop Testing this new A tag I heard about.

Wow I was hoping to grab something from the shop but that's some ugly stuff. We have casual dress code at work so I would love a classy EFF-themed T-shirt. Most of these have that juvenile meme-y/merch-ey/joke style though so that's a pass.

Plain "EFF" like on the "EFF Label Pin" on a grey fabric would have been nice. Doesn't have to be "cool" (?) just because it's on a T-shirt.

Edit: Actually just give me the Onesie design on a T-shirt (not black) and I'm good

Re: How We Saved Dot Org

#138

Post by saalweachter »

hliyan wrote: post #88
breck wrote: post #10

Ah yes, bravo EFF, you've won another battle barely keeping us at the status quo. When are you going to stop playing whack-a-mole trying to defend against every assault on internet freedoms and go on the offensive and try to win the game for the good guys? We now have the ability to give the poorest child on earth access to the same information as the richest, and yet we allow industry to shackle us instead. It's tim…

We don't need to go to this extreme. Restore copyrights and patents to 25 years. Place burden of proof on the copyright claimant.

Patents are currently only 20 years.

Re: How We Saved Dot Org

#139

Post by jlokier »

vxNsr wrote: post #69
jlokier wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People will just form a thousand LLCs or use straw men. Replace "if I hold" with "if the Beneficial Owner holds" to stop that. Beneficial ownership is not masked by forming LLCs or using intermediaries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneficial_ownership

How do you enforce that? Now you need to have a regulatory agency whose sole purpose is to investigate people, companies attempting to abuse, workaround the system.

You can't enforce it consistently - as another commenter said, in practice ownership is still masked.

But if the price or terms of ownership of something like domain ownership were legally defined using a reference to beneficial owners, that would make ownership the result of fraud (if terms haven't been complied with) and therefore precarious when such owners are discovered later.

The possibility of losing a valuable domain later due to discovery of that breach of terms would create an incentive against that kind of fraud.

If the terms are just to set a higher price, without requiring beneficial owners to be named, potential owners might be willing to simply pay the higher amount without revealing who they actually are, to ensure they don't face the risk of losing the domain on discovery, and that would achieve the original goal of raising the price.

Re: How We Saved Dot Org

#140

Post by jessaustin »

lawtalkinghuman wrote: post #102
ISO-morphism wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Intellectual Property We've come to call ideas and iterative mutations of such thoughtstuff "property" as if thoughts can be owned. What we call "intellectual property" is more accurately (at least in my current strong conclusion) called monopoly rights. Monopoly rights over the application and commercial profit of such thoughtstuff as a conscious trade-off/government subsidy to provide economic incentive for innov…

Right, and despite all the fury and word salad, it still exists and will continue to do so.

...until it doesn't. Preserving IP takes a lot of effort from a lot of highly-paid people. Currently, most of those are compensated by the public, but that won't always be the case.
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