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Posting from a throwaway account. I worked at one of the main TLDs for years and was on one of the ICANN boards and got to know the industry well. It is well

Posting from a throwaway account. I worked at one of the main TLDs for years and was on one of the ICANN boards and got to know the industry well. It is well know amongst the domain name community that ICANN is a poorly run organization, whose directors have in recent years have used their position of leadership to lead decisions from which they are afterwards benefiting themselves economically, in many cases by rushing decisions such as in these case. Peter Dengate Thrush was famous for pushing for the new domain extensions (.anything) as chief executive of ICANN and quitting a month later to become the CEO for a company that was the main bidder for a large number of extensions. Fadi Chehade is doing the same with .ORG by lifting the price cap on the prices of an established domain name and then gobbling up the company that sells those domains. Sadly, ICANN has little oversight and since its kind of in the air and doesn’t report to anyone, the directors get away with what would be legally considered corruption in most of the world. The fact that the internet community and most Internet companies have never care about it makes doesn’t help, since a lot or times the “multistakeholder” model that they claim to use in reality doesn’t work. Ultimately, this is why the DNS and domain name industry feels so shady in general and why for most companies getting a name on the internet is a tortuous process that feels very scammy, which is unfair and costs more than it probably should. But so far we don’t have any good alternatives to the current system.

