ICANN board withholds consent for a change of control of the .org registry
icann.org
icann.org
https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/correspondence/ca-ago-...
"If PIR is able to provide additional information that resolves the concerns raised by the Board, PIR remains able to re-submit or initiate a new Change of Control Request."
That's how they concluded, leaving the door open if they can manage to get past this hurdle.
One of the subtle checks & balances in our system is that we don't even want prosecution to literally go after every crime... we want them to choose the things that are actually important. There's a lot of things labeled "crimes" today where the cost of enforcement greatly exceeds any value to society of that enforcement.
(Expanding on that, one of the biggest problems, if not the biggest problem, with automated crime enforcement is that it removes this check & balance that almost nobody has even realized exists yet.)
That said, I will still take "biased human picking what to prosecute" over "a prosecution sufficiently funded to prosecute literally everything". I mean, sure, I'd prefer "real justice", but "biased human" is still constrained in their actions and has to produce enough results useful to society to be able to hide their corruption in, whereas totally perfect enforcement would be a nightmare.
The world is made of individuals and groups with biases, and as long as they have even the tiniest amount of power, those biases cannot be removed from the process.
My point is that locking "improved funding" to "improved legislation" is impossibly without a way to usefully measure improvements in legislation. Improving funding has a few ways to measure it, but in the discussion we've been having I took improved to mean "more". As for legislation, I don't think we want more legislation, but any measurement is rife with problems. As a simple example, legislation if perpetual until changed (or created with an expiration), and laws created today with a beneficial effect may have a deleterious effect years or decades from now. Examples of this are abundant, such as patent and copyright laws not dealing with the nuance of the digital age, to privacy laws not taking into effect the ability to store everything that happens in a way that can be indexed and accessed because of computers.
A moderately good law today may become a real problem tomorrow. Given that, how do we measure legislation when the effect time is essentially unbounded?
you'd instead be giving police the freed time and resources to both investigate real cromes like murder, theft and corruption, and also commit to community policing around observing, teaching and encouraging good civic behavior, rather than writing pointless jaywalking tickets.
I.e., a legal system where the "choosing" of which cases to go after, is somehow built into the letter of the law (maybe with a high bar in the indictment process?), such that everything that is illegal by the letter of the law is something necessary to go after (the societal equivalent of a showstopping bug—serial killers, for example), rather than just a "nice-to-have" that could be indefinitely deprioritized.
a) Stop electing people whose platform is "tough on crime." These people come in with a mandate to do nothing but increase the number of cases on dockets and the numbers of years on sentences, both of which are extremely harmful to both the crim justice system and to society at large. This is why I would come into court every single day with an average of 6-8 trials scheduled (yes, every day), with some days bringing 14+. So what do you do with that? Well, you overcharge so you can plea them down. That's not justice. It's also why I was forced by the hand of the law to send a 20 year old with no priors to prison for 5 years after he was pressed into selling weed by the local gang and a gun was found in his room near the drugs. Someone wanted to appear tough on guns, so if a gun's found anywhere near drugs w/ intent to distribute, automatic 5 years. He was a good kid who made a mistake, his parents were crying and begging the court for mercy, his young sisters were in the back sobbing, and I had to stand there and be the representative of that law. One of the most shameful experiences of my life, and one of the things that directly led to me resigning.
b) Be okay with paying taxes. I can't even tell you the number of times every single week I would hear civilians in the courtroom complaining about how long they were stuck there. "This is where our tax dollars go??" Actually, this is where your tax dollars don't go, because there isn't enough of them to go around, so my office is stuck paying law school graduates with high loan burdens under $40k per year, and then burning them out in < 2 years because the case loads are so high.
I don't mean too sound harsh, but - the idea that other states should be funding another state's AG dept is frankly kind of ludicrous, it's not like it's a charity or nonprofit or something. The case volume they have is a direct result from the political forces at play in that state; that's true for any state. If they want more resources per case, they should lower the number of cases. That starts with the AG himself but includes the rest of the state-level government and the citizens making voting decisions.
