The .Org Fire Sale: How it sold for less than half its valuation

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.

Even if they push 60% of domains off of .org that business will mostly go to other TLDs owned by the same people..

Oh who did this organization with a duty to steward .org for public interest sell it to? How can you separate that duty from the action of selling it to a third party without that duty?

It's an interesting hair to split.

Maybe people are protesting the wrong thing. The sale of .org is a symptom, the underlying cause is a bad regulatory framework for internet names.

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.

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.

False.

do note that neither of these are exclusively owned by the US,

False.

but rather that the US owns the responsibility to maintain these services that we all use.

False. The US has no responsibility, they own it.

even the dollar as reserve is a fickle thing that could change if the rest of us choose to.

And until other countries choose to, they get to deal with the consequences of their shortsighted reaches for centralization.

we could all just drop the US as our client provider and tank the american economy.

Good luck, there's plenty of software in Europe with hardcoded URLs, and there's no chance of getting operating systems in Europe, which are contributed to almost exclusively by US companies, to switch their DNS over to something that isn't ICANN-controlled.

we don't, because shit like this isn't supposed to happen, but push hard enough, and it will

The US has performed coups on foreign countries at least a dozen times. Other countries won't do a thing, as is shown by historical precedent.

you already see russia and china going this route.

Neither of those run their own DNS, they leech off of ICANN, and occasionally block things or modify records. Were ICANN to disappear, both would be in disarray.

It's not like with domain names where some bytes are floating around in networks and it's easiest if we all use the US addressing system.

There are ≈ 40 hunks of metals up in space with extremely precise clocks, _completely_ essential to the functioning of the GPS system, owned by the US, sent into space by the US.

Just because we leech on their satellites doesn't lower the "exclusivity" of the ownership by the US. Which is also probably why all the other big players (Russia/China/EU) are doing their own GNSS.

No, you have this all backwards. Let's take a hypothetical country -- Fredonia with it's Fredonian Franc. The government of Fredonia decides "I want to be a global reserve currency!". How would they go about accomplishing that?

First, let's define what it means to be a global reserve currency. What it means is that other reserve banks use your currency as their reserve. That means other reserve banks need to accumulate Fredonian Francs, and in large amounts.

Of course banks don't warehouse currencies, they would be holding Fredonian Government Bonds (FGB), which must be bought with Fredonian Francs. So how would they get their hands on large numbers of FGBs? By running trade surpluses against Fredonia.

In other words, to be a reserve currency means you have to allow the rest of the world to run large trade surpluses against you, which means you have to allow your currency to be permanently overvalued relative to the rest of the world -- relative to what it would be valued if there was no global investment demand for Fredonian Francs.

Now, all of a sudden, it's not looking like such a great proposition for the Fredonians, as this means that their own production is disadvantaged in global markets more or less permanently and their financial system has to be huge and swollen. It distorts the Fredonian economy and hurts workers. That would require a very resilient economy and a population willing to tolerate the employment hit to running persistent trade deficits vis-a-vis the rest of the world.

Next, Fredonia would need to develop deep and liquid capital markets, so that the rest of the world would be confident in storing their wealth there. That means a long tradition of rule of law, large turnover at low prices, and huge bond markets. Big enough to absorb the surplus of the entire world. It also means that your interest rates are going to be permanently lower than they would be if there was no excess global demand for FGBs. This means your economy is going to be subject to asset bubbles and financialization -- we're talking huge bond markets that risk dominating the country.

So the economy of Fredonia has to be big, be investor friendly, have strong property protections and rule of law, a grotesquely bloated and powerful bond market, and be willing to run permanent trade deficits vis-a-vis the rest of the world.

Not many nations qualify on all of these accounts, right? China is big enough, but no rule of law, and since their entire economy is based on running trade surpluses instead of trade deficits, they are suited to be the accumulator of global reserves rather than the issuer of global reserves. Saudi Arabia? Nope. The EU? Nope. Simply no one else is both able and willing to pay the price to be a global reserve currency, and that's why it's going to remain the USD. Not only is this not a "fickle" thing, the rest of the world should be grateful that the US is willing to sacrifice the interests of its own workers and production base in order to make sure the rest of the world has a steady supply of USG bonds.

Rather, the real question is how long will the US be willing to bear this burden? When the US was 40% of global GDP, and global trade was tiny relative to global GDP, it didn't seem like a very big burden. But today, when the US economy doesn't dominate the rest of the world and trade is huge, the price of being a global reserve currency is devastating. It means de-industrialization, collapsing cities in the rust belt, rising death rates and a shrinking US middle class, as well as rising Federal deficits.

I can very easily see a future in which the US starts imposing more and more capital controls that prevent foreigners from purchasing dollar assets similar to protections that other nations have, at which point guess what -- there will be no global reserve currency. The free ride, for the rest of the world's producers, will be over.

Trade agreements will need to go back to being settled either bilaterally, or with some kind of specie (gold? silver? bitcoin?). This would be a great thing in some respects, because it would force each nation to not overproduce, but it would cause a huge contraction in international trade, corresponding to a contraction in global GDP and well being, and especially to those economies that rely on running persistent trade surpluses in order to employ their workers -- nations such as Germany, China, Japan will take big hits should they lose the ability to persistently run surpluses.

What you should have brought up, really, is the UN. The US pays for most of what is effectively a common good, because it derives prestige, influence, and material advantages (indirect control of a huge chunk of diplomatic communications, tons of money from workers and diplomats stationed there, etc etc) from hosting it.

And sure enough, the UN has a specialized agency that would have been the natural destination for a global communication service: the ITU. Sadly, the ITU is (in)famed for being a political clusterf#ck, so a choice was made by the Clinton/Gingrich generation of US politicians to keep the internet well away from it. That might have been a wise choice at the time, but we've since seen the drawbacks of that choice: instead of getting captured by known evils with some (small) degree of accountability, dns was captured by a bunch of new evils that answer to no one. That way lies oligarchy, as Russia showed in the last 30 years.

If another World War breaks out, or major conflict that the military deemed necessary they can and will cut off all Cilivian access to the GPS Network

This is why Russia has its own, and China is in the process of Deploying its own, and the EU has considered deploying their own as well.

First of all, phone numbers were pretty short, and were chunked and thus pretty easy for humans to memorize. Do you think the average human will be able to memorize a bunch of onion addresses?

Second, even with phone numbers, companies used the corresponding characters to the digits to create human readable names, for example 1-800-FLOWERS

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.