sytelus 7y ago
ICANN having little oversights is not an accident. It’s corrupt current and past leaders have ensured that. This organization is supposed to be non-profit international organization. If you ask me “who controls Internet”? it’s these guys. They have managed to convert ICANN into a perpetual personal wealth fund for friends and families.
- nieve 7y ago
  The writing was on the wall when the board decided they weren't getting what they wanted from the at-large constituency & direct elections and shut them down, in doing so completely blowing off the Memorandum of Understanding. It's a bit surprising that it's taken so long to hit .org directly, it's a really obvious target if you want to find ways to turn an ICANN position into cash. Full disclosure, I was one of those at-large members and they made it very clear that we weren't being good little peons.
  - marvin 7y ago
    To me, this seems like a good case for government intervention. Domain names are critical infrastructure at this point.
    - nsomaru 7y ago
      Which government? Critical to whom?
      - cnorthwood 7y ago
        It possibly fits within the portfolio of the ITU (although I guess the UN is intergovernmental, rather than a government).
        C14L 7y ago
        That has been proposed for as long as I can remember. The result would be that dictatorships and authoritarian governments control the internet, because they make up the majority in the ITU. I don't think we want that.
        hyperman1 7y ago
        Can you explain this a bit more? Afaik the ITU does a good if boring job. I can phone about anybody in the world. The system works. Now ICANN? They seem a bad choice, as this story demonstrates. Tolerable as long as the internet wasnt very important, but today, a UN international body seems the obvious choice.
        int_19h 7y ago
        They would only control the assignment of TLDs, whereas all the stuff that's actually interesting from a censorship perspective happens on much lower levels than that. For example, ITU also controls country code assignment for phone numbers. Does that translate to any meaningful capacity to censor? So far as I know, the only practical restriction that comes out of it is that unrecognized states don't get one assigned, but that's also generally true with TLDs.
LudwigNagasena 7y ago
How is it “in the air”? It is a non-profit registered in California.
Camillo 7y ago
It may be useful to note that the US government transferred control of DNS to ICANN in September 2016. I searched HN, and this seems to be the biggest thread from back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12612033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12612033 At the time, consensus in the media seemed to be that this would have little effect. However, the debate was quite politicized, as the transfer to ICANN occurred towards the end of the Obama administration, with fruitless opposition from high-profile Republicans.
- syshum 7y ago
  >>consensus in the media There is a reason for this, the American media is laregly Anti-American today. They believe in idea of "American Imperialism" and that America is the cause of most of the worlds problem. Thus they believed anything was better than "Corrupt American Control" over the internet. There were many many people that predicted bad outcomes from this transfer, most are starting to come true
oefrha 7y ago
It seems to me that running an NIC for a major TLD almost has zero marginal cost: for each domain, you automatically interface with ICANN once in a while to update registration info, then serve some NS and associated A/AAAA records. So it’s kind of surprising to me that $10/yr is already a non-profit price. Am I missing something?
- notahacker 7y ago
  The $10 a year includes the markup of a profit making domain registrar which has marketing and support costs. This article suggests Public Interest Registry's costs for third party technical services were about half their revenue, with the beneficiary of the rest of the funds being the Internet Society https://domainnamewire.com/2019/10/28/pir-org-slashes-registry-fee-to-afilias-in-half-to-18-million/ https://domainnamewire.com/2019/10/28/pir-org-slashes-regist... Still, you can see why those kind of margins and the ability to raise prices were an attractive combination to private equity
  - oefrha 7y ago
    > The $10 a year includes the markup of a profit making domain registrar which has marketing and support costs. I use Cloudflare Registrar these days for .com and .org. They claim to offer wholesale prices. My last .org bill was $9.90 + ICANN fee. And according to [1], Cloudflare directly work with PIR to offer .org, so unless they're lying, they are actually charged $9.90 per domain per year by PIR. Now, the article you linked to claims that PIR paid less than $2 per domain to the for-profit contractor who did everything technical for them (what's left? PR?). I wonder where the remaining $7.90 went... [1] https://www.cloudflare.com/tld-policies/ https://www.cloudflare.com/tld-policies/ Edit: Apparently overlooked the beneficiary part. Not a fan of mandatory donations but at least the numbers sort of add up now.
byuu 7y ago
The process of mapping name=IP is not remotely technically difficult, and I'd dare say most people reading this message could implement the backend to such a system in a few days. Setting up the peering replication and nameservers around the world is considerably harder, but it's definitely not a $10 billion+ problem (the current value of registrars and certificate authorities.) A startup funded by YC could handle that easily. Dealing with all the companies trying to sue you over others squatting their domains and having to decide who has the better claim would be the most expensive part. I really hate to say it because it's so cliche and overused, but a blockchain-like system could remove the central authority, the server costs, and the lawsuit risks. But it would introduce concerns over trust, most likely. The really hard, unsolvable part is the unwillingness of the browser vendors to support an alternative domain name system. If Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all supported a new TLD outside of ICANN's control as a public service (let's call it "Let's Resolve" which would offer free domains and would be funded through donations), it would be very successful. If even one of them didn't support it, nobody would ever consider using it for their websites. Browser extensions, even if they allowed access to intercept domain name lookups, would not work. It would have to be supported out of the box in every major browser, and well, good luck with that. Anything failing to herd those three cats right out of the starting gate is absolutely dead on arrival. Who knows though, maybe they'll raise .org prices just a bit too much, and piss off an established non-profit enough to start a huge campaign to create an alternative. But probably not.
- 22c 7y ago
  namecoin is one of the oldest altcoins around and probably predates the existence of the term altcoin. https://www.namecoin.org/ https://www.namecoin.org/
- oefrha 7y ago
  > The really hard, unsolvable part is the unwillingness of the browser vendors to support an alternative domain name system. If Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all supported a new TLD outside of ICANN's control as a public service (let's call it "Let's Resolve" which would offer free domains and would be funded through donations), it would be very successful. Not sure I understand your proposal. Say every single browser in the world supports Let's Resolve. byuu.org is registered with ICANN; but someone now wants to register byuu.org with Let's Resolve. Do you let them? What about the other way round? And what if someone attempts to register byuu.org with ICANN, while another attempts to register byuu.org with Let's Resolve at the same time, causing a race. Who wins? Also, unique, meaningful and memorable identifiers are a scarce resource. Offering free domains just open up the floodgate of squatting and hoarding (at unprecedented ease). Edit: Parent suggested a new TLD; I read it as a whole alternative system. Well, the new TLD idea was already implemented as .bit AFAIK, and it's pretty crap.
antihero 7y ago
Who'd have thought unaccountable private companies would act in their own best interest?
mihaaly 7y ago
Corruption and causing financial damages intentionally for having personal benefits on it - especially by abusing a position against the very community they represent - is punishable by law in most country. Aren't they subject of legal proceedings now by violating the law?
- koboll 7y ago
  Yeah this movement shouldn't just be "Save .org" but also specifically "Prosecute Fadi Chehadé", who is a criminal.
projectileboy 7y ago
At the risk of being overly-nationalistic, this is exactly the sort of scenario that many were worried about when the rest of the world demanded that the US hand over control to an international governing body. Just as you see with - for example - the IOC, many international governing bodies have a dangerous tendency to devolve to the ethical standards of their most corrupt members.
matheusmoreira 7y ago
> Ultimately, this is why the DNS and domain name industry feels so shady in general and why for most companies getting a name on the internet is a tortuous process that feels very scammy, which is unfair and costs more than it probably should. Shady is putting it lightly. I once tried to register a nice .wiki domain in order to host a wiki for myself. Those domains weren't available anywhere. I had to "request" one from the company that managed the TLD. So I emailed them and they asked me about my "plans" for the domain. Eventually they just said they'd host it on my behalf. They created a wiki on the domain I wanted, threw ads around it and told me to start contributing. It's not really an equal playing field where anyone can buy a domain. They gatekeep not only by charging huge prices but also by simply refusing to sell the domain if they think you're not important enough. People should start making more onion services.
- blotter_paper 7y ago
  Onion services don't have human readable namespaces. Independently of using onion services, whatever services we run should probably be registered on Namecoin and/or Ethereum Name Service. That's how we get out of the DNS cabal's grasp.
  - troquerre 7y ago
    ENS is more focused on wallet naming than DNS. Have you checked out Handshake? It’s aiming to create a more secure root of trust for DNS that’s resistant to seizure and censorship. We (namebase.io) are building on it ourselves. https://handshake.org https://handshake.org
- flir 7y ago
  > People should start making more onion services. A practical DNS replacement would be nice. Something not amenable to governmental or legal attacks, or straight-up corruption like this.
- troquerre 7y ago
  You highlight an interesting point which made me realize that no one actually owns their domain names on the Internet. We’re all just renters. You might be interested in checking out https://handshake.org https://handshake.org which is trying to create an alternative to the existing ICANN system that is resistant to censorship and seizure. The technology is really interesting and we’re building on it ourselves.
troquerre 7y ago
We[1] are building on a new project called Handshake[2] which is trying to create a more secure (alternative) root of trust for domain names. It does so by storing certs on a distributed ledger instead of relying on CAs. Though this isn’t the main goal of the project, one of the benefits is that anyone can register their own TLD through a vickrey auction which is much more fair than the current ICANN system. [1]https://namebase.io https://namebase.io [2]https://handshake.org https://handshake.org
- oefrha 7y ago
  > It does so by storing certs on a distributed ledger instead of relying on CAs. When you remove/replace the buzzwords that sounds exactly like a CT log, which is also a Merkel tree.
syshum 7y ago
>>>Sadly, ICANN has little oversight This is why the US Dept of Commerce should have never given up control
commandersaki 7y ago
It's funny because every defence I've heard about ICANN is "why did you not participate in the governance meetings?".

