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The .Org Fire Sale: How it sold for less than half its valuation
- metasj 7y agoRelated past threads: "Save .org": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677 "Take action to save .org": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664582 "Why I Voted to Sell .org": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656960 "ISOC sold the .org registry to Ethos Capital for $1.1B" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667355
- nathcd 7y agoDupe of "Take action to save .org" with some discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21677533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21677533
- lancewiggs 7y agoI wrote about this too - linked in the article. https://lancewiggs.com/2019/12/01/did-isoc-leave-1-billion-on-the-table/ https://lancewiggs.com/2019/12/01/did-isoc-leave-1-billion-o... The travesty is that ISOC has given up a sure-fire stream of $55+ million/year in tax-free income, along with the ability to easily grow that to over $100m/year with price increases - all for just over $1.1 billion. As any r/personalfinance reader can tell you a rule of thumb for endowments is to spend a maximum of 4% of your assets each year. This means $44m from the $1.1bn, which means ISOC is immediately worse off than they were forecasting for this year (~$55m). Alternatively use the Yale method, which in today's low-return market will yield similar or worse results. Moreover it's clear that ISOC are not behaving as the sharpest of investors, so we can imagine that the endowment might be be poorly managed or over-spent.
- xwdv 7y agoThere ain’t nothing “sure-fire” in this world when it comes to income son. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Those armchair investors from reddit don’t know the situation .
- formercoder 7y agoThat's why cash flows are discounted at the cost of capital - it's a quantitative decision.
- kick 7y agoMost of your comments on HN today have been extremely condescending. Is 'xwdv a parody account? (Genuine question.)
- xwdv 7y agoIt’s a self fulfilling prophecy. I used to get upvotes, but recently I only get downvotes, and now that I feel targeted, the tone of my posts gets more hostile. I wish there was more transparency surrounding downvotes.
- kick 7y agoThere is [transparency]: if you're being downmodded, you're either deemed as not contributing to the conversation, or people disagree with you enough to do so. As per Paul Graham: I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 Forcing users to publicly display their opinion on a person's comment would be negative for many reasons, especially on a site like HN, where many people choose to be eponymous. Also, note: most of the comments on the first page of your profile seem to be in the black, which means they weren't controversial enough to receive many (if any) downvotes.
- jorvi 7y ago
- forrestthewoods 7y agoExchanging 10 to 20 years of potential revenue for a flat check seems like a pretty good deal.
- Scoundreller 7y agoAgreed. A p/e of 20 isn't bad. S̶t̶o̶c̶k̶ ̶m̶a̶r̶k̶e̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶1̶5̶ ̶r̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶n̶o̶w̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶f̶a̶r̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶d̶i̶v̶e̶r̶s̶i̶f̶i̶e̶d̶.̶ Oops, stock market is 20-25 right now. There's so many TLDs today, the ability to raise prices isn't what it was. Though they could 5x prices and even if they lost 60% of their business, they'll come out ahead. I could understand the worries of .org holders.
- lancewiggs 7y ago.org is .org, and they have a lot more pricing power than almost all of the gTLDs (generic top level domains). Their customers, if you think about it, are perhaps more likely to value what the domain stands for. Meanwhile the annual price is currently absolutely trivial versus the expenses of most organisations from higher GDP countries.
- onion2k 7y agoTheir customers, if you think about it, are perhaps more likely to value what the domain stands for. Some of their customers perhaps. If you go back and look at what companies were doing with domains 20 years ago most medium and large enterprises bought <company name>.com, .org, .net and some country code tld domain because that's what everyone recommended "in case someone cybersquatted". I think behaviour has stopped now there are hundreds of gTLDs available. Consequently .org is much less likely to sell to businesses, and will find it very difficult to grow.
- darkwater 7y ago.org customers are not businesses, it's the non-profit
- annoyingnoob 7y agoThere is a chance that the fire sale price will help keep .org prices from skyrocketing. Maybe they did .org domains a favor.
