13 ms·

The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org

526 points by jdkee 7y ago

pampedant 7y ago
... ICANNexit? I mean Switching out a computer's DNS root zone is a small operation. Managing a substitute to ICANN, how much could that really cost? A few million a year?
teruakohatu 7y ago
It seems that over time any sufficiently well funded non-profit will eventually hire a financial engineer as CEO and transform into a Hedge Fund with some sort of charitable appendage.
- riddlemethat 7y ago
  Absolutely true. My buddy managed money for the kind of non-profits everyone has heard of at one time or another. Tends to be that once they get big enough they find themselves recipients of endowments that they can invest however they see fit. They tend to put that capital to work in whatever yields the highest return. Know what offers the best returns? Stuff that tends to cause the problems the non-profit might have been set up to stop. Becomes a self sustaining ecosystem where the investments from the societally damaging corporations pays to sustain the cleanup effort.
  - TomMarius 7y ago
    Why do they do that? Are they extracting the profit out of the nonprofit somehow?
    - paulmd 7y ago
      Nonprofits still have to "make a profit" on the services they provide if they want to be a going concern. Unless you've got some big project to dump it into, it goes into an endowment for "a rainy day". Which then starts looking for places to park that money. Some of the biggest nonprofits also have the biggest endowments and/or asset holdings - colleges/universities, hospital systems, religious leadership, etc etc. Fundamentally, most non-profits are still run like a for-profit corporation and provide services in exchange for money, they just don't have publicly traded shares, dividends, etc. Think Harvard or hospital systems, not ACLU or Red Cross.
    - ketzo 7y ago
      I mean, it's easy to justify: "Our organization does good work with the money we have." "We could do more good work, or better work, with more money." "Therefore investments/endowments we receive should be invested inwards, to increase the amount of money we have available with which to do good work." You can see, of course, how this kind of cycle could become more about the money than the good work.
      - Rels 7y ago
        Exactly. And that's actually how the .org sell was justified. From http://www.circleid.com/posts/20191127_why_i_voted_to_sell_org/ http://www.circleid.com/posts/20191127_why_i_voted_to_sell_o... : "This transaction will put that bigger mission on a solid footing — so that the Internet Society can provide much more substantive help to nonprofits than merely leasing domain names, and with more continuity over time. While it's true that running .org provided a relatively steady income stream, it effectively staked most of our revenue on a single business, and required a certain amount of our resources to be spent managing that business, distracting from the broader mission. Especially as PIR has grown over time, this situation has become increasingly untenable. Establishing a more diverse portfolio of investments will allow us to have more predictable revenue over time, and to take a longer-range perspective when it comes to achieving our mission. "
        goatinaboat 7y ago
        Other than managing .org no one can say what ISOC’s so-called mission is nor point to any evidence of them doing it. The salaries they pay themselves however are substantial.
        philpem 7y ago
        Sounds like how the sale of a large chunk of the amateur radio IP space allocation (AMPRNet) was justified, too. http://www.arrl.org/news/millions-of-amprnet-internet-addresses-sold-to-fund-grants-and-scholarships http://www.arrl.org/news/millions-of-amprnet-internet-addres...
  - matt_morgan 7y ago
    I suppose that it's only a pity that after 26 years in nonprofits--eight different .orgs--that I have never experienced this. Beware anecdotal data.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  America's well-endowed universities seem like a perfect example of human greed. They have amassed so much money that they could seriously invest in furthering their ostensible mission — education — yet they'd rather just obsess over making sure the big pile of money only grows bigger.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    Should they though? In the current climate that seems risky, if your donation to the university wasn't used for education but instead spent building infrastructure on Africa then some folks would likely decry that investment as being self-serving (trying to build good PR to cover up some perceived bad event that recently happened), or it might be decried as being injust (sure, they invested into that village, but the neighboring village was so much worse off), or it might be controversial (did you know that the village you gave money to was the home of the mother of the former dictator that raised a child army over here)... or it might just be decried as being wasteful (if the university has so much money to spare why should I donate to it - they're just lighting money on fire trying to fight causes that have no relation to education). I think there isn't an easy answer to this question and just letting the ball of cash grow bigger honestly might be the only "safe" decision we've left open to universities... that said pumping it into mutual funds managed by the president's husband or giving steep raises to administrators also looks terrible from the outside.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jdkee 7y ago
    From Jordan Weissmann writing at Slate: “The joke about Harvard is that it’s a hedge fund with a university attached to it,” Mark Schneider tells me. https://www.businessinsider.com/why-harvard-should-be-taxed-2015-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/why-harvard-should-be-taxed-...
  - kortilla 7y ago
    I’m not sure you understand the purpose of an endowment. It’s supposed to be such a large pile of money that the institution can exist purely off of low risk gains without draining the principle.
- twic 7y ago
  You may enjoy this story about Bremer Bank: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2020-01-21/bank-isn-t-happy-with-its-owner https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2020-01-21/ba...
