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Comment by beambot | Hacker News Reader

You know who I would trust to administer the .org TLD for long-term public good... The EFF.

I definitely agree in the short term, but having profitable assets might attract the wrong kind of people to the organisation so I don't know how I feel about it in the long term.

Surely this could be set up to redirect profits into the EFFs other work in a binding sort of way.

That's precisely how ICANN was set up, as a public benefit corporation with articles of incorporation that required it to promote "the global public interest in the operational stability of the Internet." But if you control the board, in the long term you can accomplish pretty much whatever you want. Relying on regulators to give such an organization sufficient attention isn't a good strategy; their attention is spread thin across thousands of organizations, and of course they lack domain knowledge. Though, you can leverage the threat of regulators to impede the board, much like the EFF did as a vigilant third party.

Ultimately what needs to happen is for ICANN board members to be replaced with better people; perhaps people nominated by the EFF and similar organizations. Hopefully that will happen. Moving responsibilities to the EFF just shuffles labels around. The same thing that happened to ICANN could happen to EFF, it just hasn't happened yet because EFF isn't holding billions in assets.

What needs to happen is for ICANN to be replaced by an international body outside the US.

Preferably with a rotating board.

This is the important analysis here.

People who think in systems (as programmers often do) sometimes fail to understand this. At some point, every human institutional is more human than institution and it's only having people who will choose to do the right thing in place to exercise authority on behalf of the right thing who will make this happen.

Some problems have social solutions -- political solutions, even -- not technical ones. Personnel is policy.

It's for this very reason I'm so enamored with the concept of organizational fragmenting - gore-tex does it, and it's the sort of de facto method of restructuring that goes on in online communities: the idea is that when you get so big you need to create new vertical controls, you split horizontally - control is never vested in a central authority (instead, teams are responsible for their zone, and communicate with each other when necessary).

This has the power to make it much more difficult to achieve economic capture. It's way harder to buy off key figures in 8 different hierarchies than it is to just dump a load of money on a single CEO.

(this)[https://www.managementexchange.com/story/innovation-democrac...] is one of the better write-ups on such a structure that I could find.

Shouldn't GNU count as profitable assets already? I think the GCC was valued at something like a billion dollars.

RMS is too strong of an ideolog, (in the good sense), for him to go astray, others am less sure of.

I could get behind this. I'd contribute to a crowdfund to support that as well (as a .org domain holder)

I would trust EFF to administer all TLDs :) Epic win EFF, good job!

Serious money is a huge temptation.

Have you noticed the path down which the ACLU and SPLC have gone?

Do you notice how Mozilla have shed staff despite the lack on any major dent in their income?

I'm sorry but these types of "activist" companies have a way of going wrong when there are huge sums of money involved.

Just leave them where they are and let them continue as usual.

What path have the ACLU and SPLC gone down?

Not sure what the parent was talking about specifically, but the ACLU has fallen into the trap of pursuing partisan politics. They have leaned hard into anti-Trump rhetoric to the point that it consumes almost all of their messaging, and at the same time they have distanced themselves from ideals they once defended (in particular, they have stopped providing legal defense support for free speech court cases if they find the speech sufficiently reprehensible).

The problem I personally have with this shift is that organizations like the ACLU, FSF, and EFF are really only useful if they defend a core set of ideals rather than towing the ever-shifting partisan line. There are plenty of ways to fund Democrat/Republican causes, but strikingly few ways to fund civil liberty defense, software freedom, and the rest of the values with less mind share.

Being pro-democracy can be neutral one year and not the next if a facist leaning president gets elected. ACLU is neutral as in pro-democracy and pro-human rights. Changing political landscapes being for or against what the ACLU stands for has nothing to do with it suddenly not being neutral. Neutral doesn't mean "in the middle of the political spectrum".

Today we have a president that is firmly against the core set of ideals you speak of. That doesn't mean the ACLU should suddenly change their ideals.

>organizations like the ACLU, FSF, and EFF are really only useful if they defend a core set of ideals rather than towing the ever-shifting partisan line

Which are exactly what they are doing. Trump is against those core set of ideals.

The change at the ACLU happened way before Trump. When Romero replaced Glasser, the priorities and philosophy of the organization changed dramatically.

Nazis in Skokie are also against that core set of ideals. Only pursuing justice for people who you agree with is the essence of fascism. You have to be consistent to your own values, not evaluate victims to figure out whether you like them or not.

In fact, defending victims who you hate isolates and illustrates the principle.

> ACLU is neutral as in pro-democracy and pro-human rights. Changing political landscapes being for or against what the ACLU stands for has nothing to do with it suddenly not being neutral.

You described the incredible shrinking and shifting of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

They defended the NRA in 2018

https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/new-york-state-cant-be...

They defended an anti-muslim group protesting in 2014

https://www.aclumich.org/en/cases/hecklers-veto

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