sytelus 7y ago

ICANN having little oversights is not an accident. It’s corrupt current and past leaders have ensured that. This organization is supposed to be non-profit international organization. If you ask me “who controls Internet”? it’s these guys. They have managed to convert ICANN into a perpetual personal wealth fund for friends and families.

nieve 7y ago
The writing was on the wall when the board decided they weren't getting what they wanted from the at-large constituency & direct elections and shut them down, in doing so completely blowing off the Memorandum of Understanding. It's a bit surprising that it's taken so long to hit .org directly, it's a really obvious target if you want to find ways to turn an ICANN position into cash. Full disclosure, I was one of those at-large members and they made it very clear that we weren't being good little peons.
- marvin 7y ago
  To me, this seems like a good case for government intervention. Domain names are critical infrastructure at this point.
  - nsomaru 7y ago
    Which government? Critical to whom?
    - cnorthwood 7y ago
      It possibly fits within the portfolio of the ITU (although I guess the UN is intergovernmental, rather than a government).
      - C14L 7y ago
        That has been proposed for as long as I can remember. The result would be that dictatorships and authoritarian governments control the internet, because they make up the majority in the ITU. I don't think we want that.
        hyperman1 7y ago
        Can you explain this a bit more? Afaik the ITU does a good if boring job. I can phone about anybody in the world. The system works. Now ICANN? They seem a bad choice, as this story demonstrates. Tolerable as long as the internet wasnt very important, but today, a UN international body seems the obvious choice.
        int_19h 7y ago
        They would only control the assignment of TLDs, whereas all the stuff that's actually interesting from a censorship perspective happens on much lower levels than that. For example, ITU also controls country code assignment for phone numbers. Does that translate to any meaningful capacity to censor? So far as I know, the only practical restriction that comes out of it is that unrecognized states don't get one assigned, but that's also generally true with TLDs.