Also, another question: how could you have 6 trials scheduled on the same day? Does that mean you had to be in 6 places at once, presented 6 cases to 6 juries? How does that even work?
States pay the Pennsylvania Dept. of Food to regulate their food, and Pennsylvania has many bread and food companies. How are AGs and regulators different?
There are a number of factors at play here:
Sometimes, I'm not aware of the issue
I don't know if the offending party is amenable at any level to changing their mind
I don't know if something is possibly against the law (e.g. I didn't know the AG had a say until I say this post)
I don't know if the authorities or avenues of dissent that I have access to have any jurisdiction over or effect on the offending party
I often have very little insight into how others feel about the issue.
I don't know how much work needs to be done to shift proceedings (e.g. how many people need to contact the AG for them to change their priorities)
I don't know at what level I need to focus my efforts on (e.g. community, corporate, federal, ngo, etc.)
Everything is scattered all around the place.
For example, I saw this good idea in another HN post: "Would it be so hard to use less packaging on foods, especially snacks?". I have an opinion on this, but I don't know how to effectively voice it.
Is there an existing system, or can we make a better system to most effectively turn our opinions on the matter into action?
Find an organization that already exists and get involved in it. If one doesn't exist, create one.
For packaging, you'd have a few potential avenues: 1. Work to build support politically. Even small groups of 30-40 people (or smaller) are very attractive for local politicians to meet and speak with. 2. Reach out to companies directly. 3. Get earned media (possibly in conjunction with 1 or 2).
If you have small, achievable, reasonable goals, then it may even be a win-win scenario for all of the above, which makes it easier to make progress. For example, you could have a campaign goal of reducing x% of packaging to reduce y tons of waste.
It could be positive media attention for a company to say they've worked with a group like yours (or a small local company!) to reduce packaging and help save the environment (and it may even save the company money).
Finding ways for everyone to win and creating a big tent (as opposed to trying to influence by vilifying) tends to be more successful, in my experience.
If that's just too wild to consider, it probably also looks good come next election.
Maybe, but probably not in this case.
The idea being put forward here is the AG's actions had "it's nothing to do with those lazy petitions" and other kinds of activism. That's clearly false. There are literally millions of good causes and issues, and no one just wakes up and decides to help one in particular. They need to learn information about both the problem and the action, and that information needs to be brought to their attention. For instance, it's almost certain there's something like a charity that you'd certainly give money to, but you don't because you're totally ignorant of it. It'll take a news article, a conversation with a friend, etc. to bring it to your attention, first.
Petitions and activism are, among other things, ways of steering the attention of those in power. I doubt the AG would have taken action independently unless his attention has been so steered. Organizations like ICANN are not of perennial law enforcement interest.
It's likely false, because I'm sure it had something to do with those petitions even if a very small amount, but there are many other possible reasons it could have become a priority to an AG. It's not either the petitions or he did it out of the goodness of his heart.
But my point wasn't to imply he did it because he's a good guy, but to point out he's a regular person with myriad motivations which likely includes doing what he thinks is the right thing in the calculation of what to do. There's no reason to assume that just because someone holds public office they're entirely self-serving. People are more complicated than that.
Good people give food to homeless because they see value in doing so, not because they fear repercussions from public opinion.
That someone has to present themselves as a non-sleazy person with non-sleazy plans to get elected, and if they do something different once elected or otherwise do something the voters recognize as super sleazy, they won't get re-elected. So a person in an elected position is responsive to public opinion, or does not remain elected.
Whether it's working out so well for us in the USA, I dunno.
they're selling domain names, not running an oil major or large defence contractor
Other than your cynicism about the effectiveness of petitioning for redress, why do you think this is true?
What in Becerra's background makes you think he's angling for a revolving-door job?
Other than you showing us that you "know" how the "game" is played, what can you back this view up with? Something seems lazy here, and it isn't the people writing letters.
