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Comment by hetman | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

Preferably with a rotating board.

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.

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