- syshum 7y agoIn what universe is that the case? Prices are going to raise by at least 10% per year from now until the end of time. that is doubling every 7 years thereabouts, far far far higher than inflation or cost bais increases would demand
- slantedview 7y agoAs always, non-profit services cost less than for-profit services for a reason. ISOC could have implemented any price hikes they wanted without the need to pay out a profit as will be necessary for the new owners. This will be a net cost increase, likely a big one (since there are no actual controls), for .org owners.
- lancewiggs 7y agoAny investment firm wants to maximise returns for their investors. The incentive is to find the (monopoly) price that maximises income from sales numbers x dollars.
- 4ntonius8lock 7y agoI appreciate your excellent write up. When I read the allegations in the original article I kinda wanted more detail. You break it down very well with great attention to detail. I'd like to place this here for those who only read comments: .org registry rights belong to a non-profit - the rights were sold to a private equity group - somewhere between 50% and 90% below market rate. It was based on self dealing of the people given stewardship of the non-profit that manages .org Basically, this is privatization Russian style. Not good. Even if you like privatization, no-bid stuff is just wrong. Want to help support the democratic institutions which hopefully won't fail us? Look here: https://drewdevault.com/2019/11/29/dotorg.html https://drewdevault.com/2019/11/29/dotorg.html
- mattrp 7y agoI don’t know if it’s fair to say they could have easily doubled but your point about not acting like investors is fair. In contrast, AAA, USAA, and AARP have chosen to leverage their assets to enter new lines of business while Isoc simply sold their’s off. I am not familiar with what governance issues might be in play here but the simpleton like me would ask, what alternatives did ISOC evaluate before taking a buyout offer from a insider-linked entity that ironically calls itself “ethos”...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cameldrv 7y agoThe bigger issue is that org was given to PIR to manage in the public interest. It was not supposed to even be a moneymaker for ISOC, they were just supposed to be the stewards of .org in the public interest. The fact that it’s worth even $1 billion shows that they’re operating it in the interest of the ISOC and not the public interest. ICANN should simply create a new entity that will charge break-even fees for registrations and stop trying to tax .org registrants with mandatory charitable donations to a dubious charity.
- reitzensteinm 7y agoFurther, the sale of the asset to a third party is essentially laundering the extraction of maximum value. The buyer pays the NPV when operated as a profit focused enterprise, then insulates the ISOC from blowback when it actually does this. The ISOC can then turn around and feign betrayal with the rest of us, its pockets full of money.
- ohashi 7y agoThis is the internet. We don't forget things like this. People's names have been attached to it, like Andrew Sullivan (CEO) and Richard Barnes (board member defending it). We know exactly who fucked over everyone here, they admit it publicly. There's no pretending about it, Andrew was more than happy to sell out the non profit space. Just read the interview: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/29/isoc_ceo_dot_org_sale/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/29/isoc_ceo_dot_org_sa...
- MrEldritch 7y agoThis is the Internet. Everyone will have forgotten this besides, like, five people before this time 2020.
- jtbayly 7y ago2020/tomorrow. FTFY
- 7y ago
- LegitShady 7y agoI feel like you're missing some capital recovery factors and alternatives analysis to be so strong with your statement.
- lancewiggs 7y agoIt’s a pretty simple analysis - but there is clearly, to me, enormous value left on the table.
- deepaksurti 7y ago>> is to spend a maximum of 4% of your assets each year. OT. Isn't 4% also the rule of early retirement, that is if you can live of 4% of your savings you can retire? Can anyone clarify if this rule applies for both individual and corporate? If so, how would be even more interesting to know?
- throwaheyy 7y agoYes. Generally and for the purposes of this discussion, individuals and corporations can both buy investments in the public markets with similar risk/return profiles. Hence the spending ratio works out similar. The 4% spending ratio theoretically varies with market performance but evens out over time. 7-8% typical returns for a total market index/etf, minus a couple % to account for inflation.
- gowld 7y agoThe % is lower for corporations than for humans, because corporations intend to outlive humans.