The WSJ editorial board had an Op-ed about this[0], and tried very hard to make it seem like it was an overreach by the AG and it was vital that ICANN go through with this. I was honestly surprised, they're generally level-headed and while they do side with wall street over main street they don't make fallacious arguments.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/working-the-webs-referees-11588...
As to myself, I have first hand knowledge they were there; I talked to some of them face to face at some of the ICANN meetings. Anyone can attend most ICANN meetings, they are open and public.
This isn't just one company or one side of partisan MSM. NYT lied about WMDs in Iraq repeatedly, WaPo lied about a Russian hack of critical US power infrastructure and CNN struggles to tell the truth when telling you the time of day.
Which of the names that I've just mentioned hasn't made huge, glaring journalistic errors repeatedly?
Even throw in the self-described 'neutral' outlets like NPR, Associated Press and others and you see the same thing. Repeated lies, walkbacks and egregious errors.
I don't know why any person would apologize for corporate media.
When Washington Post falsely claims the Russians hacked into critical US energy infrastructure, this isn't a harmless typo or a flubbed detail.
When the New York Times repeatedly lies about WMDs in Iraq and tens of thousands of people die, this isn't a harmless typo or a flubbed detail.
Those are the obvious ones, the most egregious behavior is what they don't report on or cover up.
If the internet wasn't around to fact check the lies of mainstream media in real-time, imagine what they'd be getting away with.
Why do you think they're deserving of your defense? Their actions are neither harmless nor accidental. These aren't innocent mistakes.
These are recent examples. If you go back further, the same news outlets were repeating CIA propaganda via Operation Mockingbird and other efforts.
> If the internet wasn't around to fact check the lies of mainstream media in real-time, imagine what they'd be getting away with.
Wasn't there a phrase, "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet"? What if you listen to fact-checkers who themselves cherry-pick and distort? How would you know?
With all that said, there are serious flaws with how news is distributed which can make these human characteristics more pronounced (and I suspect our opinions of the so-called "mainstream media" are actually more similar than they are different), and that we generally ought to use the news to point us toward actual primary sources we can review for ourselves, rather than use the news as a source of anger-pornography (which gets tons of clicks) to bolster our misguided opinions.
As a consumer of sources of information, I'm just trying to make decisions based upon a tiny fraction of an extremely limited amount of information we know about the world around us (which I'd argue the vast majority of what we read isn't particularly helpful).
So what I'm getting at is that I feel that your tone is far too generalized to really be meaningful in any sense.
(I apologize if that sounds harsh)
The rest of planet agrees with me. News media is very untrusted (last I read it's somewhere around 60% untrustworthy), and the industry is rapidly dying.
Faced with impending doom, the journalists at the helm of those corporate monstrosities sought to double down on lies and clickbait. Open up the Network tab on any news website these days and you'll see all the tracking and advertising garbage they've resorted to as well.
By reading news, you're supporting this behavior and also (statistically speaking) doing yourself harm in the process.
Of course it's unhealthy to consume an unhealthy amount of worthless news, but that's tautological.
I'll also note that 60% of the planet is not "the rest of the planet", and I'd bet that a large chunk of the 60% you reference merely believe that their "news sources" (I'm using this term very loosely here, such as sketchy blog posts, so-called alt-news sources, and 4-chan memes) are more reliable than the news sources they don't like. Similar to how, say... the body of Congress is the least popular branch of the U.S. government year after year, yet people reelect their Congressperson year after year because they don't necessarily hold the same opinion of their Congressperson. It's hard for me to really tease anything meaningful out of your second paragraph.
The journalism industry is not "rapidly dying", it's rapidly changing, as with most industries over the past few decades. Unfortunately it's going down the path of shitty clickbait, but shitty clickbait isn't exclusive to the mainstream media.
I believe the real tragedy isn't the existence/worsening of so-called mainstream media, but rather the growing focus on national/international news at the expense of strong impactful local journalism.