LudwigNagasena 7y ago

How is it “in the air”? It is a non-profit registered in California.

Camillo 7y ago

It may be useful to note that the US government transferred control of DNS to ICANN in September 2016. I searched HN, and this seems to be the biggest thread from back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12612033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12612033 At the time, consensus in the media seemed to be that this would have little effect. However, the debate was quite politicized, as the transfer to ICANN occurred towards the end of the Obama administration, with fruitless opposition from high-profile Republicans.

syshum 7y ago
>>consensus in the media There is a reason for this, the American media is laregly Anti-American today. They believe in idea of "American Imperialism" and that America is the cause of most of the worlds problem. Thus they believed anything was better than "Corrupt American Control" over the internet. There were many many people that predicted bad outcomes from this transfer, most are starting to come true

oefrha 7y ago

It seems to me that running an NIC for a major TLD almost has zero marginal cost: for each domain, you automatically interface with ICANN once in a while to update registration info, then serve some NS and associated A/AAAA records. So it’s kind of surprising to me that $10/yr is already a non-profit price. Am I missing something?

notahacker 7y ago
The $10 a year includes the markup of a profit making domain registrar which has marketing and support costs. This article suggests Public Interest Registry's costs for third party technical services were about half their revenue, with the beneficiary of the rest of the funds being the Internet Society https://domainnamewire.com/2019/10/28/pir-org-slashes-registry-fee-to-afilias-in-half-to-18-million/ https://domainnamewire.com/2019/10/28/pir-org-slashes-regist... Still, you can see why those kind of margins and the ability to raise prices were an attractive combination to private equity
- oefrha 7y ago
  > The $10 a year includes the markup of a profit making domain registrar which has marketing and support costs. I use Cloudflare Registrar these days for .com and .org. They claim to offer wholesale prices. My last .org bill was $9.90 + ICANN fee. And according to [1], Cloudflare directly work with PIR to offer .org, so unless they're lying, they are actually charged $9.90 per domain per year by PIR. Now, the article you linked to claims that PIR paid less than $2 per domain to the for-profit contractor who did everything technical for them (what's left? PR?). I wonder where the remaining $7.90 went... [1] https://www.cloudflare.com/tld-policies/ https://www.cloudflare.com/tld-policies/ Edit: Apparently overlooked the beneficiary part. Not a fan of mandatory donations but at least the numbers sort of add up now.

byuu 7y ago

The process of mapping name=IP is not remotely technically difficult, and I'd dare say most people reading this message could implement the backend to such a system in a few days. Setting up the peering replication and nameservers around the world is considerably harder, but it's definitely not a $10 billion+ problem (the current value of registrars and certificate authorities.) A startup funded by YC could handle that easily. Dealing with all the companies trying to sue you over others squatting their domains and having to decide who has the better claim would be the most expensive part. I really hate to say it because it's so cliche and overused, but a blockchain-like system could remove the central authority, the server costs, and the lawsuit risks. But it would introduce concerns over trust, most likely. The really hard, unsolvable part is the unwillingness of the browser vendors to support an alternative domain name system. If Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all supported a new TLD outside of ICANN's control as a public service (let's call it "Let's Resolve" which would offer free domains and would be funded through donations), it would be very successful. If even one of them didn't support it, nobody would ever consider using it for their websites. Browser extensions, even if they allowed access to intercept domain name lookups, would not work. It would have to be supported out of the box in every major browser, and well, good luck with that. Anything failing to herd those three cats right out of the starting gate is absolutely dead on arrival. Who knows though, maybe they'll raise .org prices just a bit too much, and piss off an established non-profit enough to start a huge campaign to create an alternative. But probably not.