- logfromblammo 7y ago4% works out for retirement, with the expectation that you will eventually die and no longer need the income. The assumption there is that if the market underperforms for the next 35 years in a row, you run out of money just after you die. An immortal, such as a corporation, has to use a safer number, such as 3%, or 2.5% for operations and 0.5% in fees for the fiduciary management. So the permanent endowment needs to be 40x annual operating costs, and the fiduciary needs to grow it by 3% better than (price) inflation per year. That's relatively easy to do when most of the principal won't be touched within the next 30 years: buy all the publicly-traded stocks that have historically paid regular dividends, and reinvest whatever isn't paid out. On a long enough time scale, that's probably 7% better than inflation. So the fiduciary could possibly be replaced by a robot that only needs 0.05% annually for maintenance, and then you'd only need to endow 34x annual operating costs to run forever.
- zapita 7y agoThe article says that a national bond fund may have fronted the endowment without turning .org into a for-profit. What does this mean?
- lalaland1125 7y agoThey could have sold bonds (raised money via debt) as an alternative to selling .org. They probably would have gotten a good yield considering the stability of the .org revenue stream.
- zapita 7y agoBut would buyers of national bonds consider buying debt from a non-government entity? Would they be willing and able to model the investment without a good understanding of the Internet industry?
- freddie_mercury 7y agoThey buy trillions of bonds from GSEs every day. This wouldn't be any different. Agency debt is a well understood thing.
- zapita 7y agoThanks. I find this topic fascinating, even though I know nothing about it. Do you have any recommendations for reading material to learn more?
- Reelin 7y agoYou might try (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/corporatebond.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/corporatebond.asp) for an overview.
- lancewiggs 7y agoIt's a steady and safe stream of income, and the bonds themselves would be rated as safe enough. After that it's all about the interest rate, and in today's market those are really low.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- agwa 7y ago> Take a page from the Donuts book: create multiple price tiers for popular domains, up to 100x the base rate. > Raise rates for long-time owners of common words. They weren’t using that premium space anyway. This is forbidden by the .org registry agreement, 2.10(c): https://www.icann.org/sites/default/files/tlds/org/org-agmt-html-30jun19-en.htm https://www.icann.org/sites/default/files/tlds/org/org-agmt-...
- metasj 7y agoAh, thanks -- you're right, the second is prohibited; corrected. The first seems fine per 2.10(c) as long as the registrant agrees on first registration that renewals will be expensive.
- cannonedhamster 7y agoAnd amazingly won't matter under the new owners who get to write their own rules. That's why everyone is upset. There was a vote that allowed .org to set whatever prices they wanted right before the sale.
- dwild 7y agoHis link was to the updated agreement. The sale doesn't allow the owner to write their own rules.
- vmchale 7y agoblack friday
- romaaeterna 7y agoIf this is really the case, someone(s) very possibly took and gave bribes, and we're going to see Federal scrutiny all over this.
- TheRealPomax 7y agoNo, we won't. Not unless you help set that in motion. Have you contacted the DA already?
- schoen 7y agoNote that in the U.S., district attorneys are normally the prosecutors at the state court level. At the Federal level, most prosecutors are "U.S. attorneys" or "assistant U.S. attorneys". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_attorney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_attorney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Attorney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Attorney
- TheRealPomax 7y agoRight, so: the DA. Because as incredible as this is: neither ICANN nor ISOC are controlled or run by the federal government. As much as people think that the organization that oversees internet naming must be federal (because how could it not be, they control stuff for the ENTIRE COUNTRY AND BEYOND), both ICANN and ISOC are literally just private industry non-profit organisations, like any other 501c3. If you want to sue them, or you want them sued by government, you're going to have to contact the DA for the state(s) they are registered in.
- schoen 7y agoThe reason that I mentioned the distinction was that you suggested contacting DAs in response to romaaeterna's prediction that "we're going to see Federal scrutiny". Contacting DAs might be the most appropriate way to handle a problem, but in itself it probably won't lead to Federal scrutiny of that problem.
- philipn 7y agoAre registries allowed to charge different prices for different domain names? E.g. can they ask google.com for $1B to renew and mygrandmascookiecompany.com for $20 to renew?