I'm curious to hear about your solutions to these problems, as well as where you go to get informed.
There exist study (I would guess multiple) on the media landscape and which news company leans where and how. Some media companies are explicitly leaning in one direction, others less so. Some claim neutrality, and the study do support the existence of a very small minority that seems to achieve it. It is a subject I would like to see a meta study on in order to get a good estimate on how small the narrow band are of news sources that supply political neutral news.
Such travesties as: Perfect market theory, Chicago School/ dry economics, ignoring the negative effects of monopolies/ short-term extractive capitalism.
I know they used to be "reputable" but. Today large parts of America are a crumbling trashcan. Where is their acknowledgement of this problem, and how capitalism should solve it?
I would recommend The Economist as a factually-based business & economics subscription.
To put it lightly. That stance defines it:
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2019/11/how-econo...
The canned collection of TLDs should have been abolished years ago, but when it looked like ICANN was going to do it and allow arbitrary TLDs, they turned it into a gargantuan rip-off and sham.
I can't read the WSJ article because paywall but there appears to be an effort pushing the narrative that ICANN has to remain independent. On CircleID there are 3 articles (and 1 comment reply 11 minutes after the article was published) by VeriSign affiliated/PIR affiliated folks. The comment is a reply to a former VeriSign lobbyist by active VeriSign lobbyist. I can't prove anything, but it's definitely suspicious that there seems to be a lot of VeriSign connected folks who were trying to stop this deal. Oversight is perhaps the biggest threat to their golden goose. I wrote about it here https://reviewsignal.com/blog/2020/05/01/reflecting-on-org-s...
The WSJ hiding behind the editorial board making an this exact argument seems suspect. Their coverage was non existent and became not great once they did write about it. There are actual investigative journalists covering the issue with thought and depth. Kieran McCarthy at The Register, Timothy Lee at Ars Technica and more recently David Kaut at The Capitol Forum.
Prepare for a lot more articles like this one though and think about who stands to gain the most from them. It's always about the money.
The opinion section, by contrast, is batshit insane.
It’s an important distinction.
If you're trusting any corporate media to tell you balanced truth they're either lying to you and you don't realize it, or they're lying by omission (very common in MSM).
Even the Associated Press has made some pretty egregious errors triggering retractions or walkbacks, especially in the last few years.
Which corporate news outlet doesn't have a history of egregious lies and errors?
It really is like there are multiple realities.
But luckily enough, CNN and Fox are both more irrelevant than ever. There's a reason no young people watch. Young people get news from YouTube, Snapchat and other new media sources from people they trust.
What world do you live in where the internet exists outside the economy? What economy do you participate in that is not subject to cronyism? How could this be astounding?
It's people inside ICANN abusing their position to strip ICANN and the web of things worth a lot of money for their own benefit.
It's impossible to completely fix, but there are a few ways to slow down the rot, for example:
1. Require extreme transparency (where possible)
2. Make decision-making difficult enough that everyone complains about how slow and indecisive the body is
3. Structure the administrators' roles and remuneration so that they have long term rather than short term financial incentives.
4. Don't offer large salaries to anyone. The role shouldn't attract people who care about salaries, even if it means you don't attract the "best talent". That "best talent" was probably going to wreck the organisation anyway.
- Define the long-term goals of an organisation explicitly.
- Interpret these narrowly.
- Give stakeholders a vote, both in the election of officials and on certain topics.
I would argue that there exist (hundreds of) thousands of usually small, non-profit organisations that are run pretty efficiently. I think of pretty much all of the social and sport clubs for adults and kids I know of. A lot of interpersonal drama, but also countless of volunteers and people just working for their local community organised by their hobbies. So there's something about scale and dissociation with the original goals going on.
Is this necessarily the right move? I have a vague recollection of reading about Singapore and their approach to attaining top talent to the public sector with high wages. I could be totally wrong!
