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How We Saved Dot Org

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Re: How We Saved Dot Org

#141

Post by Boltgolt »

foepys wrote: post #85
domador wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another impression I got from Richard Barnes' thinkpiece is his apparent opinion that managing the .org registry was turning into a resource-intensive, time-consuming responsibility for the Internet Society and a distraction from its main mission. If that were the case, then how about if the .org registry were turned over to a non-profit that was solely and strictly dedicated to running the registry responsibly and a…

> If that were the case, then how about if the .org registry were turned over to a non-profit that was solely and strictly dedicated to running the registry responsibly and affordably? Is creating such a non-profit feasible? Could it survive over the long term? .de is run by a non-profit and has been since 1996. Before that it had been run by researchers of the University of Karlsruhe. Until a few years ago, .de was…

See also SIDN (https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichting_Internet_Domeinreg...), the non-profit managing the 6th biggest ccTLD: .nl

Re: How We Saved Dot Org

#142

Post by Retric »

jandrese wrote: post #130
Retric wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, a non profit making X money per year is harder for insiders to profit from. However, setup a sale to the company of your choice and suddenly you can profit handsomely.

From an investment standpoint it can make sense to convert a slow but reliable income stream into a big chunk of cash that you can invest in riskier assets with higher returns.

The math is different for non profits as they are excluded form income taxes where a for profit company is going to be heavily discounting the value of that income stream.

Thus, it would generally be better for the non profit to simply take a loan out based on the income stream and invest that.

Re: How We Saved Dot Org

#143

Post by ineedasername »

breck wrote: post #131
ineedasername wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cam…

I think I generally disagree, but thanks for a more detailed response, it's an interesting discussion.

Re: How We Saved Dot Org

#144

Post by HomeDeLaPot »

RamRodification wrote: post #137
ethbr0 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have to agree with your sentiments after looking through the shop. Hopefully they'll come up with some new designs later.

Re: How We Saved Dot Org

#145

Post by wegs »

jlokier wrote: post #139
vxNsr wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 valuabl…

Private right of action.

If I want morbidus-rex.com, and I see a cybersquatter there, I can file a complaint. I pay $100.

You also need to give appropriate tools to allow private enforcement. If I file a complaint, the cybersquatter is required to release documents showing corporate ownership all the way up the chain. Failure to do so results in automatic loss.

Registrar arbitrates, with first $1000 in costs going to complainer, and remaining going to registrant. Typical case, I show that I'm an individual or similar entity, and it's done. If there is a complex corporate scheme to decipher, the party with the complex corporate scheme covers costs.

And if you hold a thousand domains like jkhzxkljhdsjkl12jkl.com, I don't really care.

Re: How We Saved Dot Org

#146

Post by pksebben »

wwweston wrote: post #100
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…

This is the important analysis here. People who think in systems (as programmers often do) sometimes fail to understand this. At some point, every human institutional is more human than institution and it's only having people who will choose to do the right thing in place to exercise authority on behalf of the right thing who will make this happen. Some problems have social solutions -- political solutions, even -- n…

It's for this very reason I'm so enamored with the concept of organizational fragmenting - gore-tex does it, and it's the sort of de facto method of restructuring that goes on in online communities: the idea is that when you get so big you need to create new vertical controls, you split horizontally - control is never vested in a central authority (instead, teams are responsible for their zone, and communicate with each other when necessary).

This has the power to make it much more difficult to achieve economic capture. It's way harder to buy off key figures in 8 different hierarchies than it is to just dump a load of money on a single CEO.

(this)[https://www.managementexchange.com/story/innovation-democrac...] is one of the better write-ups on such a structure that I could find.

Re: How We Saved Dot Org

#147

Post by NineStarPoint »

saalweachter wrote: post #138
hliyan wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup. These people are probably thinking of copyright, which software fall under. Which current is 95 years from publication or author’s lifespan + 75 years, and should almost certainly be shortened closer to patent length.

Re: How We Saved Dot Org

#148

Post by tialaramex »

geofft wrote: post #17
longtailofsighs wrote: post #7

I love a lot of what the EFF does, but this campaign, and many other organizations involved in it got a lot wrong. The real issue, that in fairness the EFF leads with, was the change in the .org contract, not the sale itself. The most robust overview of the whole thing that I have read can be found here: https://www.internetgovernance.org/2020/05/01/no-real-winner... Whether people like it or not the operation of the…

This is like saying "Whether people like it or not the King of France is sovereign." Why is the operation of the DNS a commercial endeavor, and what would go wrong if it were not be the case? There are a huge number of examples of successful internet infrastructure projects that are non-commercial, perhaps with commercial participants or sponsors but not commercial themselves. (The IETF, Let's Encrypt, and Linux all…

The IETF probably isn't a useful example because it's a fairly strange thing. You probably couldn't (and shouldn't try to) do very much else that way. It's doubtful whether for example it constitutes an "organisation".

It has no formal legal existence whatsoever, so it can't own anything, including money, nor enter into any sort of contract with anybody, it doesn't have members, and the staff who make things happen aren't working for the IETF per se.

Something like ISRG (the organisation that provides the Let's Encrypt service you mentioned) is much more conventional, there's a not-for-profit legal entity in a specific place with employees, equipment and so on. It would be reasonable to run a TLD that way, and in fact I assume some of them are indeed run that way.

Re: How We Saved Dot Org

#150

Post by cortesoft »

tortasaur wrote: post #86
cortesoft wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What path have the ACLU and SPLC gone down?

Not sure what the parent was talking about specifically, but the ACLU has fallen into the trap of pursuing partisan politics. They have leaned hard into anti-Trump rhetoric to the point that it consumes almost all of their messaging, and at the same time they have distanced themselves from ideals they once defended (in particular, they have stopped providing legal defense support for free speech court cases if they f…

They defended the NRA in 2018

https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/new-york-state-cant-be...

They defended an anti-muslim group protesting in 2014

https://www.aclumich.org/en/cases/hecklers-veto

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