- agwa 7y agoIn the case of .org, non-uniform renewal pricing is only allowed if "the applicable registrant expressly agreed in its registration agreement with registrar to higher Renewal Pricing at the time of the initial registration of the domain name following clear and conspicuous disclosure of such Renewal Pricing to such registrant" So Ethos wouldn't be able to screw over existing registrants with non-uniform renewal pricing. Source: Section 2.10(c) of https://www.icann.org/sites/default/files/tlds/org/org-agmt-html-30jun19-en.htm https://www.icann.org/sites/default/files/tlds/org/org-agmt-...
- joedavison 7y agoThis depends on the TLD (top level domain) in question. For .com, .net, .org it has historically not been possible to price discriminate like this. For the "new TLDs" (the explosion of new extensions we have seen in recent years), the registry contract is different and they are indeed allowed to do this. They call it "premium pricing". Part of the big outcry about the recent changes to .org is that it brings it closer to the "new TLD" model, which disfavors the registrant.
- mortenjorck 7y agoI wonder what the level of awareness of this is in the nonprofit community itself. Something like the National Council of Nonprofits would seem to be in a good position to file a suit or at least raise awareness among its members who might be interested in forming a class. While a major charity like the Salvation Army certainly doesn’t care if a single, sub-$100 annual expense doubles or even goes up by a factor of ten, thousands of small organizations across the country might care enough to band together and take action.
- C1sc0cat 7y agoFormer member of the worker coop that bid to run .org when ISOC won here. Technically .org is not just for American style "non profits", I it was and should be any thing else that doesn't fit the other big 5 eg jwz.org. That was the problem a lot of shady stuff goes on in the Charity world ("but its for charity") notorious for bullying often much worse than the behaviour of wall street or city bankers and traders. I feel that a more sensible approach such as ours would have been better served - as coop members tend to be stroppy bastards and would have stood up for the common good - a lot of our ISP side in Manchester where members of alt 2600 .
- enjoyyourlife 7y agoThe reason for this is because former Ethos members are involved with ICANN and are probably making money because of the sale
- quantified 7y agoFollow the money. If they invest with GS, see how much is left after 5-7 years.
- slantedview 7y ago"Sullivan suggested that their goal is to return roughly the same annual revenue as they have been getting from PIR — around $50M. Of course this time it would come without the possibility of expanding the underlying business year by year." This hurts my head. Needless to say, the returns on this fund will be _far_ less assured than the returns on simply maintaining the .org business as it was (especially with Goldman managing the fund). Impressively, even ISOC comes out a loser from this deal. Only Ethos wins, but then, that was surely the point.
- ohashi 7y agoWaiting to hear who are ISOC gets new gigs in the Ethos orbit.
- edgefield0 7y agoIs there a benefit to locking in pricing today for say 10 years? I assume the major registries, such as namecheap and godaddy, will allow a longer term buy in?
- patrickdavey 7y agoAnother way to look at it - is there a downside to locking in the current price for 10 years? It doesn't _seem_ if Ethos do end up with it that the prices will go anywhere but up. I renewed my .org for 10 years.
- Tepix 7y agoYou are supporting a broken system. Chances are it won't get fixed. The better option may be to support a new, decentralized name system instead. I'm hoping this incident will provide new energy to these efforts.
- bad_user 7y agoThe option you're talking about isn't available. In the meantime those of us with an .org domain have to look after ourselves. I have an .org domain since 2008 and my whole online identity is tied to it. In other words I'm a stakeholder. Are you suggesting that I should give it up and support ... what exactly? So yes, I'll be renewing for the maximum limit as well.
- soraminazuki 7y agoThe whole reason people are upset about this deal is because it's not possible to just "switch" to an alternative name system without breaking the whole internet. What you're suggesting is unrealistic.
- Tepix 7y agoIs it? All it takes initially is support by the browser makers.
- TomMckenny 7y agoHonest question: since .org is relied on world wide, why are just two US state courts the only ones with the legal power to review the sale?
- kick 7y agoWhy would anywhere else have legal power to? .org doesn't sell domains directly to consumers, and ICANN is intentionally centralized, up until a few years ago being owned by the US government. US-owned US-created top-level domains are hardly an international affair. You could argue that DNS is broken, and that ICANN is bad, but there's no legal argument for .org being subject to foreign governments.