22c 7y ago
namecoin is one of the oldest altcoins around and probably predates the existence of the term altcoin. https://www.namecoin.org/ https://www.namecoin.org/
oefrha 7y ago
> The really hard, unsolvable part is the unwillingness of the browser vendors to support an alternative domain name system. If Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all supported a new TLD outside of ICANN's control as a public service (let's call it "Let's Resolve" which would offer free domains and would be funded through donations), it would be very successful. Not sure I understand your proposal. Say every single browser in the world supports Let's Resolve. byuu.org is registered with ICANN; but someone now wants to register byuu.org with Let's Resolve. Do you let them? What about the other way round? And what if someone attempts to register byuu.org with ICANN, while another attempts to register byuu.org with Let's Resolve at the same time, causing a race. Who wins? Also, unique, meaningful and memorable identifiers are a scarce resource. Offering free domains just open up the floodgate of squatting and hoarding (at unprecedented ease). Edit: Parent suggested a new TLD; I read it as a whole alternative system. Well, the new TLD idea was already implemented as .bit AFAIK, and it's pretty crap.

antihero 7y ago

Who'd have thought unaccountable private companies would act in their own best interest?

mihaaly 7y ago

Corruption and causing financial damages intentionally for having personal benefits on it - especially by abusing a position against the very community they represent - is punishable by law in most country. Aren't they subject of legal proceedings now by violating the law?

koboll 7y ago
Yeah this movement shouldn't just be "Save .org" but also specifically "Prosecute Fadi Chehadé", who is a criminal.

projectileboy 7y ago

At the risk of being overly-nationalistic, this is exactly the sort of scenario that many were worried about when the rest of the world demanded that the US hand over control to an international governing body. Just as you see with - for example - the IOC, many international governing bodies have a dangerous tendency to devolve to the ethical standards of their most corrupt members.

matheusmoreira 7y ago

> Ultimately, this is why the DNS and domain name industry feels so shady in general and why for most companies getting a name on the internet is a tortuous process that feels very scammy, which is unfair and costs more than it probably should. Shady is putting it lightly. I once tried to register a nice .wiki domain in order to host a wiki for myself. Those domains weren't available anywhere. I had to "request" one from the company that managed the TLD. So I emailed them and they asked me about my "plans" for the domain. Eventually they just said they'd host it on my behalf. They created a wiki on the domain I wanted, threw ads around it and told me to start contributing. It's not really an equal playing field where anyone can buy a domain. They gatekeep not only by charging huge prices but also by simply refusing to sell the domain if they think you're not important enough. People should start making more onion services.

blotter_paper 7y ago
Onion services don't have human readable namespaces. Independently of using onion services, whatever services we run should probably be registered on Namecoin and/or Ethereum Name Service. That's how we get out of the DNS cabal's grasp.
- troquerre 7y ago
  ENS is more focused on wallet naming than DNS. Have you checked out Handshake? It’s aiming to create a more secure root of trust for DNS that’s resistant to seizure and censorship. We (namebase.io) are building on it ourselves. https://handshake.org https://handshake.org
flir 7y ago
> People should start making more onion services. A practical DNS replacement would be nice. Something not amenable to governmental or legal attacks, or straight-up corruption like this.
troquerre 7y ago
You highlight an interesting point which made me realize that no one actually owns their domain names on the Internet. We’re all just renters. You might be interested in checking out https://handshake.org https://handshake.org which is trying to create an alternative to the existing ICANN system that is resistant to censorship and seizure. The technology is really interesting and we’re building on it ourselves.

troquerre 7y ago

We[1] are building on a new project called Handshake[2] which is trying to create a more secure (alternative) root of trust for domain names. It does so by storing certs on a distributed ledger instead of relying on CAs. Though this isn’t the main goal of the project, one of the benefits is that anyone can register their own TLD through a vickrey auction which is much more fair than the current ICANN system. [1]https://namebase.io https://namebase.io [2]https://handshake.org https://handshake.org

oefrha 7y ago
> It does so by storing certs on a distributed ledger instead of relying on CAs. When you remove/replace the buzzwords that sounds exactly like a CT log, which is also a Merkel tree.

syshum 7y ago

>>>Sadly, ICANN has little oversight This is why the US Dept of Commerce should have never given up control

commandersaki 7y ago

It's funny because every defence I've heard about ICANN is "why did you not participate in the governance meetings?".