Why ISOC sold .ORG to VCs
easydns.com
easydns.com
Maybe I'm wrong to consider this a zero-sum game, but surely if ISOC made a good deal selling .org that means that Ethos Capital got the short end of the stick. That means that eventually they'll realize that they can't make as much money out of it as they had hoped. And then what will they do? Agree to continue operating the TLD at a loss? ell oh ell. It's more likely that they'll either attempt to extort more money from people who can't actually afford to migrate or "strip" the TLD for parts somehow.
On the other hand if ISOC bet on the wrong horse they've lost the Goose that Laid Golden Eggs, and they'll be in a worse position to help the open web. From the point of view of people believing in the ethos (ha!) of what .org is supposed to stand for, it seems like a lose/lose situation.
I still don't really think it made sense to greenlight that deal for purely monetary reasons, I think the people on that board lost track of their objective, which I think is what the author acknowledges in part in his conclusion.
The field of economics, and pretty much all monetary transactions, are about demonstrating that sales (and thus wealth) are not a zero-sum game. Whether that’s true for any particular case, such as this one, can be debated forever still, just often not based simply on that assumption.
Yes, a good chunk of them are really negative-sum games, once you include all secondary stakeholders in the calculations.
Link: https://vimeo.com/377655043
The only voice of reason was at the tail end of the video where someone voiced: it is all very good and well to talk about assurance and promises and future guarantees, the problem is we have a conflicting timeline and effectively what we've been presented with is we're being asked to accept the deal on the basis that our concerns will be dealt with, and I don't think it is reasonable and would like to ask that Ethos and ISOC and so on consider simply delaying it long enough to put in place the binding commitments they are clearly willing to undertake before we finalise the deal rather than the other way around.
I raised a similar question but rather asked why they couldn't delay the deal to allow for community and public scrutiny and why everything has to be rushed. I got a response from someone saying the deal is dead in the water if it isn't done by April 1st next year.
> Maybe I'm wrong to consider this a zero-sum game, but surely if ISOC made a good deal selling .org that means that Ethos Capital got the short end of the stick
Lots of transactions like this aren't zero sum. ISOC gets everything they want to continue their mission forever and escapes a major source of uncertainty/risk. Ethos Capital gets an asset for less than its expected value and tries to leverage the risk to make it worth more.
If they have the option of 'stripping' the TLD for cash, do you think they'd ever decline to do this?
The flip side is the implication (and I hope I read this correctly) is that a bunch of smart but possibly ethically challenged individuals infiltrated ISOC (a non profit) in order to create investment opportunities for themselves down the road.
- That ISOC was reasonably justified in taking a lump sum rather than operating a registry.
- That the sale of the registry was corrupt and not in the public's best interest.
Today they sell .org claiming it’s not forever. Tomorrow they’ll be doing an IPO claiming it’ll be around for eternity.
Why wouldn't it? .org is one of the most well-known TLDs, and I see know reason why there would be an exodus away from it (well, apart from this sale itself!) - it's as sure a thing as there can be.
I don't know what a good answer is. From the user perspective it'll likely look more like a search. but technically? Honestly it could remain DNS just abstract away from the TLDs to make them not mean as much.
At least that's my opinion.
> The Project Sponsors received a minority participation (7.5%) of HNS in the interest of aligning all stakeholders, including industry. All of the 10.2MM USD collected from Project Sponsors (Funds and Individuals) will be given to Free and Open Source Software projects.
The rest was all airdropped in an attempt to get wide distribution / get it in the hands of as many users as possible.
The pattern for these projects is pretty predictable: Promise amazing things from a technical project associated with a cryptocurrency token. Premine a bunch of those tokens and give them to insiders, then airdrop the token to create a market. The insiders sell off their tokens, and the project is forgotten.
DNS is a rotten system. It's rotten technically, politically and administratively. It has to be replaced by something distributed. Step #1 is to collectively admit this.
Generally speaking, the underpinnings of the Internet (protocols, certain levels of infrastructure) should always and forever be public, not-for-profit, "open-source", and not patentable, in order to protect the integrity of the system. I'm no expert, so maybe a lot of it is this way already, but DNS seems to be a bastion of for-profit greed.
All of this walks hand in hand with Net Neutrality, in my view -- governance to protect what is a fundamental human right, the free (as in freedom, and to some degree, as in beer) flow of information. And in an ideal world, objectively factual information.
So first of all: the overhead for running the registry is unreasonably high. You'd expect there to be considerable room for reducing costs, so the 75M$ per year is artificially low; revenue is around 100M.
Secondly, that revenue is artificially (but reasonably!) low because the price is capped. But guess what? That price cap was just removed; so the actual price may rise considerably; certainly it is not reasonable to assume that under the terms specifically changed for the deal the revenue will stay at just 100M a year.
Thirdly, the risk of .org evaporating is pretty absurd. The cost of a domain is (and should be) pretty trivial compared to the value most people can extract from it; the fact that this is a for-profit business at all is highly questionable - it's as if your street address were owned by a third party, and you can't have anything shipped their at your cost without the acquiescence of a third party. I'm not sure anybody is seriously buying this story of .org becoming irrelevant to the point that people won't pay 10$ (+margin above wholesale) for a domain. But even if you're unsure - the very fact that a private party snapped this up is evidence to the contrary.
Fourthly, it's entirely unreasonable for ISOC to earn even a penny off of this deal. What exactly did they do to earn the right to profit of other people's valuable contributions? Right, nothing - they were just there are the right time. There's no reason they should even be an exclusive party at all, let alone one that operates with a profit motive.