- beiz 7y agothats a very US-centric view. not everything is monetary, certain things are simply setup with intent of management and responsibility in a global world. DNS is one of those things, GPS another. do note that neither of these are exclusively owned by the US, but rather that the US owns the responsibility to maintain these services that we all use. even the dollar as reserve is a fickle thing that could change if the rest of us choose to. with everything set in place and the technology readily available, we could all just drop the US as our client provider and tank the american economy. we don't, because shit like this isn't supposed to happen, but push hard enough, and it will. you already see russia and china going this route.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> neither of these are exclusively owned by the US, but rather that the US owns the responsibility to maintain these services that we all use For all practical purposes, these systems are owned by the U.S. because America maintains them. That lets the U.S. government cut it off to unfriendly users, the definition of control.
- beiz 7y agoThey are allowed to own and maintain and control these systems. No one is forced to use them, and if the US abuse it, they lose the control they currently are allowed to possess.
- lazyguy2 7y agoThe reason it sold at half it's valuation is because the valuation was bullshit. It's like some guy claiming his classic car is worth 25,000 dollars. If nobody is offering 25k for it then it's not worth 25k. Period, end of story.
- lancewiggs 7y agoThey didn't appear to shop the offer. It's like that 'some guy' selling his classic car to a classic car dealer who was walking by, without first testing the price with experts or posting an advertisement.
- yborg 7y agoExcept in this case the "some guy" is selling the classic car without actually owning it since it actually belonged to a public museum, and the dealership was just set up last week by the former director of the museum who just happened to retire the week before that. There seems to be some kind of breach of fiduciary trust here somewhere, heads should roll at ICANN even if all of this was somehow not in violation of any laws.
- asdff 7y agoIt would be like you valuing the car at 25k then selling it to your buddy for 15k without even listing the car on ebay first to feel the price.
- akiselev 7y agoThe entire deal was put together in secret within the last 2 months. We don't know what anyone else would have offered because no one else was given the chance.
- tinus_hn 7y agoThe deal was closed in two days with no other offers allowed.
- goatinaboat 7y agothe valuation was bullshit Valuation of a cashflow is a very well understood thing. There is literally a button on my calculator that just does it. And a built-in function in Excel. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/NPV-function-8672CB67-2576-4D07-B67B-AC28ACF2A568 https://support.office.com/en-us/article/NPV-function-8672CB...
- LegitGandalf 7y agoIt's almost like someone figured out how to cash out. Just about any percentage kickback on a billion discount is life changing money.
- shkkmo 7y agoWow, the level of corruption and self dealing here is remarkable. Chehadé was the CEO of ICANN until a couple of years ago. > On May 7th, Chehadé registered the domain for EthosCapital.com. > On May 13th, ICANN decided to lift the price caps anyway. The decision was made by ICANN staff, not its board, evading the obligation to publicly carry out due diligence and explain board decisions. > On May 14th, Ethos Capital was incorporated as a new Boston-based “investment firm”, founded by Brooks — who stepped down from running the 60-person team at Abry to do so. Ethos Capital has two staff: Brooks and Nora Abusitta-Ouri, a former ICANN SVP who later worked for Chehadé. [0] Then a couple of months later, surprise, .org gets sold to Ethos Capital... Almost as if this was the plan the whole time... Here's hoping that somehow these crooks actually end up in jail... [0] http://blogs.harvard.edu/sj/2019/11/23/a-tale-of-icann-and-regulatory-capture-the-dot-org-heist/ http://blogs.harvard.edu/sj/2019/11/23/a-tale-of-icann-and-r...
- jijji 7y agoit looks like an inside job when the CEO of ICANN sells the .Org TLD to himself...
- Proven 7y agoNow everyone is so smart. When there was a chance to manage these things in a completely free market manner, no one was for it. The same goes for all the dot org registrants. They complain about being hostages and whatnot but when they had a chance to pick a TLD they either didn’t think about this possibility or they did and despite the risks they still chose dog org. Another point that was made but should be reiterated: even if the new owner doubled the price it’s still be negligible. Socialists are more upset about the “unfair” sale price of TLD than the price they pay to use it. If something is so important don’t leave it to the state and inter-governmental organizations to manage.
