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Spurious Justifications for Eliminating Price Caps on .org and Legacy Domains
- numakerg 8y ago>If Verisign were to charge him $10 million per year to renew the tucows.com domain name despite "the bile that would rise" in his stomach he would likely pay that renewal fee because it is only through Verisign that he can obtain the tucows.com domain name and because the domain name is that vital to his business. Would it be in the company's interest to sue ICANN at that point?
- TheRealPomax 8y agoSue them on what grounds?
- bencollier49 8y agoI wonder if trademark law would kick in at that point.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y agoI suspect it would not. Not until they handed the domain to someone else, that is. You might be able to force them to not give it to anyone else, maybe, but I'd be susprised if you could force them to give it to you.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoYou can force other people who have domains you want to turn them over to you in a trademark suit. Forcing a registrar to do it isn't quite the same thing -- the registrar isn't parallel to you, it's one level up -- but it's not quite different either.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- TheRealPomax 8y agoThe actual domain itself cannot act as trademark, so I suspect it would not.
- Illniyar 8y agoI suppose if they do such a thing they'll have to charge each customer differently, which might lead to some kind of discrimination lawsuit?
- TheRealPomax 8y agoBut that's literally the situation we have right now: commercial entities are discriminated against by having to pay more for their .com than nonprofits and individuals interested in obtaining a .org Make not mistake: I hate ICANN so much right now for their idiotic "we need to let the marker regulate the prices" for a product in which there IS no marketplace (you can't buy the same thing from someone else for less, domains are unique) but if the grounds are to be discrimination, that's the situation we currently have, and this decision by ICANN would be the result of a lawsuit brought against them on those grounds.
- scarejunba 8y agoNo way. This is awful. They cannot be allowed to do this. What do we have to do to stop this insanity? These companies don’t own the namespace. They are in charge of delivering a service that resolves the namespace. This is not at all correct. ICANN must not do this!
- thaumasiotes 8y ago> These companies don’t own the namespace. They are in charge of delivering a service that resolves the namespace. Matt Levine likes to write about different concepts of business ownership, such as... - You own all the company's stock. - You are legally listed as the owner on a piece of paper somewhere. - You know all the company passwords. - Everyone at the company recognizes your authority. - You have the keys to the office. All of those are more or less independent of each other and give you different kinds of control. In a very real sense, if you resolve the namespace, then you own the namespace.
- scarejunba 8y agoSure, in the sense that GitHub owns my code. But if Microsoft take the stuff in my private repo and sell it to someone else, I'm going to kick up a fuss.
- lsiebert 8y agoComments close in one day, you can submit one at https://www.icann.org/public-comments/org-renewal-2019-03-18-en https://www.icann.org/public-comments/org-renewal-2019-03-18...
- wolfgang42 8y agoAlso: https://www.icann.org/public-comments/info-renewal-2019-03-18-en https://www.icann.org/public-comments/info-renewal-2019-03-1... https://www.icann.org/public-comments/biz-renewal-2019-04-03-en https://www.icann.org/public-comments/biz-renewal-2019-04-03...
- justinclift 8y agoExcept the form doesn't work. Clicking the button to submit a comment does literally nothing. :(
- wolfgang42 8y agoWorks for me, but maybe you don't have your browser set up to handle email addresses--after you accept their privacy policy and TOS it redirects you to a mailto: link for the relevant mailing lists, which are: .org: comments-org-renewal-18mar19@icann.org .info: comments-info-renewal-18mar19@icann.org .biz: comments-biz-renewal-03apr19@icann.org
- justinclift 8y agoThanks. That's probably it. Definitely don't have my web browser set up for that. Still, detection or no warning or anything is weird. :/
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y agoIt's so utterly obvious that this is not really about "allowing the market to discover prices". For one, obviously, establishing a monopoly does not allow the market to discover prices. But also, if they really wanted the market to discover prices, they would establish a market. Namely, they would allow potential registrars to bid on the yearly registration price, and then give the lowest (qualified) bidder a contract to run the domain for a few years, with that fixed registration price. As it is, this is like handing over the street network of a city to a private owner "for better prices discovery". It's just crazy.
- ralph84 8y ago> Namely, they would allow potential registrars to bid on the yearly registration price, and then give the lowest (qualified) bidder a contract to run the domain for a few years, with that fixed registration price. This is sort of how it used to work. NSF created and funded InterNIC and contracted its operation to Network Solutions. The cost of registering a domain was $0.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y agoI wonder what the chances of an alternate organization simply starting a new .org registry would be if this actually happens? Would this be bad enough that the world would be willing to simply ignore ICANN on the question of who is responsible for .org? Or rather, maybe not ignore it, but simply add a secondary recognized authoritative zone that gets asked when ICANN's registrar returns an NXDOMAIN? Then, the Red Cross, say, could simply use trademark law to prevent ICANN's registrar from handing out the domain to anyone, and register it themselves through the alternate registrar at a reasonable price?
- hkt 8y agohttps://www.itu.int/ https://www.itu.int/ These people should probably be in charge of icann / everything currently in icann's domain.
- rudiv 8y agoY'know, I tried to search for opinions on ITU vs ICANN, but I couldn't find much signal amongst the noise - mostly handwavey arguments about how only the US can be trusted to uphold freedom and handing the control(s) of the Internet over to godless foreigners will lead to totalitarianism, yadda yadda. Do you know of any good writing on the subject?
- goombastic 8y agoEvery time the basics seem set, a bunch of rent seeking overlords arrive to destabilize everything. Verisign shouldn't have this power and should be penalized for trying this trick. They shouldn't be in a position to bottleneck basic internet infrastructural elements and in the spirit of the internet, we need alternatives to Verisign setup ASAP. A counter proposal is in order.