You want people who don't need to play the game and buddy up to people if they want to improve their lot. You don't want people who see the role as a stepping stone to "better things".
That this decision was made in the first place, and that ICANN took so long to withhold consent, shows that there are not enough stewards in either organization.
Holding meetings in far flung and hard to get to places was one tactic
1. High bar to get a job.
2. Modest, but livable salary.
3. Long-term job stability.
This guarantees you don't really need to worry about money (unless you're super-greedy), but at the same time, no one was in it for the money. It broke when elite university compensation went astronomical ($1 million plus at the top-end), and job stability went away (no reasonable paths to tenure, and lots of adjunct / postdoc / research scientists / etc. positions).
With competition, the easiest way to land a tenured job is to lie and cheat. With high compensation, there are all the wrong reasons to do it. As a result, several elite schools are now cesspools of corruptions, academic misconduct, and (most legal but unethical) embezzlement.
We should go back to where:
* Jobs are stable
* Salaries are modest, but cover food+housing+basic essentials
* Benefits are strong
I'd say something similar is true for other not-for-profits. There are tons of exceptionally smart, competent, caring people who want jobs which provide meaning and have a positive impact on the world. To take them, they want to be able to feed their families. To stay there, you don't need to guarantee high income, so much as high stability.
over the millenia we've developed mechanisms like the division of power (checks & balances) for governments and the board system for corporations.
what I want to say with this is that if organizational stewardship is not working, it's most likely a flaw in the structure of the system (and/or the processes), and my instinct would tell me to investigate if the right amount & scrutiny in terms of checks & balances is in place.
I think we should investigate the scope of power instead of your proposed scale of power.
This seems counterproductive to me. If you don't pay people enough that they're worried about losing the position then they're incentivized to try and monetize whatever power they have, leading to corruption.
Aligning incentives with goals is wise, but it's hard to do perfectly. Humans are still human.
I don't know, it just doesn't feel like there's a ton of risk of "non-profit board member" becoming the next gold-rush degree track.
> This seems counterproductive to me. If you don't pay people enough that they're worried about losing the position then they're incentivized to try and monetize whatever power they have, leading to corruption.
No, I think the idea is to offer something comfortable but not so large salary would attract people by itslef. You want to discourage the people who "try and monetize whatever power they have" from joining, and reduce the barriers to joining for people who aren't driven by greed.
“In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”
It seems that HN wants to help them with that. There isn't a single name in this entire thread.
Why aren't we talking about the board members here? Why aren't we using their real names so that they can be personally held responsible for their decisions?
Andrew Sullivan is the guy you want, though. He's the one pushing this deal.
> It was for this reason that the board voted unanimously to approve the deal (aside from one trustee who is recused from PIR matters).
https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2019/12/the-sale-of-pir...
That would certainly work in the short term.
In the long term however, wouldn't the EFF become a magnet for the types of people currently populating the ICANN board? They see that there is an opportunity there. So I worry that the long term effect would be to ruin the EFF as it is slowly overrun by opportunist that do not care about the core mission.
Not sure what a good long term solution is however.
The ISOC, while they proudly proclaim 67K members, is an organization with largely silent/inactive members (aside from lobbyists), most of whom probably forgot by now that they are members at all - or at least that's what it seems to be from my perspective.
The EFF (or even mozilla) on the other hand have more active members, and it would be harder to do a (slow-moving) hostile takeover. Of course, everything can be undermined and taken over, as the ISOC shows. However, the ISOC seems "burned" at this point where it would be extremely hard to rebuild and recover, while the EFF e.g. is still functional and it would be easier to keep it from deteriorating in the first place than trying to undo damage already done.
I was about to start ranting about Google, but it appears that they are now allowing public .dev registrations through registrars. I don't know when that changed.
It's a poorly reasoned piece where he won't even accept basic facts when called out on them.