JohnFen 7y ago
PIR (and, apparently, ICANN) are simply selling us out on this, and whether or not the sale goes through, they both have taken a huge credibility hit -- and ICANN, anyway, already had credibility problems to begin with. In terms of its impact on the net, I see no upside to this at all. It's nothing but harmful.
iameli 7y ago
> Verisign controls the registries for .com and .net, two of the internet’s most popular. All it does is administer a database and collect small sums from website owners, but with computing power rising and practically no marginal cost to adding another website to the database, the entire enterprise is a license to print money. In the third quarter of 2019, Verisign showed operating income of $205.6 million on $308.4 million in revenues, a profitability margin of 66.67 percent. This makes Verisign one of the most profitable companies in the world. I wish we lived in a world where a company being kinda monopolistic to make a 67% profit margin was enough to get me angry. If I hadn't read this, I'd have assumed they were making a lot more than $100 million a year profit. I see the real answer to this as the gTLD program: radically expand the number of domain-issuing entities and normalize companies operating on something other than .com.
- byuu 7y ago
  The problem is you can't move a domain once you've established it. I'm stuck on byuu.org for life. There's 15 years worth of links to it scattered across the web that would all go dark. Or more precisely, that would all suddenly point at spam. I could never get most of them updated. Even my subdomain from my previous host from 15 years ago is squatted to this day to serve up advertising. It's even aware of the software that I used to host there. One answer in my view is to remove the maximum length of prepayment for domains. Let us buy a domain for 100 years. Sure, that's $1,000. Maybe throw in a discount. But now we never have to worry about it again, as long as we live. Or at least, as long as the registry lives. It would never be squattable.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    What if a signed version of the content was always accessible, content addressable, in the Internet Archive? Does it matter than what the current namespace is?
    - toyg 7y ago
      > in the Internet Archive I would wager that 95% of web users do not even know that IA exists, let alone that they can use it. > Does it matter than what the current namespace is? As long as it's the only thing a browser will consider to retrieve information, yes. Which is why cool URIs don't change.
coder1001 7y ago
This quote kind of summarises the effect of the attempted takeover: "Nonprofit websites will be trapped: If they want to keep their longtime brand and their archives, they’ll pay whatever price. “When you buy a domain you own it, but after a couple years it owns you.”" Hope this ends well for all .org owners!
kick 7y ago
I found this article incredible (despite the tabloid-like headline) on this subject: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/14/icann_org_redacted/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/14/icann_org_redacted/ TL;DR: Purchase funded by debt, includes another ex-ICANNer, will be done through four different companies. Some highlights that I think are important from it: Incredibly, the names of three directors of the organization that will buy the registry remain redacted in documents published by ICANN [PDF] this month, despite the three entities pushing the sale – PIR, ISOC and Ethos Capital – claiming that publication of the information is “unprecedented” and they are “strong believers in the power of transparency.” The rationale given for the removal of director names is that it was based “on the principles set forth in ICANN’s Documentary Information Disclosure Policy (DIDP)” – a bizarre claim that has nothing to do with the issues at hand and which ICANN has refused to discuss. As well as refusing to supply the names of those in overall charge, the three companies have also refused to publish the “underlying equity purchase agreement, sensitive financial information, corporate organizational information, draft organizational documents, documentation provided to governmental entities and certain supporting contractual documents.”
- cptskippy 7y ago
  > (despite the tabloid-like headline) I like everything about The Register but the cheezy headlines, nicknames, and bad photoshop are some of the best parts.
  - kick 7y ago
    I mean, I enjoy it for personal consumption. It makes it way harder to seriously share, though!
    - cptskippy 7y ago
      What do you mean? Headlines like "Yabba Dabba Doo it's the iPad 2" scream professionalism.
      - kick 7y ago
kirbypineapple 7y ago
Attempted? It already happened.
- NickBusey 7y ago
  According to the article, no it didn't. > ICANN must sign off on the deal in order for it to proceed. In December, it paused the sale for 30 days amid public outcry, expressing concern about the lack of transparency surrounding the deal.
dang 7y ago
I think these are the major related threads so far. In reverse order: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21931258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21931258 - The NRO Issues Inspection Request to ICANN Concerning .ORG Sale https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800085 - ICANN Delays .ORG Sale Approval https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21723682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21723682 - Why ISOC sold .ORG to VCs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21689121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21689121 - The .Org Fire Sale: How it sold for less than half its valuation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667355 - ISOC sold the .org registry to Ethos Capital for $1.1B https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656960 - Why I Voted to Sell .ORG https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21626677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21626677 - ICANN races towards regulatory capture: the great .org heist https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677 - Save .org https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592297 - Internet world despairs as non-profit .org sold to private equity firm https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21582622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21582622 - Private Equity Is Going to Ruin the .Org Domain System and Screw Nonprofits https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21557779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21557779 - ICA asks ICANN to block .Org private equity deal in damning letter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21526982 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21526982 - Private Equity company acquires .org registry https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20263561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20263561 - Regulatory Capture at ICANN Did I miss any?
