
The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org - jdkee
https://prospect.org/power/private-equity-corporate-takeover-org-domain-name/
======
kick
I found this article incredible (despite the tabloid-like headline) on this
subject:

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/14/icann_org_redacted/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/14/icann_org_redacted/)

TL;DR: _Purchase funded by debt, includes another ex-ICANNer, will be done
through four different companies._

Some highlights that I think are important from it:

 _Incredibly, the names of three directors of the organization that will buy
the registry remain redacted in documents published by ICANN [PDF] this month,
despite the three entities pushing the sale – PIR, ISOC and Ethos Capital –
claiming that publication of the information is “unprecedented” and they are
“strong believers in the power of transparency.”_

 _The rationale given for the removal of director names is that it was based
“on the principles set forth in ICANN’s Documentary Information Disclosure
Policy (DIDP)” – a bizarre claim that has nothing to do with the issues at
hand and which ICANN has refused to discuss._

 _As well as refusing to supply the names of those in overall charge, the
three companies have also refused to publish the “underlying equity purchase
agreement, sensitive financial information, corporate organizational
information, draft organizational documents, documentation provided to
governmental entities and certain supporting contractual documents.”_

~~~
cptskippy
> (despite the tabloid-like headline)

I like everything about The Register but the cheezy headlines, nicknames, and
bad photoshop are some of the best parts.

~~~
kick
I mean, I enjoy it for personal consumption. It makes it way harder to
seriously share, though!

~~~
cptskippy
What do you mean? Headlines like "Yabba Dabba Doo it's the iPad 2" scream
professionalism.

~~~
kick
Upon further consideration, you're absolutely right.

------
dang
I think these are the major related threads so far. In reverse order:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21931258](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21931258)
\- The NRO Issues Inspection Request to ICANN Concerning .ORG Sale

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800085](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800085)
\- ICANN Delays .ORG Sale Approval

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21723682](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21723682)
\- Why ISOC sold .ORG to VCs

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21689121](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21689121)
\- The .Org Fire Sale: How it sold for less than half its valuation

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667355](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667355)
\- ISOC sold the .org registry to Ethos Capital for $1.1B

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656960)
\- Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21626677](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21626677)
\- ICANN races towards regulatory capture: the great .org heist

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677)
\- Save .org

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592297](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592297)
\- Internet world despairs as non-profit .org sold to private equity firm

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21582622](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21582622)
\- Private Equity Is Going to Ruin the .Org Domain System and Screw Nonprofits

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21557779](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21557779)
\- ICA asks ICANN to block .Org private equity deal in damning letter

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21526982](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21526982)
\- Private Equity company acquires .org registry

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20263561](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20263561)
\- Regulatory Capture at ICANN

Did I miss any?

~~~
frandroid
It's almost as if HN could use a tagging system... :)

~~~
dang
I'm inclined to disagree.

~~~
anewvillager
Why?

~~~
dang
It would add a lot of complexity, and any system has only a limited number of
complexity cards to play. I'd rather play them on things that have a clear
connection to HN's core.

With features like this, the benefits are obvious while the costs are not. I
fear those.

That's not to say that tagging is always a bad idea—far from it. It depends on
the system.

~~~
bostonpete
> I'd rather play them on things that have a clear connection to HN's core.

What have they been played on historically? Mostly behind the scenes stuff?
Maybe I don't pay close enough attention but I haven't noticed much in the way
new features/improvements over the past five years or more...(?)

~~~
dang
Yes, mostly behind the scenes stuff. And also just keeping powder dry, per our
motto: Move slowly and preserve things.

~~~
frandroid
I was tongue in cheek with my comment, but I enjoy JWZ's "previously" links
and tags can help traverse the history that you're working to preserve.

The simplicity you mention is worth a lot, though.

------
iameli
> Verisign controls the registries for .com and .net, two of the internet’s
> most popular. All it does is administer a database and collect small sums
> from website owners, but with computing power rising and practically no
> marginal cost to adding another website to the database, the entire
> enterprise is a license to print money. In the third quarter of 2019,
> Verisign showed operating income of $205.6 million on $308.4 million in
> revenues, a profitability margin of 66.67 percent. This makes Verisign one
> of the most profitable companies in the world.

I wish we lived in a world where a company being kinda monopolistic to make a
67% profit margin was enough to get me angry. If I hadn't read this, I'd have
assumed they were making a lot more than $100 million a year profit.

I see the real answer to this as the gTLD program: radically expand the number
of domain-issuing entities and normalize companies operating on something
other than .com.

~~~
byuu
The problem is you can't move a domain once you've established it. I'm stuck
on byuu.org for life. There's 15 years worth of links to it scattered across
the web that would all go dark. Or more precisely, that would all suddenly
point at spam. I could never get most of them updated.

Even my _subdomain_ from my previous host from 15 years ago is squatted to
this day to serve up advertising. It's even aware of the software that I used
to host there.