Instead of moving .org. There need to be some accountiblty and/or leadership change inside of ISOC
The Cooperative Corporation of dot-org Registrants (CCOR)
The way this sailed through, it had to have insider influence. How dod this deal glide through ICANN (prior to its announcement)? Who made the decision to approve it? What paper trail is there?
As much as I'm glad this deal was killed, we shouldn't stop here. Let's weed out and hold to account the weak, inept and corrupt who allowed this to go this far.
The problem is systemic.
I hope this serves as a wake-up call to everyone who got scared by this.
It's like asking whether you'd prefer your landlord to have a national monopoly on land. (No.)
Having different problems in different places is actually preferable to having the same problems everywhere, because different problems affect different people differently. It gives people choice. If you don't like San Francisco, move to Austin, or New York, or Miami. Whereas if a central authority makes a rule you can't live under there is nowhere to hide.
And even if you stay where you are, it gives you more of a voice, because you aren't being diluted by a constituency so large you can never be heard.
You mean like moving from .org domain to something else?
The whole point is that certain resources (like gTLD) are global in nature.
Consider the alternative -- corruption at ICANN where they sell the root to a private company. Then what are you going to do, move from DNS whatsoever?
> The whole point is that certain resources (like gTLD) are global in nature.
It's only "global" in the sense that its jurisdictional boundaries are administrative rather than regional. The .org gTLD is operated by different people than the .com gTLD.
If housing costs were lower, more people would be able to move to the bay area and take advantage of the incredible wealth creation and job opportunities available.
I wouldn't be shocked if the bay areas housing policies were responsible for the loss of 1 percent of GDP growth every year in this county.
- My landlord and my city are both subject to laws from a national government, and if they're egregiously misbehaving, the national government can step in, but they usually don't.
- If I switch landlords, let alone cities, my address changes.
- I can choose a landlord and to a lesser extent a city by reputation, but I might end up choosing a city because it's where I want to be for business etc. reasons, even if I disagree with its leadership choices
- I have limited ability to influence my city's decision-making and essentially no ability to influence my nation's decision-making, but it's not unheard of.
Which all seems very similar to having a choice of registrar, limited choice of TLD/registry, no choice in ICANN, the theoretical (and occasionally practical, as in this case) ability to influence ICANN, and the ability to change registrars and TLDs if I like - as long as I'm okay changing addresses.
On the other hand, your city is also subject to its constituents, who care more about what happens there than people in the nation's capital do, so you already have a mechanism to hold them to account when they misbehave. (And the city has jurisdiction over the local landlords.)
Meanwhile, what do you do if the national government is doing something that ruins your life, but there aren't enough similarly situated people to get them to stop? If it was only a city you could at least move.
> if I switch landlords, let alone cities, my address changes
This is costly. It could still be less costly than having nowhere to hide from policies that cause you significant harm, which makes the availability of that option very valuable.
> I can choose a landlord and to a lesser extent a city by reputation, but I might end up choosing a city because it's where I want to be for business etc. reasons, even if I disagree with its leadership choices
It's all trade offs. If you really want to be there for business reasons and mildly dislike their policies then you might go there anyway. If there are minor business reasons they're preferable but their policies make your life unlivable you might go somewhere else. This is still better than having the unlivable policies imposed nationally, whereupon you would choose your location for business reasons (because the ruinous policy is everywhere), but still have a worse life than having to move to avoid bad policies, because then you'd at least have actually avoided them.
> I have limited ability to influence my city's decision-making and essentially no ability to influence my nation's decision-making, but it's not unheard of
It's not a binary matter of impossibility, it's a matter of difficulty level. Getting your city to do something is a lot easier than getting your whole country to do it, and they're more likely to be receptive to local problems because a larger percentage of their constituents are affected by them.
> Which all seems very similar to having a choice of registrar, limited choice of TLD/registry, no choice in ICANN, the theoretical (and practical, in this case) ability to influence ICANN, and the ability to change registrars and TLDs if I like.
