31–40 of 105 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. Just trying to help people distinguish the two businesses. PE companies acquire private companies and run them. VC companies invest in founders and they run the company.
Since we're striving for accuracy here, usually they acquire public firms and "take them private".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That is, the $75m/annum profit from .org may not last for long Why wouldn't it? .org is one of the most well-known TLDs, and I see know reason why there would be an exodus away from it (well, apart from this sale itself!) - it's as sure a thing as there can be.
I'm convinced that TLDs will slowly fade away. They're not very intuitive, especially if they're not a .com and the user is not very technical. I know Google would love for search to basically replace the need for them but I doubt that'll entirely happen. But I don't think they are long for this world.
So first of all: the overhead for running the registry is unreasonably high. You'd expect there to be considerable room for reducing costs, so the 75M$ per year is artificially low; revenue is around 100M.
Secondly, that revenue is artificially (but reasonably!) low because the price is capped. But guess what? That price cap was just removed; so the actual price may rise considerably; certainly it is not reasonable to assume that under the terms specifically changed for the deal the revenue will stay at just 100M a year.
Thirdly, the risk of .org evaporating is pretty absurd. The cost of a domain is (and should be) pretty trivial compared to the value most people can extract from it; the fact that this is a for-profit business at all is highly questionable - it's as if your street address were owned by a third party, and you can't have anything shipped their at your cost without the acquiescence of a third party. I'm not sure anybody is seriously buying this story of .org becoming irrelevant to the point that people won't pay 10$ (+margin above wholesale) for a domain. But even if you're unsure - the very fact that a private party snapped this up is evidence to the contrary.
Fourthly, it's entirely unreasonable for ISOC to earn even a penny off of this deal. What exactly did they do to earn the right to profit of other people's valuable contributions? Right, nothing - they were just there are the right time. There's no reason they should even be an exclusive party at all, let alone one that operates with a profit motive.
Fifthly, the people involved, and the timing, stinks. If this were all above-board, it should have been public and not have been bought out by insiders almost immediately after those same people are involved in enabling the deal. It's not at all transparent what those insiders were doing, but if it's not plain old highway robbery again, perhaps some transparency would have helped.
Frankly, the whole cartel (DNS, not merely .org) should simply be dumped; there's just no reason this is private to start with, and most certainly not run with a profit motive; that's just asking to reasons to distort the far more important markets with rent-seeking behavior here. If chrome+safari were to sponsor an alternative to DNS, I'm sure the rest of the browsers would follow; e.g. by using a different protocol (not http(s)) to disambiguate, and by forking the existing (as of some fixed date) DNS domains. Good riddance to those leaches.
Honestly if that analysis is correct then on one hand I concede that it does make the decision appear less like pure bribery than I initially thought but on the other it's even worse for .org users. Maybe I'm wrong to consider this a zero-sum game, but surely if ISOC made a good deal selling .org that means that Ethos Capital got the short end of the stick. That means that eventually they'll realize that they can't m…
> Maybe I'm wrong to consider this a zero-sum game, but surely if ISOC made a good deal selling .org that means that Ethos Capital got the short end of the stick. The field of economics, and pretty much all monetary transactions, are about demonstrating that sales (and thus wealth) are not a zero-sum game. Whether that’s true for any particular case, such as this one, can be debated forever still, just often not base…
Yes, a good chunk of them are really negative-sum games, once you include all secondary stakeholders in the calculations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I notice domains. And I don't trust domains that don't end in .com, .org or a recognizable national TLD. Besides, the point is irrelevant. When you build an online brand, you build it by having links distributed on the web, to get the Google juice going, on social media, on forums, etc. Even in business emails you add your domain there for easy reference later. Then if you have to change the domain, all of those link…
Perhaps it was incorrect of me to claim that users don't notice domains. I suppose the issue I was getting at was users don't appear to memorize the domain and instead use Google or similar for finding the site they are looking for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maybe I'm wrong to consider this a zero-sum game, but surely if ISOC made a good deal selling .org that means that Ethos Capital got the short end of the stick. The field of economics, and pretty much all monetary transactions, are about demonstrating that sales (and thus wealth) are not a zero-sum game. Whether that’s true for any particular case, such as this one, can be debated forever still, just often not base…
> The field of economics, and pretty much all monetary transactions, are about demonstrating that sales (and thus wealth) are not a zero-sum game. Yes, a good chunk of them are really negative -sum games, once you include all secondary stakeholders in the calculations.
How often do people notice domains? I've seen many users use Google or similar to find their desired site such as facebook without typing the URL. If it were only an IPv6 address, would people even care?
I notice domains. And I don't trust domains that don't end in .com, .org or a recognizable national TLD. Besides, the point is irrelevant. When you build an online brand, you build it by having links distributed on the web, to get the Google juice going, on social media, on forums, etc. Even in business emails you add your domain there for easy reference later. Then if you have to change the domain, all of those link…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That is, the $75m/annum profit from .org may not last for long Why wouldn't it? .org is one of the most well-known TLDs, and I see know reason why there would be an exodus away from it (well, apart from this sale itself!) - it's as sure a thing as there can be.
I'm convinced that TLDs will slowly fade away. They're not very intuitive, especially if they're not a .com and the user is not very technical. I know Google would love for search to basically replace the need for them but I doubt that'll entirely happen. But I don't think they are long for this world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The field of economics, and pretty much all monetary transactions, are about demonstrating that sales (and thus wealth) are not a zero-sum game. Yes, a good chunk of them are really negative -sum games, once you include all secondary stakeholders in the calculations.
Care to expand on your one sentence dismissal of modern economics? Maybe a second sentence describing the means by which this happens, or an example, or even - gasp - a source?