Fifthly, the people involved, and the timing, stinks. If this were all above-board, it should have been public and not have been bought out by insiders almost immediately after those same people are involved in enabling the deal. It's not at all transparent what those insiders were doing, but if it's not plain old highway robbery again, perhaps some transparency would have helped.
Frankly, the whole cartel (DNS, not merely .org) should simply be dumped; there's just no reason this is private to start with, and most certainly not run with a profit motive; that's just asking to reasons to distort the far more important markets with rent-seeking behavior here. If chrome+safari were to sponsor an alternative to DNS, I'm sure the rest of the browsers would follow; e.g. by using a different protocol (not http(s)) to disambiguate, and by forking the existing (as of some fixed date) DNS domains. Good riddance to those leaches.
Anyway, supposing that it is - how do you know that's where the money went? And - how do you know the money went mostly to the same place in most universities?
This sounds like a baseless generalization.
PS - I'm not from the US.
>They find that supply factors such as wages in the education sector and state appropriations to higher education both play important roles in explaining changes in college tuition inflation. In contrast, they find little evidence that demand factors such as changes in the availability of student loans have a significant effect on college tuition.
Take a university that provides decent statistics:
http://irp.dpb.cornell.edu/university-factbook/employees
click workflow trends. The workforce composition is virtually unchanged over the past 20 years.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.30.a...
Expenditures in real per-student dollars are up, but at nothing like 7% a year. Tuition is up because of disinvestment by state legislatures:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-m...
Even there, net tuition actually paid by students at private schools is also largely flat, as while the nameplate tuition has gone up, few students pay that, as they get grants, financial aid, etc.:
https://research.collegeboard.org/trends/college-pricing/fig...
Cause & effect got obscured by compounding factors, including, but not limited to: privatizing student loans, grade inflation, ratcheting up credentials, glut of labor, artificially constraining supply, the textbook racket, the standardized testing racket, the academic publishing racket, the money chase for funding basic research, and others I'm sure I've forgotten.
Source: Worked in higher ed.
Administratively, I'm sure there's a rather enormous number of customer service requests to deal with from registrars and law enforcement/court orders. Also accounting related to the registrars.
If they were running it themselves, $25M/year seems within reason to me. Affilias can probably do it for less, because they're running a bunch of tlds, so the capital costs of operating the registry are amortizable across all of them. However, PIR could have (and should have) bid that out occasionally, so I'd guess there isn't an obscene margin here.
You also need lots of lawyers just to keep up with what's going on in ICANN (which looks a lot like a full employment scheme for lawyers, lobbyists, and policy wonks). Then they spent over $1M on marketing. It adds up.
"Web.com expressly reserves the right to deny, cancel, terminate, suspend, lock, or modify access to (or control of) any goods or services (including the right to cancel or transfer any domain name registration) for any reason (as determined by Web.com in its sole and absolute discretion."[1]
You don't have to put up with that overreach. Compare Gandi:
"You are the owner of the domain name, i.e. the individual or legal person who is declared as the owner as soon as the domain name is registered and visible as such in the "Whois" domain name directory"[2]
[1] https://assets.web.com/legal/English/TermsOfUse.pdf [2] https://contract.gandi.net/v5/contracts/18056/DomainNameCond...
Not if it's only 15x profits!! And those profits are more or less guaranteed.
Donuts, Inc, was bidding for .Web in 2016, and lost to Nu Dot. Nu Dot then sold the name to Verizon. Somehow this was unfair and they decide to sue them. ( What ? )
Had Donut got .Web, they would have floated the company and make a return of Investment. Since they lost, they figure out their next step / solution was .ORG. And the timeline in 2017 and 2018 seems to confirm that.
To quote Michael Bolton from Office Space:
Samir: Hmm… well why don't you just go by Mike instead of Michael?
Michael: No way. Why should I change? He's the one who sucks.
> Unlike the more prevalent .org domain, which is also managed by the Public Interest Registry, .ngo will require validation of the registrant's non-governmental status
ICANN owner who also owns Donuts, Inc (they own all the new TLDs .donuts, etc) buys .org from former owner (ISOC) who is also now much richer.
TLDs serve as a classification structure for various aspects of human interest, knowledge, creativity and commerce...
Where should the canonical for TLDs come from?
Should a particular interest have its own TLD, regardless of topic - how to measure when to provide a TLD -- is it scale of interested people? is it ideologically based?
As such, should there be a .dem and a .gop? if so, then should them be a .socialist? .nazi? .zionist? etc?
Some of the current TLDs are silly, to me, but what is the barrier to entry and what is the criteria for approval?
And most importantly, WHO APPROVES? Like literally - the names of the people who actually make TLDs happen?
Besides, the point is irrelevant.
When you build an online brand, you build it by having links distributed on the web, to get the Google juice going, on social media, on forums, etc. Even in business emails you add your domain there for easy reference later.
Then if you have to change the domain, all of those links will be broken.
As they say... Cool URIs don't change ;-)
And you're similarly not likely to own an ip address forever, not to mention that if you have any doubts about the userfriendliness of domains, you don't need to wonder about ip-addresses. Ip addresses are worse on all fronts; leaving you back to square one: the DNS gatekeepers own your domain and merely let you use it. Just pray they don't change the terms of that deal.
I just renewed and I've got another 10 years. Things will be sorted out by then.
Domains matter in links.
Domains matter because they name a thing. This allows us to create an expectation. This is also what certificates are based around. They certify that "The server you are talking to really has this name". This is important because names have meanings to people.