- devinplatt 8y agoELI5 version: https://www.namecheap.com/blog/keep-domain-prices-in-check/ https://www.namecheap.com/blog/keep-domain-prices-in-check/ I have a .org domain, but I don't know much about the Domain Name System at all so I did Google search and found that article quite helpful. Maybe someone else will too?
- ridgewell 8y agoI saw Derrel Fincher, a Oklahoma House Representative, wrote a comment against the price cap removal. [1] This was relatively interesting since I've never seen a politician participate in such a niche request for comment process. [1] https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/comments-org-renewal-18mar19/2019q2/002697.html https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/comments-org-renewal-18mar19/...
- techsupporter 8y agoCouple of questions: First, why does ICANN keep insist on picking on .org? In 2004, or thereabouts, .org owners saw a proposal to restrict that gTLD to just not-for-profit and community groups. Considering .org was originally listed as the gTLD for "this doesn't fit into any of the other categories" (back when we actually enforced that .net be a network operator and .com be a business), this would have booted a whole lot of individuals and unorganized groups out of the space. It was also the first gTLD to be foisted onto Verisign, though it got moved to Public Interest Registry in 2003. Which brings up the second question, why would PIR want price caps to be removed for the .org gTLD? PIR is, supposedly, not-for-profit itself and is owned by the Internet Society, a very not-for-profit group. Shouldn't PIR be pushing for .org fees to be as low as possible to sustain its mission of effectively operating the .org gTLD for as many people as it can? Shouldn't PIR be acting more like a credit union and less like a Verisign?
- techsupporter 8y agoI found, in the linked article, a link another article (by the same author) that answers my second question, why PIR would want price caps to be removed: https://domainnamewire.com/2019/04/24/how-icann-uses-the-org-registry-to-fund-the-internet-society/ https://domainnamewire.com/2019/04/24/how-icann-uses-the-org... My summary of that article is that the article assumes that the Internet Society (which owns PIR and was given .org as a way to fund ISOC's activities) has grown large enough--or may eventually grow large enough--that it considers its current funding levels inadequate and wants the price caps removed so it can receive even more funding. That article also points out that one non-profit, ISOC, is largely being funded by payments from other non-profits since .org is wildly popular in the non-profit space.
- woofie11 8y agoI see. The not-for-profit has grown from 8 people to over a hundred, and wants to become another corrupt, POS not-for-profit focused on executive fiefdoms and headcount, rather than doing any good. They have a monopoly position on .org, and so are able to do so if they choose. Seems like the right response is to cap price increases to 0%, or at most inflation, rather than the current 10%.
- im3w1l 8y agoIs this related to the 2016 story of how "Obama handed over control of the internet" ?
- bouncycastle 8y agoThe internet community needs come come up with an alternative domain registry system, one that completely removes middlemen. Did I hear someone echo "blockchain"?
- asaph 8y agoI believe this has been tried. Check out namecoin.
- bouncycastle 8y agoThe problem with namecoin was that it was just a plain fork of Bitcoin and it retained the UTXO account model which is not very well suited for this kind of application. Although, gotta give it credit as it was the first one in this area.
- JonathonW 8y agoWhat decides who gets a name in a “blockchain” DNS? The first to squat on the name? The one to waste the most electricity doing meaningless computations? The highest bidder?
- bouncycastle 8y agoSame existing methods that are used today could be used to prevent squatting, eg 'commit-reveal' Vickery style auction, in that way the domains do not go for the highest price (The highest bidder wins but the price paid is the second-highest bid).
- notahacker 8y agoSo basically, there is a middleman, taking auction bids which are a lot higher than .com renewal fees...
- bouncycastle 8y agoNot when it's built in to the protocol itself.
- scarejunba 8y agoThis is not even about the price caps. This is about the direct transfer of value from the public to a single company. That's not acceptable. If they had to buy .com or .org they would have to pay billions. We cannot just give this away for free. I lived in the third world and this was so common there. Some company would infiltrate neutral arbiters or government offices and those places would then pass off public goods to the company under some spurious excuse. That company then immediately gets billions of dollars in value. That's insane. It's straightforward corruption.
- hbbio 8y ago.com itself is probably worth 100s of billions. A new Big Four... There are more than 100M .com domains. An average price of $100/year would leave sites with no other option than to pay. So, that's a $10bn/year business with very very high margins. Worth 100s.
- ringaroll 8y agoThis is plain corruption happening in front of our eyes. If the U.S. government and ICANN cannot take care of these most important general TLD's then hand it over to the United Nations. THIS IS CORRUPTION!
- Isinlor 8y agoIsn't this exactly the type of situation that USA antitrust law is supposed to penalize? Controlling .org is a monopoly. Rising prices is exploiting that monopoly and is detrimental to customers. Seems like it should be easy to show in court. Am I missing something?
- adventured 8y ago> Am I missing something? Modern anti-trust law isn't about punishing monopolies per se. Its primary focus is on consumer harm (direct or indirect). It is not against anti-trust law to exploit a monopoly. Microsoft, Google, Intel, Cisco, eBay, Google, Facebook, SiriusXM, and a thousand other companies (at various sizes at the local, regional and national levels) in the US do exactly that every day. An anti-trust case would need to prove a given action is particularly harmful. The extent of the monopoly exploitation and harm is where the case is argued. It's very much a subjective doctrine and always has been. Any company raising prices will argue that they're doing so in a very reasonable manner, and then will set out to demonstrate that it's reasonable (based on any favorable comparisons they can make).
- Aeolun 8y agoAll .org organizations suddenly switching to a different domain name seems like a fantastic definition of harm to me.
- rasengan 8y agoThe public comment system is moderated, so any comments that do not get approved by the moderator will not be published. This is exactly how you get foul play. Far from a vote, this process stinks of all kind of potential for corruption.