One answer in my view is to remove the maximum length of prepayment for
domains. Let us buy a domain for 100 years. Sure, that's $1,000. Maybe throw
in a discount. But now we never have to worry about it again, as long as we
live. Or at least, as long as the registry lives. It would never be
squattable.

~~~
dangerface
If you want a new domain and to keep your backlinks you can 302 the old domain
to the new.

> One answer in my view is to remove the maximum length of prepayment for
> domains. Let us buy a domain for 100 years.

Makes sense to me but I don't think I have seen anything more than 10 years.

~~~
account42
> If you want a new domain and to keep your backlinks you can 302 the old
> domain to the new.

Which will only work as long as you keep paying for the old domain.

------
teruakohatu
It seems that over time any sufficiently well funded non-profit will
eventually hire a financial engineer as CEO and transform into a Hedge Fund
with some sort of charitable appendage.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
America's well-endowed universities seem like a perfect example of human
greed. They have amassed so much money that they could seriously invest in
furthering their ostensible mission — education — yet they'd rather just
obsess over making sure the big pile of money only grows bigger.

~~~
jdkee
From Jordan Weissmann writing at Slate:

“The joke about Harvard is that it’s a hedge fund with a university attached
to it,” Mark Schneider tells me.

[https://www.businessinsider.com/why-harvard-should-be-
taxed-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/why-harvard-should-be-taxed-2015-9)

------
jrochkind1
This article explained some things clearly.

ISOC didn't "buy" the rights to administer .org in the first place. They were
given it. Along with $5 million actually; they paid, like, negative for it,
they were paid to take it.

Now they get to sell it for $1.1 billion? How does that make any sense at all?

We're literally at "Russian oligarch-type" transaction here. America!

------
munk-a
ICANN has no technical power to enforce this change, so continuing with it
while there is so much dissent is dangerous to itself and the current
organization of the internet. If some big players in the DNS space decided to
object to this change (like say google and a few ISPs who thought they should
get a bigger slice of the registration pie) they could just disrespect
registrations published by Ethos and require an additional fee to propagate a
new name to their servers (Oh you registered a name? Well, how much is
allowing comcast users[1] to see it worth to you)... I hope ICANN stops being
silly before it fractures assumptions around DNS propagation.

1\. Specifically all those users who use the default assigned DNS, which is
the vast majority.

------
coder1001
This quote kind of summarises the effect of the attempted takeover:

"Nonprofit websites will be trapped: If they want to keep their longtime brand
and their archives, they’ll pay whatever price. “When you buy a domain you own
it, but after a couple years it owns you.”"

Hope this ends well for all .org owners!

------
getpost
There is a SaveDotOrg Protest at ICANN on Friday in Los Angeles.

Date: Friday, January 24, 2020 Time: 9 am – 11 am Location: ICANN, 12025
Waterfront Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90094

[https://savedotorg.org/index.php/savedotorg-protest-at-
icann...](https://savedotorg.org/index.php/savedotorg-protest-at-icann/)

~~~
getpost
Update: Around 2 dozen people showed. ICANN received the petition. “Chairman
Maarten Botterman said ICANN is looking at the impact of the sale and what
guarantees they could obtain for dot-org registrants, though he made no
promises.”

[https://mobile.twitter.com/russforce/status/1220789586554523...](https://mobile.twitter.com/russforce/status/1220789586554523648?s=12)

[https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/nonprofits-
worry-s...](https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/nonprofits-worry-sale-
dot-org-universe-raise-costs-68504169)

------
majos
Here’s a slightly different question: the article mentions that Ethos is
paying to take over PIR, thus taking over .org administration as well. How
transparent is this transaction?

Viewed uncharitably, it looks like ICANN built a separate entity to admin
.org, built a separate entity to buy it, and then claimed that the purchase
was just normal business, even as they were self-dealing to sell to friends.
Is this accurate, or is the purchase by Ethos actually something like market-
rate? In that case, even if I dislike the capitalization of .org, it doesn’t
seem _illegal_?

------
JohnFen
PIR (and, apparently, ICANN) are simply selling us out on this, and whether or
not the sale goes through, they both have taken a huge credibility hit -- and
ICANN, anyway, already had credibility problems to begin with.

In terms of its impact on the net, I see no upside to this at all. It's
nothing but harmful.

------
sroussey
Protest this Friday:

[https://www.eff.org/event/savedotorg-protest-
icann](https://www.eff.org/event/savedotorg-protest-icann)

------
brandon272
Something has gone seriously wrong when one of our original TLDs, which, from
my perspective, should be considered sacrosanct elements of the internet with
historical importance, are able to be sold off by interloping individuals,
who, for some bizarre reason, feel that they are entitled to capitalize on
these TLDs, and who do so purely with their own self-interest at heart.

I'm really just disappointed and angered that this happened.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Alas the Internet was created in a capitalist world, and capitalism loves
rent-seeking.

~~~
chaostheory
Would it be any different in a non-capitalist world? If we’re being honest,
corruption eventually permeates everything given time. IMO the biggest
difference between capitalism and socialism is the massive centralization of
power in socialist systems. The effects of corruption tend to be much worse
the more power is concentrated. These systems of finite resource distribution
are ultimately just hacks to mitigate the real problem: people or individual
nodes tend to seek the optimal outcome for themselves even if it’s at the
expense of the system as a whole

Everyone tends to forget that sociopaths adapt

~~~
coliveira
Capitalism is a system created by and for sociopaths. It doesn't get much
worse than that.

~~~
chaostheory
How so for both? HN isn’t reddit

------
jascii
Sigh, I am flabbergasted at my own lack of outrage. Not to long ago something
like this would have me all up in arms, now it seems like just another nail in
the coffin of democracy..