- frandroid 7y ago
  It's almost as if HN could use a tagging system... :)
  - pjmorris 7y ago
    Maciej Cegłowski would like a [word](https://pinboard.in https://pinboard.in) with you.
  - dang 7y ago
    I'm inclined to disagree.
dr_dshiv 7y ago
Can someone explain the issue? Currently, anyone can buy a .org. I imagine that this company will charge more money for .orgs in exchange for some verification procedure. Compare this to today, where anyone can buy .orgs for any reason: it might be a public good if there is some authentication and prestige. NGOs and non-profits have money. Paying $100 a year to maintain a verified "I'm not a company" status might be a good idea. Keep in mind that non profits aren't necessarily good -- many are essentially tax shelters. This article feels anti-capitalist. Nothing in the article makes a principled argument for how .orgs should operate. What's the argument for allowing anyone to buy a .org for $10 per year?
- oaiey 7y ago
  The UNHCR or another huge entity will not give a shit. They have a legal department which can end Ethos Capital if they like. However, the reading club with 20 members and yearly income of 300€ cannot afford a 100€ .org. .org and the PIR had a dedicated purpose.
  - dr_dshiv 7y ago
    But why not just get a .club extension? Shouldn't .orgs be reserved for big orgs?
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      > Shouldn't .orgs be reserved for big orgs? Why should it be? The size of the orgs has never been a criteria in the past, and the majority of nonprofits using a .org domain are small.
      - dr_dshiv 7y ago
        What if there was a grandfather clause for existing orgs, so there is no funny business on pressuring people to change their domain. But I also feel like it would make sense to have a domain extension that meant something. Right now it seems like it does, but it doesn't.
    - 7y ago
brandon272 7y ago
Something has gone seriously wrong when one of our original TLDs, which, from my perspective, should be considered sacrosanct elements of the internet with historical importance, are able to be sold off by interloping individuals, who, for some bizarre reason, feel that they are entitled to capitalize on these TLDs, and who do so purely with their own self-interest at heart. I'm really just disappointed and angered that this happened.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  Alas the Internet was created in a capitalist world, and capitalism loves rent-seeking.
  - kortilla 7y ago
    Rent seeking would require the new owner to not really be doing anything (I.e. not operating the tld nameservers, etc) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking Just paying recurring fees (e.g. paying rent to your landlord) does not match the definition of rent-seeking.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - Gabrielfair 7y ago
      You are right, however I think rent-seeking in this context is that the owner is able to extract more money without producing any more value. So it would meet the definition. This usage of the term has become quite common when referring to political rent-seeking.
      - TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
        Yes, that's what I meant by it.
    - Retric 7y ago
      Operating the .org domain is not creating new wealth. It’s the same as a VA selling toll roads or someone buys old songs. They all spend some money maximize their income stream. However, that spending is not creating something useful. Operations spending is required, but does not generate any long term wealth. You keep cleaning a hotel ever day and it does not get ever cleaner over time the way an actual investment does when you keep investing more money.
majos 7y ago
Here’s a slightly different question: the article mentions that Ethos is paying to take over PIR, thus taking over .org administration as well. How transparent is this transaction? Viewed uncharitably, it looks like ICANN built a separate entity to admin .org, built a separate entity to buy it, and then claimed that the purchase was just normal business, even as they were self-dealing to sell to friends. Is this accurate, or is the purchase by Ethos actually something like market-rate? In that case, even if I dislike the capitalization of .org, it doesn’t seem illegal?
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
I'm curious if private equity chose .org for a specific reason, and which other TLDs could be next. Perhaps there was something about the organizational structure that would make the .org TLD easy to extract profits from.
sroussey 7y ago
Protest this Friday: https://www.eff.org/event/savedotorg-protest-icann https://www.eff.org/event/savedotorg-protest-icann
getpost 7y ago
There is a SaveDotOrg Protest at ICANN on Friday in Los Angeles. Date: Friday, January 24, 2020 Time: 9 am – 11 am Location: ICANN, 12025 Waterfront Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90094 https://savedotorg.org/index.php/savedotorg-protest-at-icann/ https://savedotorg.org/index.php/savedotorg-protest-at-icann...
- getpost 7y ago