- tinus_hn 7y agoI don’t know if it is allowed but it sure would be amusing if ICANN decided to grant .org to someone else now, leaving Ethos with a worthless carcass.
- C1sc0cat 7y agoAnyone know anyone with a spine at ICANN I am sure that I could find people who might be interested Ivan Pope for one.
- kome 7y agoI love the smell of some rent extracting capitalism in the morning...
- scarejunba 7y agoMy favourite part is that they didn't own it really. We told them to run it for us. It's like if my property management guy sold my house and took the money.
- dependenttypes 7y agoThis is a good chance to stop our dependence on DNS and move to things such as .onion domains instead (which by the way help avoid the whole certificate CA mess).
- matheusmoreira 7y agoAbsolutely agree. Every site should also available on the onion network. This would put some pressure on DNS operators. This would also help dissociate the onion network from criminal activity. The more sites become available as hidden services, the more legitimate the network becomes.
- cyphar 7y agoI agree, but I would say that .onion addresses should already be seen as being entirely legitimate. Let's not forget that Facebook's onion address (facebookcorewwwi.onion) is the main target of "darknet" traffic by a very wide margin.
- kingludite 7y agoI believe the problem is the lack of protocols implemented in browsers. It's needlessly fragile to have a single route to the data. "Web pages only last about 100 days on average"[1] http was nice, we gave it a good spin, it was certainly close enough for the cigar but in all honesty... where you have 100 days to find the content you want to consume it is not even a reasonable approach. I bet a lot of it is still available some place but whoever archived it legally may not distribute it without permission. I really don't care if TOR, IPFS, freenet or zeronet work out of the box. If it means access to more content its great. I don't even know how to use gopher atm. Good stuff is happening[2] but where they apparently chose to make it an extension is pretty lame. also.. If the user types "salvation army" into the browser we know what they want. Selling the rights to deny access is not what we need. [1] - http://blog.archive.org/2015/02/11/locking-the-web-open-a-call-for-a-distributed-web/ http://blog.archive.org/2015/02/11/locking-the-web-open-a-ca... [2] - https://blog.ipfs.io/2019-10-08-ipfs-browsers-update/ https://blog.ipfs.io/2019-10-08-ipfs-browsers-update/
- 7y ago
- timwaagh 7y agoMaybe they can use the money to buy some shares in Ethos. They seem to be going places.
- syshum 7y agoThis is one of the most blanetly and openly corrupt transactions in modern history. It saddens me that it looks like they are going to get away with it as well..
- apexalpha 7y agoI still can't really believe someone can sell a building block of the world wide web like .org tld. Who runs .net? .com? .edu? .info? Can they be sold, too?
- f4ewagy34aew 7y agoYes all of those are private now. .com is still with ICANN (which is now an NGO), .net is now VeriSign, .edu is Educause NGO, .info is Afilias (coop formed by several independent domain registrars)
- icedchai 7y ago.COM's registry is Verisign, just like .NET.
- leibnitz27 7y agoI bought an org domain back in the 90s, and have been using it as my personal domain (i.e. also primary email address) ever since. While, granted, I was perhaps a little silly to go org (it seemed like a good idea back then!), it's mildly terrifying that my personal footprint on the web of 20+ years can now be held to ransom by a random VC firm, and to keep my own email address I might have to pay an additional $$$ annually. Sigh.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 7y agoExtend your domain lease by 10 years at the current yearly fee. Gives you some time to migrate if you choose to.
- zrm 7y agoThat's a bad deal unless you actually need ten years to migrate, which you probably don't. Better off to take a year or three at the 10% annual increase and then stop paying entirely (~364% of the existing rate for three years, with payments made in the future rather than the present) than to pay 1000% of the existing rate right now.
- dropmann 7y ago10 years is a long time, maybe until than its bought back to non-profit, you never know. Also it allows you the luxury of starting worrying about your migration later. If you could invest that money now with more than 4-5 times US interest rates (which is the price increase I would expect), then I would consider this a bad deal.