It's not the wrong analogy, the question is how much (if any) of the authority actually has to be in ICANN. You could in theory give them no power at all, or have them not exist, and rest control of each gTLD entirely with its respective registrar.
I could even turn it around and say that the problem here is that the .org registry is itself too centralized and once it delegates a name to someone it should cease to be under the registrar's control and become permanently under the control of the domain owner, so that who owns .org would only matter to new registrants and not existing ones who already have their delegations.
Neither of your proposed replacement systems seem like they'd make things overall better with regards to the actual concerns of .org domain name owners.
> My landlord and my city are both subject to laws from a national government, and if they're egregiously misbehaving, the national government can step in, but they usually don't.
It looks like a bait-and-switch by trying to perform some comparison to a non-centralized authority while invoking it (using the odd "national government" phrase) in the same breath.
> The fact that the central authority made the right call in this instance doesn’t ultimately mean that the central authority isn’t still dangerous.
> I hope this serves as a wake-up call to everyone who got scared by this.
In this comment, "central authority" means ICANN, who has oversight over registry operations, not the .org registry themselves.
I am reading this comment as saying that the very idea of having a centralized authority like ICANN is dangerous and we need something else (like a blockchain or whatever). I am claiming that it's fine because the alternatives are all worse.
The next comment tried to say, well, in the case of physical housing, your landlord or city doesn't have total control. But the landlord or city is not in the place of the "central authority" here - they are analogous to a registrar or registry. In the same way that my national government is flawed but better than not having one, ICANN is flawed but better than not having it.
It's always nice to have options by being able to deal with multiple people... except when a given issue becomes a tragedy of the commons or some other kind of coordination problem, at which point you really want to have a single superior authority above the ones you were dealing with. This applies recursively. So you want to have one city authority, but many cities; one county authority, but many counties; one state authority, but many states; one country authority, but many countries...
Alternatives like Handshake [1] move the root zone to a blockchain as a root of trust avoiding any centralized control and is currently used by many [2].
[2] https://dns.live
There are also legitimate concerns with many distributed techniques in terms of domain squatting that need to be addressed.
I'm not trying to discourage you from creating your own system to try to solve these issues, or support one you think is close. I do find it a bit insulting that you just seem to assume that this problem has never been tackled before.
I’m simply serving as a reminder that they’re important despite being hard, and that we should not be dissuaded by their difficulty: the danger is real.
> I do find it a bit insulting that you just seem to assume that this problem has never been tackled before.
Please try to assume good faith before you assume bad faith.
I'd argue that building a system that a computer illiterate person can use is a technical challenge. it's a constraint on the design and architecture of the system.
Why are you sure if you don't know?
Anyway, I mentioned some on my original post. There are ways, but so far there have been tradeoffs in terms of ease of gaming or transaction volume. Blockchains aren't magic and have their own trade offs. That said I'm always interested to read about new systems working to mitigate those.
Reading only a little about handshake, I haven't yet seen anything that nudges me otherwise. Blockchains also make having light clients very difficult or otherwise they need to use another service tondo the heavy lifting. There are some references that handshake doesn't, so I'm interested to read further.
This part from https://handshake.org/files/handshake.txt does concern me, though:
> The Handshake project aims to distribute around 70% of the coin supply to open source developers, projects, and non-profits without any contractual expectation of work by the individual free and open source developers.
I do agree with what you wrote about the tradeoffs with the current solutions, but those are tractable problems, I believe.
Awww shucks. They're pissed ICANN realised they might not get away with this one so played it safe this time around.
> This decision will suffocate innovation and deter future investment in the domain industry.
I'm sure we'll really miss the lack of innovation in registering a damn domain name.
I expect that the fallout from this will also be that the current board of ISOC gets replaced. But maybe that's too much to hope for.
I found the lack of engagement prior to the transaction truly shocking. I understand some of the reasons, even if I disagree with them: I think the ISOC board did not breach the law. But I do think they broke an implicit social contract.