  Update: Around 2 dozen people showed. ICANN received the petition. “Chairman Maarten Botterman said ICANN is looking at the impact of the sale and what guarantees they could obtain for dot-org registrants, though he made no promises.” https://mobile.twitter.com/russforce/status/1220789586554523648?s=12 https://mobile.twitter.com/russforce/status/1220789586554523... https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/nonprofits-worry-sale-dot-org-universe-raise-costs-68504169 https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/nonprofits-worry-s...
jascii 7y ago
Sigh, I am flabbergasted at my own lack of outrage. Not to long ago something like this would have me all up in arms, now it seems like just another nail in the coffin of democracy..
- philpem 7y ago
  With so much to be outraged about, we're all burned out on outrage... to put it another way, the battery's in dire need of a recharge.
- cf141q5325 7y ago
  And the truly horrible part that this is working as intended. The public has to get loud every time, while from the other perspective, getting lucky once is enough.
annoyingnoob 7y ago
I updated my .org domains for the max 5 years that my provider would let me. At least I'm locked in for now. The whole thing seems shady though I really want to believe that the new owner will play nice. As humans we can decide that altruism > greed, something tells me that greed will rule here.
- EvanAnderson 7y ago
  Good idea. My personal .org domain is up for renewal right now. I guess it's time to lock it in for now.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > I really want to believe that the new owner will play nice I do too, but everything that the players involved in this have said and done strongly indicates that "playing nice" or even behaving relatively responsibly isn't in their DNA.
- BLKNSLVR 7y ago
  That's a good start, but maybe also purchase a separate non-.org domain and start the process of migration ASAFP.
- throwawayjava 7y ago
  to future readers: namecheap will let you do 9 years.
  - annoyingnoob 7y ago
    In the past I've had a lot of issues with spammers and scammers using domain names that came from namecheap. namecheap made it difficult to report and resolve issues, spammer/scammers could create names much faster than they could be taken down. namecheap was not interested in tying one violation to another, they did not want to see that a few players were generating a lot of names that appeared to be from different people but all immediately started running the same spam/scam. If namecheap chooses to be a citadel for spammer/scammers then I'm sure not going to give them any of my money.
- 7y ago
megiddo 7y ago
Isn't gTLD by convention? It is technically feasible to set up a shadow registry and route to that, operated as a NPO.
munk-a 7y ago
ICANN has no technical power to enforce this change, so continuing with it while there is so much dissent is dangerous to itself and the current organization of the internet. If some big players in the DNS space decided to object to this change (like say google and a few ISPs who thought they should get a bigger slice of the registration pie) they could just disrespect registrations published by Ethos and require an additional fee to propagate a new name to their servers (Oh you registered a name? Well, how much is allowing comcast users[1] to see it worth to you)... I hope ICANN stops being silly before it fractures assumptions around DNS propagation. 1. Specifically all those users who use the default assigned DNS, which is the vast majority.
asaph 7y ago
> ... and it could use its power to sell the browsing data of users of .orgs By what mechanism is this possible?
- TheFlyingFish 7y ago
  That's what I want to know. I would assume the article is talking about monitoring which IP's request which domains, but the overwhelming majority of requests that a registry sees have to be from downstream resolvers, right? In which case they don't know who's using the site, they only know that "somebody who uses this resolver" is using the site. In most cases there are probably multiple levels of resolvers, so it might even be as coarse as "somebody on the west coast of the US is using this site," which isn't terribly useful.
jrochkind1 7y ago
This article explained some things clearly. ISOC didn't "buy" the rights to administer .org in the first place. They were given it. Along with $5 million actually; they paid, like, negative for it, they were paid to take it. Now they get to sell it for $1.1 billion? How does that make any sense at all? We're literally at "Russian oligarch-type" transaction here. America!
aabbcc1241 7y ago
Could this situation be improved/eliminated when we move from TCP/IP to NDN (Named Data Network)? In NDN, you don't request data from a specific host, hence no need to specify the receiving machine's IP, indeed, you send the packet to a p2p network, another with certain data / signature can answer your request.
- ohazi 7y ago
  > when *if? This is basically never going to happen. TCP is too entrenched.
- rjmunro 7y ago
  So what does a URL look like in this system? E.g. If I have put up a poster on a wall somewhere, what do I say instead of "Visit www.example.org for more details"?
  - aabbcc1241 7y ago
    Take news for example. Instead of sending a HTTP GET on 'https://news.com/what-is-NDN.html' https://news.com/what-is-NDN.html', which must be answered from the server 'news.com' with https cert for prove. You'll send an interest package '{title: what-is-NDN, type: news, cert: a-public-key}', which can be answer by any node having the data. Be the data source or someone that already got it (like BT download-and-seed sharing) (The cert is optional, if you can trust an information from anyone)
    - rjmunro 7y ago
      What exactly do I put on my poster?
      - aabbcc1241 7y ago
        What do you mean by "poster"?
lwb 7y ago
> Ethos ... could use its power to sell the browsing data of users of .orgs Is this possible? Can all top-level domain name owners view all browsing data on their domain?
- paulannesley 7y ago
  Not really. Unless they completely hijacked all DNS resolution under .org to IPs they control, fraudulently gain TLS certificates (using DNS-based proof), and proxy the traffic to the true IP. Not a realistic scenario at scale.
Yuval_Halevi 7y ago
>The entire market for domain name registries is broken, a troubling combination of government-granted monopoly, disinterested (at best) regulators, and eager extractors of profit. well said

