
ICA asks ICANN to block .Org private equity deal in damning letter - pierreneter
https://domainnamewire.com/2019/11/15/ica-asks-icann-to-block-org-private-equity-deal-in-damning-letter/
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frankharv
Excellent Article and insightful comments setion.

As much as I hated seeing the US Department of Commerce having stewardship of
ICANN this recent development this is really a body blow to all .org
stakeholders.

I guess we all should have seen this coming when it was spun off to a "Multi
stakeholder board".

First an increase in allowed fee's then the private turnover. A well scripted
subversion.

------
Ayesh
I find it quite impressive that everyone raised their voices, although ICANN
and PIR seem to turn a blind eye to them.

For a registry, their main costs are nameserver costs and ICANN licensing fees
(~$25K for gTLDs, not sure for classic TLDs). It's totally unfair on PIR side
to jack the prices up just because they can.

~~~
echelon
These costs don't sound exorbitant.

Are profane TLDs allowed? I'd love to register a particular four letter gTLD.
I'm sure it'd make its money back.

~~~
rovr138
Not really profane, but there’s [https://get.sucks](https://get.sucks)

~~~
echelon
I love that the first selling point is

> Protect your identity online so that no one can defame your name.

This one is an extortion racket.

~~~
dessant
[http://facebook.sucks](http://facebook.sucks)

> Registrant Organization: Facebook, Inc.

[https://whois.nic.sucks](https://whois.nic.sucks)

~~~
saagarjha
microsoft.sucks, apple.sucks, and google.sucks are registered by their
respective companies as well.

------
lioeters
The letter itself: [https://domainnamewire.com/wp-content/ICA-Letter-to-ICANN-
Bo...](https://domainnamewire.com/wp-content/ICA-Letter-to-ICANN-Board-of-
Directors-November-15-2019.pdf) [PDF]

~~~
japhyr
I have certainly taken the internet's infrastructure for granted at times. Can
someone who follows this more closely say something about how this is likely
to play out?

The profit motive is helpful in some areas, but it can just wreck service-
related fields.

~~~
Sebguer
The profit motive is helpful when it comes to providing incentives to
innovate. There's no room for innovation here - it's purely a cash grab.

~~~
o-__-o
See all of the new TLDs as an example of a cash grab, we all know how they are
going to play out once the internet phenomenon peters out

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crankylinuxuser
Having a crazy thought here...

So we have things like Tor, which makes a PKI based .onion TLD. What's
stopping Us (the people) from making our own TLDs?

It really just is a massive amount of groupthink, inertia, and acceptance of
who dns is... right?

And with IP6 seems like it'd be a wild west on all sorts of TLDs.. But we have
these monolithic orgs holding us all back. Hell, I know it's orthogonal to
TLDs, but we even had the ANPR ip space sold partially to Amazon (
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20475855](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20475855)
). Bluntly stated, these orgs that manage underlying infra aren't trustworthy.
And that goes without stating ICANN and all those woes.

~~~
simlevesque
Check out OpenNIC: [https://www.opennic.org/](https://www.opennic.org/)

~~~
judge2020
I posted this elsewhere a while ago but it's relevant to opennic, let me know
if something is out-of-date or wrong:

The choice to support DNS roots like .oz, .ku, .te, .ti, and .uu is not
standards-compliant. Say suddenly a new nation comes into the world and ISO
assigns them one of these abbreviations, or one of these “emerging countries”
they have TLDs for gets assigned a different cctld, what does opennic do? They
made the choice to pre-register a bunch of domains under these reserved
2-letter country codes, so now they either have to

A. stop being able to say “we directly support all ICANN-assigned tlds” and
keep resolving the existing domains

or

B. say to the existing domain owners of [their artificial] tld “sorry to be
you” as their domain names they thought they owned now become registered to
other entities.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
The implicit goal of a project like OpenNIC is to eventually get a seat at the
standards compliance table, where they'll be able to convince decisionmakers
not to make those assignments in the first place.

For now they do (B). They renamed their .free domain to .libre after ICANN
registered .free.

~~~
echelon
Why don't they purchase gTLDs?

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
They're ideologically opposed to ICANN's authority over gTLD registration, so
even if they could afford to I don't think they'd want to.

------
jdkee
How was this transaction valued if it was a "private" sale to a private equity
firm? Should it not have been done along the lines of a FCC public spectrum
auction? Secondly, as I raised this issue previously, why is .org. being
commercialized in the first place?

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Animats
Why is there only one .org registry, anyway? There are multiple registries for
.com.

I hate to say it, but maybe domain names should be managed on a blockchain, so
there's no central authority.

~~~
detaro
No, there is only one .com Registry: Verisign. There's multiple Registr _ar_ s
(the companies you as an individual typically buy your domains at) for .org
just as there are for .com

~~~
a3n
> buy your domains

Rent.

As far as I know, you can't "pay off" a domain. And most of us are at some
usually negligible risk of losing a domain by mistake or because someone
bigger wanted it.

------
saganus
I'm not really informed enough about this to fully understand it, but if I own
a .org domain, can anyone explain to me what repercussion can this have?

~~~
duud
Your annual renewal cost will go up.

~~~
ohashi
And ICANN removed any sort of price cap (used to be 7% per year) because fuck
non profits and consumers.

------
neiman
This makes me think of ENS project (based on Ethereum) that is making a
decentralized TLD. The registry is managed automatically by a smart contract.

Pros? The conditions are equal to all users. Cons? It is a wild west style
registry with no governance besides the little the automated algorithm offers.

They're goal, if I understood correctly, is having .eth TLD managed by this
decentralized registry. It can be an interesting experience.

[Full disclosure: I'm part of the Almonit project which uses ENS]

~~~
zozbot234
Namecoin is a lot more popular and better known than ENS, fwiw.

------
louischatriot
Raising the price for tld would actually be a good thing, as it would make
"domain investing" (domain hoarding) unprofitable.

Let's say a .com costs $1,000 per year. For a legitimate business /
organization, that is a trivial cost. For a domain hoarder, that makes keeping
domains by and large unprofitable.

Killing this parasitic activity is a good thing.

~~~
finnthehuman
So keeping the domain for my primary email address that I’ve used for 15 years
is “hoarding” now?

~~~
techsupporter
Personal anecdote: If the e-mails I get every few months are to be believed,
yes. I was lucky enough to be around on the Internet when domains were free so
I have two .org domains (because to have a .com back then was a sign that you
were one of those "dirty businesses" who wanted to "sully the InterNet"[0])
that are old enough to buy their own drinks in the States. Both have been used
for e-mail and internal naming schemes for as long as I've had them; only one
has a web site.

Every few months, I get e-mails asking if I'll sell one or the other for a
small sum or donate the domain to the group that's asking. I used to reply and
politely decline but the vitriol about my "pointlessly" keeping a domain that
I'm "obviously not using" that inevitably comes back now has me shift-Delete
e-mails like that. The times, they have changed.

0 - And getting a .net meant showing you were an actual Network Operator.
Anybody else remember FTPing the template down from internic.net and sending
it to hostmaster and waiting two months for the zone delegation?