The thing is: there is a downside. This was going to create a large abiding fund for ISOC. It was going to create something of real world value. Alibeit at the expense of some principle but there is now a consequence, something which might have been good won't happen directly, or as quickly.
I also think its premature to assume some kind of sale or change in PIR/.org will not actually still happen: they just have to do more work. And, probably, for lower $value since its no longer as simple. (I don't think in the current economic climate the price will be as good)
This was their argument the whole time, but it seems incredibly weak. The money from the sale was presumably the net present value of the future domain revenue (minus whatever losses from the apparent self-dealing). If they were going to keep it as an endowment and only spend the interest so that it wouldn't run out over time then it wouldn't be anything more than the revenue they already had.
Whereas if they were going to spend it all at once then it seems a lot like mortgaging the future. On top of that, if they really wanted to do that then they didn't need to sell the registry -- just take out a loan. Interest rates are super low right now.
If the thing they wanted to do with the money wasn't so pressing that it could justify borrowing money to do it immediately instead of letting the money come in over time then it couldn't have been so pressing as to justify the sale either.
So I sort-of agree and disagree. It wasn't really a huge windfall outcome, viewed as a perpetuating fund. But it was a huge structural change for ISOC, and very possibly the IETF too.
I was led to believe moving to a trust with oversight of a fund is different, and more beneficial as a perpetuating entity. And, Org and PIR relates to the status of Verisign and COM and also places ISOC in a relationship with ICANN which I suspect was irksome, because in so many other senses ISOC felt it was not subject to ICANN direction but actually one of the peer-set.
If I had been on the board, and a well structured proposal had been put to me to do this, I truly don't know what I would have said. My instinct is: this should be discussed publicly and we should get community consensus, but I could imagine other pressures/tensions emerged.
Interesting. Who's telling you that?
It speaks to me, that ISOC decided not to explore that and then went single-buyer, NDA+Lawyers.
Wonder if there's an appeals process in place.
.org domain names are safe from the corporate raider sharks
for now
[1] https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/correspondence/becerra...
The gist is the DNS model is broken.
(You could have googled this.)
It's not like .org lives in a bubble. There are many other TLDs that they have to compete with on price.
Capitalism + the underpinnings of the Internet don’t exactly play well together (hence the need for clearly defined net neutrality codified by law). And arbitrarily raising prices on already existing domains registered by people and non-profits who bought in when there were rules in place about such prices is actually wrong.
Likewise whoever wrote this false statement on Wikipedia: "The domain [sic] was originally intended for non-profit entities, but this restriction was removed in August 2019."
In fact registration under .ORG has been unrestricted for most of its existence, even before it was taken over by PIR around 20 years ago.
The complaints about potential price rises are also totally bizarre when .ORG has been for years one of the most overpriced and price hiked extensions, significantly more expensive than .COM, and popular country code TLDs like .uk, .nl, .de.
The "non-profit" aspect is a total red herring.
.ORG has been more expensive than .COM lately because of price increases and the fact ICANN uncapped them was a major concern. Which is what sparked this whole saga, and opportunity for an uncapped monopoly which would disproportionately affect non profit users of the internet.
The non profit aspect plays a major role in this.
Fact: .ORG - like virtually every other extension - has been the home of anyone who wants to register it for decades (two), even prior to the establishment of PIR in 2003.
It was specifically intended for non-profits a generation ago, for a relatively brief 10-15 year period, during most of which relatively few people were online, relatively few websites existed and relatively few .ORGs were registered.
For the past 20 years, a period when millions of .ORGs have been registered, there has been nothing special about .ORG other than its grossly inflating price, which has been continuously jacked up for more than a decade.
Any non-profit genuinely concerned about watching the pennies would have shifted to a different extension years ago, but is it supposed to be a comfort for .ORG owners who don't want to give up a name (like myself), that the people screwing us over call themselves "not-for-profit"?
Who cares who's doing it, other than the people suddenly complaining because a for profit company might become involved in a money printing exercise.