526 points by jdkee 7y ago

... ICANNexit? I mean Switching out a computer's DNS root zone is a small operation. Managing a substitute to ICANN, how much could that really cost? A few million a year?

teruakohatu 7y ago

It seems that over time any sufficiently well funded non-profit will eventually hire a financial engineer as CEO and transform into a Hedge Fund with some sort of charitable appendage.

riddlemethat 7y ago
Absolutely true. My buddy managed money for the kind of non-profits everyone has heard of at one time or another. Tends to be that once they get big enough they find themselves recipients of endowments that they can invest however they see fit. They tend to put that capital to work in whatever yields the highest return. Know what offers the best returns? Stuff that tends to cause the problems the non-profit might have been set up to stop. Becomes a self sustaining ecosystem where the investments from the societally damaging corporations pays to sustain the cleanup effort.
- TomMarius 7y ago
  Why do they do that? Are they extracting the profit out of the nonprofit somehow?
  - paulmd 7y ago
    Nonprofits still have to "make a profit" on the services they provide if they want to be a going concern. Unless you've got some big project to dump it into, it goes into an endowment for "a rainy day". Which then starts looking for places to park that money. Some of the biggest nonprofits also have the biggest endowments and/or asset holdings - colleges/universities, hospital systems, religious leadership, etc etc. Fundamentally, most non-profits are still run like a for-profit corporation and provide services in exchange for money, they just don't have publicly traded shares, dividends, etc. Think Harvard or hospital systems, not ACLU or Red Cross.
  - ketzo 7y ago
    I mean, it's easy to justify: "Our organization does good work with the money we have." "We could do more good work, or better work, with more money." "Therefore investments/endowments we receive should be invested inwards, to increase the amount of money we have available with which to do good work." You can see, of course, how this kind of cycle could become more about the money than the good work.
    - Rels 7y ago
      Exactly. And that's actually how the .org sell was justified. From http://www.circleid.com/posts/20191127_why_i_voted_to_sell_org/ http://www.circleid.com/posts/20191127_why_i_voted_to_sell_o... : "This transaction will put that bigger mission on a solid footing — so that the Internet Society can provide much more substantive help to nonprofits than merely leasing domain names, and with more continuity over time. While it's true that running .org provided a relatively steady income stream, it effectively staked most of our revenue on a single business, and required a certain amount of our resources to be spent managing that business, distracting from the broader mission. Especially as PIR has grown over time, this situation has become increasingly untenable. Establishing a more diverse portfolio of investments will allow us to have more predictable revenue over time, and to take a longer-range perspective when it comes to achieving our mission. "
      - goatinaboat 7y ago
        Other than managing .org no one can say what ISOC’s so-called mission is nor point to any evidence of them doing it. The salaries they pay themselves however are substantial.
      - philpem 7y ago
        Sounds like how the sale of a large chunk of the amateur radio IP space allocation (AMPRNet) was justified, too. http://www.arrl.org/news/millions-of-amprnet-internet-addresses-sold-to-fund-grants-and-scholarships http://www.arrl.org/news/millions-of-amprnet-internet-addres...
- matt_morgan 7y ago
  I suppose that it's only a pity that after 26 years in nonprofits--eight different .orgs--that I have never experienced this. Beware anecdotal data.
TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
America's well-endowed universities seem like a perfect example of human greed. They have amassed so much money that they could seriously invest in furthering their ostensible mission — education — yet they'd rather just obsess over making sure the big pile of money only grows bigger.
- munk-a 7y ago
  Should they though? In the current climate that seems risky, if your donation to the university wasn't used for education but instead spent building infrastructure on Africa then some folks would likely decry that investment as being self-serving (trying to build good PR to cover up some perceived bad event that recently happened), or it might be decried as being injust (sure, they invested into that village, but the neighboring village was so much worse off), or it might be controversial (did you know that the village you gave money to was the home of the mother of the former dictator that raised a child army over here)... or it might just be decried as being wasteful (if the university has so much money to spare why should I donate to it - they're just lighting money on fire trying to fight causes that have no relation to education). I think there isn't an easy answer to this question and just letting the ball of cash grow bigger honestly might be the only "safe" decision we've left open to universities... that said pumping it into mutual funds managed by the president's husband or giving steep raises to administrators also looks terrible from the outside.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jdkee 7y ago
  From Jordan Weissmann writing at Slate: “The joke about Harvard is that it’s a hedge fund with a university attached to it,” Mark Schneider tells me. https://www.businessinsider.com/why-harvard-should-be-taxed-2015-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/why-harvard-should-be-taxed-...
- kortilla 7y ago
  I’m not sure you understand the purpose of an endowment. It’s supposed to be such a large pile of money that the institution can exist purely off of low risk gains without draining the principle.
twic 7y ago
You may enjoy this story about Bremer Bank: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2020-01-21/bank-isn-t-happy-with-its-owner https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2020-01-21/ba...