- zrm 7y agoIf it's reverted back to non-profit then prepaying is still a bad proposition because then you're paying today the same amount you would be able to pay years from now -- and paying it to the for-profit entity now instead of the non-profit entity later. And I don't see any reason to expect the annual probability that it's transitioned back to a non-profit to be a lot different in the future than it is right now, which means that if it makes sense to migrate then it doesn't make sense to wait. Especially when continued use of the domain only increases the migration cost as it gets further distributed as your active contact information.
- stevespang 7y ago" . . .to invest it with guidance from Goldman Sachs, who financially brokered the acquisition." Oh, Goldman was involved ? Well, once the AG's file lawsuits with motions to stop the sale, a motion for discovery will likely be filed to determine how much money was passed around, how much Goldman made off this crooked deal, and we will be counting on our friends in the press to publish far and wide to embarrass and humiliate the Goldman douchebags . . . and BTW, this lawsuit provides the perfect opportunity to also craft the motion for discovery to blow wide open these internet organizations finances and show the world how much they squander their money on bogus salaries, self dealing, etc.
- Darvon 7y agoIt's so hard to stay angry and not just default to sad.
- deadmik3 7y agoI still think it's a shame that they are extorting the .org domain from so many beneficial non profits such as the Lemon Party
- glitcher 7y agoI find it very curious that NPR has not covered this story, _and_ that they are notably missing from the list of organizations that signed at savedotorg.org. Especially because they are a .org! I mean, I'm not trying to imply it should be attributed to malice, but are they asleep at the wheel or what?
- xivzgrev 7y agoOk honest question fellow comment reader - what are you going to do about it? This is the 5th or 6th article I’ve seen on this transaction, with hundreds of comments each. Ethos Capital does not give 2 shits about your comments here. Are you writing to the DA like this article suggested? What else can you do? Myself, I don’t personally care that much. But I see a lot of people here obviously do, and I don’t really see that energy translating into action. I would like to see it move forward in a positive direction, so I’m asking the question of you - you don’t like it, what are you going to do about it besides complain here?
- matthewdgreen 7y agoThe DA (and others) are a lot more likely to care about this if it gains press attention — preferably national and preferably well beyond the HN audience. Keep sending those emails to the DA, by all means. But if anything happens to this deal, it’s going to be 100% driven by press attention.
- WalterSobchak 7y agoCan the URL be updated to use HTTPS, which is fully supported on blogs.harvward.edu? https://blogs.harvard.edu/sj/2019/12/02/the-dot-org-fire-sale-sold-for-half-its-valuation/ https://blogs.harvard.edu/sj/2019/12/02/the-dot-org-fire-sal...
- dropmann 7y agoWait, if you can no longer trust ICANN, does not that mean you cannot trust the whole internet (domain name system) anymore?
- metasj 7y agoI would assume that ICANN itself may give up its non-profit status in time. That doesn't make them untrustworthy in general -- they will only exist so long as the system they administer is reasonably useful -- just trustworthy for fewer things (don't expect them to implement any sanity check on prices, for instance)
- jacquesm 7y agoIsn't there a technical resolution possible here where outsiders set up a new root for .org and people can change their allegiance and leave them to rot? That way Ethos capital (what a disingenuous name) paid $1B for nothing at all.
- Accujack 7y agoYes, you just have to get everyone who might want to access a .org address or their DNS provider to recognize the new root. That's the problem - you have to get organizations - some of whom are deeply invested in making money off of DNS - to agree to not do so. Or you just ignore the existing system and build a new one... once enough desirable sites are in the new one, then the old one will fade away.
- kerkeslager 7y agoFor all the people who keep saying there's no application for blockchain: here's one. Namecoin was a bad implementation, but the concept is sound. Letting companies control domain names serves no purpose. They don't prevent domain squatters, they've censored on behalf of governments in the past, and now they're allowed to gouge nonprofits on .org domains. A decentralized domain name system wouldn't solve all these problems, but at least we wouldn't be paying rent-seeking middle-men to provide terrible service.
- markman 7y agoI'm probably going to regret asking this and I apologize for my ignorance but I thought .org's were all government and nonprofit. I didn't think anybody owned it nor that the entire domain could be sold?!