JohnFen 7y ago

PIR (and, apparently, ICANN) are simply selling us out on this, and whether or not the sale goes through, they both have taken a huge credibility hit -- and ICANN, anyway, already had credibility problems to begin with. In terms of its impact on the net, I see no upside to this at all. It's nothing but harmful.

iameli 7y ago

> Verisign controls the registries for .com and .net, two of the internet’s most popular. All it does is administer a database and collect small sums from website owners, but with computing power rising and practically no marginal cost to adding another website to the database, the entire enterprise is a license to print money. In the third quarter of 2019, Verisign showed operating income of $205.6 million on $308.4 million in revenues, a profitability margin of 66.67 percent. This makes Verisign one of the most profitable companies in the world. I wish we lived in a world where a company being kinda monopolistic to make a 67% profit margin was enough to get me angry. If I hadn't read this, I'd have assumed they were making a lot more than $100 million a year profit. I see the real answer to this as the gTLD program: radically expand the number of domain-issuing entities and normalize companies operating on something other than .com.

byuu 7y ago
The problem is you can't move a domain once you've established it. I'm stuck on byuu.org for life. There's 15 years worth of links to it scattered across the web that would all go dark. Or more precisely, that would all suddenly point at spam. I could never get most of them updated. Even my subdomain from my previous host from 15 years ago is squatted to this day to serve up advertising. It's even aware of the software that I used to host there. One answer in my view is to remove the maximum length of prepayment for domains. Let us buy a domain for 100 years. Sure, that's $1,000. Maybe throw in a discount. But now we never have to worry about it again, as long as we live. Or at least, as long as the registry lives. It would never be squattable.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  What if a signed version of the content was always accessible, content addressable, in the Internet Archive? Does it matter than what the current namespace is?
  - toyg 7y ago
    > in the Internet Archive I would wager that 95% of web users do not even know that IA exists, let alone that they can use it. > Does it matter than what the current namespace is? As long as it's the only thing a browser will consider to retrieve information, yes. Which is why cool URIs don't change.

coder1001 7y ago

This quote kind of summarises the effect of the attempted takeover: "Nonprofit websites will be trapped: If they want to keep their longtime brand and their archives, they’ll pay whatever price. “When you buy a domain you own it, but after a couple years it owns you.”" Hope this ends well for all .org owners!

kick 7y ago

I found this article incredible (despite the tabloid-like headline) on this subject: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/14/icann_org_redacted/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/14/icann_org_redacted/ TL;DR: Purchase funded by debt, includes another ex-ICANNer, will be done through four different companies. Some highlights that I think are important from it: Incredibly, the names of three directors of the organization that will buy the registry remain redacted in documents published by ICANN [PDF] this month, despite the three entities pushing the sale – PIR, ISOC and Ethos Capital – claiming that publication of the information is “unprecedented” and they are “strong believers in the power of transparency.” The rationale given for the removal of director names is that it was based “on the principles set forth in ICANN’s Documentary Information Disclosure Policy (DIDP)” – a bizarre claim that has nothing to do with the issues at hand and which ICANN has refused to discuss. As well as refusing to supply the names of those in overall charge, the three companies have also refused to publish the “underlying equity purchase agreement, sensitive financial information, corporate organizational information, draft organizational documents, documentation provided to governmental entities and certain supporting contractual documents.”

cptskippy 7y ago
> (despite the tabloid-like headline) I like everything about The Register but the cheezy headlines, nicknames, and bad photoshop are some of the best parts.
- kick 7y ago
  I mean, I enjoy it for personal consumption. It makes it way harder to seriously share, though!
  - cptskippy 7y ago
    What do you mean? Headlines like "Yabba Dabba Doo it's the iPad 2" scream professionalism.
    - kick 7y ago

kirbypineapple 7y ago

Attempted? It already happened.

NickBusey 7y ago
According to the article, no it didn't. > ICANN must sign off on the deal in order for it to proceed. In December, it paused the sale for 30 days amid public outcry, expressing concern about the lack of transparency surrounding the deal.

dang 7y ago

I think these are the major related threads so far. In reverse order: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21931258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21931258 - The NRO Issues Inspection Request to ICANN Concerning .ORG Sale https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800085 - ICANN Delays .ORG Sale Approval https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21723682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21723682 - Why ISOC sold .ORG to VCs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21689121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21689121 - The .Org Fire Sale: How it sold for less than half its valuation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667355 - ISOC sold the .org registry to Ethos Capital for $1.1B https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656960 - Why I Voted to Sell .ORG https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21626677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21626677 - ICANN races towards regulatory capture: the great .org heist https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677 - Save .org https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592297 - Internet world despairs as non-profit .org sold to private equity firm https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21582622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21582622 - Private Equity Is Going to Ruin the .Org Domain System and Screw Nonprofits https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21557779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21557779 - ICA asks ICANN to block .Org private equity deal in damning letter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21526982 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21526982 - Private Equity company acquires .org registry https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20263561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20263561 - Regulatory Capture at ICANN Did I miss any?

frandroid 7y ago
It's almost as if HN could use a tagging system... :)
- pjmorris 7y ago
  Maciej Cegłowski would like a [word](https://pinboard.in https://pinboard.in) with you.
- dang 7y ago
  I'm inclined to disagree.

dr_dshiv 7y ago

Can someone explain the issue? Currently, anyone can buy a .org. I imagine that this company will charge more money for .orgs in exchange for some verification procedure. Compare this to today, where anyone can buy .orgs for any reason: it might be a public good if there is some authentication and prestige. NGOs and non-profits have money. Paying $100 a year to maintain a verified "I'm not a company" status might be a good idea. Keep in mind that non profits aren't necessarily good -- many are essentially tax shelters. This article feels anti-capitalist. Nothing in the article makes a principled argument for how .orgs should operate. What's the argument for allowing anyone to buy a .org for $10 per year?

oaiey 7y ago
The UNHCR or another huge entity will not give a shit. They have a legal department which can end Ethos Capital if they like. However, the reading club with 20 members and yearly income of 300€ cannot afford a 100€ .org. .org and the PIR had a dedicated purpose.
- dr_dshiv 7y ago
  But why not just get a .club extension? Shouldn't .orgs be reserved for big orgs?
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    > Shouldn't .orgs be reserved for big orgs? Why should it be? The size of the orgs has never been a criteria in the past, and the majority of nonprofits using a .org domain are small.
    - dr_dshiv 7y ago
      What if there was a grandfather clause for existing orgs, so there is no funny business on pressuring people to change their domain. But I also feel like it would make sense to have a domain extension that meant something. Right now it seems like it does, but it doesn't.
  - 7y ago

brandon272 7y ago

Something has gone seriously wrong when one of our original TLDs, which, from my perspective, should be considered sacrosanct elements of the internet with historical importance, are able to be sold off by interloping individuals, who, for some bizarre reason, feel that they are entitled to capitalize on these TLDs, and who do so purely with their own self-interest at heart. I'm really just disappointed and angered that this happened.

TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
Alas the Internet was created in a capitalist world, and capitalism loves rent-seeking.
- kortilla 7y ago
  Rent seeking would require the new owner to not really be doing anything (I.e. not operating the tld nameservers, etc) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking Just paying recurring fees (e.g. paying rent to your landlord) does not match the definition of rent-seeking.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Gabrielfair 7y ago
    You are right, however I think rent-seeking in this context is that the owner is able to extract more money without producing any more value. So it would meet the definition. This usage of the term has become quite common when referring to political rent-seeking.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
      Yes, that's what I meant by it.
  - Retric 7y ago
    Operating the .org domain is not creating new wealth. It’s the same as a VA selling toll roads or someone buys old songs. They all spend some money maximize their income stream. However, that spending is not creating something useful. Operations spending is required, but does not generate any long term wealth. You keep cleaning a hotel ever day and it does not get ever cleaner over time the way an actual investment does when you keep investing more money.

majos 7y ago

Here’s a slightly different question: the article mentions that Ethos is paying to take over PIR, thus taking over .org administration as well. How transparent is this transaction? Viewed uncharitably, it looks like ICANN built a separate entity to admin .org, built a separate entity to buy it, and then claimed that the purchase was just normal business, even as they were self-dealing to sell to friends. Is this accurate, or is the purchase by Ethos actually something like market-rate? In that case, even if I dislike the capitalization of .org, it doesn’t seem illegal?

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

I'm curious if private equity chose .org for a specific reason, and which other TLDs could be next. Perhaps there was something about the organizational structure that would make the .org TLD easy to extract profits from.

sroussey 7y ago

Protest this Friday: https://www.eff.org/event/savedotorg-protest-icann https://www.eff.org/event/savedotorg-protest-icann

getpost 7y ago

There is a SaveDotOrg Protest at ICANN on Friday in Los Angeles. Date: Friday, January 24, 2020 Time: 9 am – 11 am Location: ICANN, 12025 Waterfront Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90094 https://savedotorg.org/index.php/savedotorg-protest-at-icann/ https://savedotorg.org/index.php/savedotorg-protest-at-icann...

getpost 7y ago
Update: Around 2 dozen people showed. ICANN received the petition. “Chairman Maarten Botterman said ICANN is looking at the impact of the sale and what guarantees they could obtain for dot-org registrants, though he made no promises.” https://mobile.twitter.com/russforce/status/1220789586554523648?s=12 https://mobile.twitter.com/russforce/status/1220789586554523... https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/nonprofits-worry-sale-dot-org-universe-raise-costs-68504169 https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/nonprofits-worry-s...

jascii 7y ago

Sigh, I am flabbergasted at my own lack of outrage. Not to long ago something like this would have me all up in arms, now it seems like just another nail in the coffin of democracy..

philpem 7y ago
With so much to be outraged about, we're all burned out on outrage... to put it another way, the battery's in dire need of a recharge.
cf141q5325 7y ago
And the truly horrible part that this is working as intended. The public has to get loud every time, while from the other perspective, getting lucky once is enough.

annoyingnoob 7y ago

I updated my .org domains for the max 5 years that my provider would let me. At least I'm locked in for now. The whole thing seems shady though I really want to believe that the new owner will play nice. As humans we can decide that altruism > greed, something tells me that greed will rule here.

EvanAnderson 7y ago
Good idea. My personal .org domain is up for renewal right now. I guess it's time to lock it in for now.
JohnFen 7y ago
> I really want to believe that the new owner will play nice I do too, but everything that the players involved in this have said and done strongly indicates that "playing nice" or even behaving relatively responsibly isn't in their DNA.
BLKNSLVR 7y ago
That's a good start, but maybe also purchase a separate non-.org domain and start the process of migration ASAFP.
throwawayjava 7y ago
to future readers: namecheap will let you do 9 years.
- annoyingnoob 7y ago
  In the past I've had a lot of issues with spammers and scammers using domain names that came from namecheap. namecheap made it difficult to report and resolve issues, spammer/scammers could create names much faster than they could be taken down. namecheap was not interested in tying one violation to another, they did not want to see that a few players were generating a lot of names that appeared to be from different people but all immediately started running the same spam/scam. If namecheap chooses to be a citadel for spammer/scammers then I'm sure not going to give them any of my money.
7y ago

megiddo 7y ago

Isn't gTLD by convention? It is technically feasible to set up a shadow registry and route to that, operated as a NPO.

munk-a 7y ago

ICANN has no technical power to enforce this change, so continuing with it while there is so much dissent is dangerous to itself and the current organization of the internet. If some big players in the DNS space decided to object to this change (like say google and a few ISPs who thought they should get a bigger slice of the registration pie) they could just disrespect registrations published by Ethos and require an additional fee to propagate a new name to their servers (Oh you registered a name? Well, how much is allowing comcast users[1] to see it worth to you)... I hope ICANN stops being silly before it fractures assumptions around DNS propagation. 1. Specifically all those users who use the default assigned DNS, which is the vast majority.

asaph 7y ago

> ... and it could use its power to sell the browsing data of users of .orgs By what mechanism is this possible?

TheFlyingFish 7y ago
That's what I want to know. I would assume the article is talking about monitoring which IP's request which domains, but the overwhelming majority of requests that a registry sees have to be from downstream resolvers, right? In which case they don't know who's using the site, they only know that "somebody who uses this resolver" is using the site. In most cases there are probably multiple levels of resolvers, so it might even be as coarse as "somebody on the west coast of the US is using this site," which isn't terribly useful.

jrochkind1 7y ago

This article explained some things clearly. ISOC didn't "buy" the rights to administer .org in the first place. They were given it. Along with $5 million actually; they paid, like, negative for it, they were paid to take it. Now they get to sell it for $1.1 billion? How does that make any sense at all? We're literally at "Russian oligarch-type" transaction here. America!

aabbcc1241 7y ago

Could this situation be improved/eliminated when we move from TCP/IP to NDN (Named Data Network)? In NDN, you don't request data from a specific host, hence no need to specify the receiving machine's IP, indeed, you send the packet to a p2p network, another with certain data / signature can answer your request.

ohazi 7y ago
> when *if? This is basically never going to happen. TCP is too entrenched.
rjmunro 7y ago
So what does a URL look like in this system? E.g. If I have put up a poster on a wall somewhere, what do I say instead of "Visit www.example.org for more details"?
- aabbcc1241 7y ago
  Take news for example. Instead of sending a HTTP GET on 'https://news.com/what-is-NDN.html' https://news.com/what-is-NDN.html', which must be answered from the server 'news.com' with https cert for prove. You'll send an interest package '{title: what-is-NDN, type: news, cert: a-public-key}', which can be answer by any node having the data. Be the data source or someone that already got it (like BT download-and-seed sharing) (The cert is optional, if you can trust an information from anyone)
  - rjmunro 7y ago
    What exactly do I put on my poster?
    - aabbcc1241 7y ago
      What do you mean by "poster"?

lwb 7y ago

> Ethos ... could use its power to sell the browsing data of users of .orgs Is this possible? Can all top-level domain name owners view all browsing data on their domain?

paulannesley 7y ago
Not really. Unless they completely hijacked all DNS resolution under .org to IPs they control, fraudulently gain TLS certificates (using DNS-based proof), and proxy the traffic to the true IP. Not a realistic scenario at scale.

Yuval_Halevi 7y ago

>The entire market for domain name registries is broken, a troubling combination of government-granted monopoly, disinterested (at best) regulators, and eager extractors of profit. well said