~~~
cf141q5325
And the truly horrible part that this is working as intended. The public has
to get loud every time, while from the other perspective, getting lucky once
is enough.

------
annoyingnoob
I updated my .org domains for the max 5 years that my provider would let me.
At least I'm locked in for now. The whole thing seems shady though I really
want to believe that the new owner will play nice. As humans we can decide
that altruism > greed, something tells me that greed will rule here.

~~~
throwawayjava
to future readers: namecheap will let you do 9 years.

~~~
annoyingnoob
In the past I've had a lot of issues with spammers and scammers using domain
names that came from namecheap. namecheap made it difficult to report and
resolve issues, spammer/scammers could create names much faster than they
could be taken down. namecheap was not interested in tying one violation to
another, they did not want to see that a few players were generating a lot of
names that appeared to be from different people but all immediately started
running the same spam/scam. If namecheap chooses to be a citadel for
spammer/scammers then I'm sure not going to give them any of my money.

------
JMTQp8lwXL
I'm curious if private equity chose .org for a specific reason, and which
other TLDs could be next. Perhaps there was something about the organizational
structure that would make the .org TLD easy to extract profits from.

------
Yuval_Halevi
>The entire market for domain name registries is broken, a troubling
combination of government-granted monopoly, disinterested (at best)
regulators, and eager extractors of profit.

well said

------
aabbcc1241
Could this situation be improved/eliminated when we move from TCP/IP to NDN
(Named Data Network)?

In NDN, you don't request data from a specific host, hence no need to specify
the receiving machine's IP, indeed, you send the packet to a p2p network,
another with certain data / signature can answer your request.

~~~
rjmunro
So what does a URL look like in this system? E.g. If I have put up a poster on
a wall somewhere, what do I say instead of "Visit www.example.org for more
details"?

~~~
aabbcc1241
Take news for example.

Instead of sending a HTTP GET on '[https://news.com/what-is-
NDN.html'](https://news.com/what-is-NDN.html'), which must be answered from
the server 'news.com' with https cert for prove.

You'll send an interest package '{title: what-is-NDN, type: news, cert:
a-public-key}', which can be answer by any node having the data. Be the data
source or someone that already got it (like BT download-and-seed sharing)

(The cert is optional, if you can trust an information from anyone)

~~~
rjmunro
What exactly do I put on my poster?

~~~
aabbcc1241
What do you mean by "poster"?

------
asaph
> ... and it could use its power to sell the browsing data of users of .orgs

By what mechanism is this possible?

~~~
TheFlyingFish
That's what I want to know. I would _assume_ the article is talking about
monitoring which IP's request which domains, but the overwhelming majority of
requests that a registry sees have to be from downstream resolvers, right? In
which case they don't know who's using the site, they only know that "somebody
who uses this resolver" is using the site.

In most cases there are probably multiple levels of resolvers, so it might
even be as coarse as "somebody on the west coast of the US is using this
site," which isn't terribly useful.

------
pampedant
... ICANNexit?

I mean

Switching out a computer's DNS root zone is a small operation.

Managing a substitute to ICANN, how much could that really cost? A few million
a year?

------
lwb
> Ethos ... could use its power to sell the browsing data of users of .orgs

Is this possible? Can all top-level domain name owners view all browsing data
on their domain?

~~~
paulannesley
Not really. Unless they completely hijacked all DNS resolution under .org to
IPs they control, fraudulently gain TLS certificates (using DNS-based proof),
and proxy the traffic to the true IP. Not a realistic scenario at scale.

------
megiddo
Isn't gTLD by convention? It is technically feasible to set up a shadow
registry and route to that, operated as a NPO.

------
kirbypineapple
Attempted? It already happened.

~~~
NickBusey
According to the article, no it didn't.

> ICANN must sign off on the deal in order for it to proceed. In December, it
> paused the sale for 30 days amid public outcry, expressing concern about the
> lack of transparency surrounding the deal.

------
dr_dshiv
Can someone explain the issue? Currently, anyone can buy a .org. I imagine
that this company will charge more money for .orgs in exchange for some
verification procedure. Compare this to today, where anyone can buy .orgs for
any reason: it might be a public good if there is some authentication and
prestige.

NGOs and non-profits have money. Paying $100 a year to maintain a verified
"I'm not a company" status might be a good idea. Keep in mind that non profits
aren't necessarily good -- many are essentially tax shelters.

This article feels anti-capitalist. Nothing in the article makes a principled
argument for how .orgs _should_ operate. What's the argument for allowing
anyone to buy a .org for $10 per year?

~~~
oaiey
The UNHCR or another huge entity will not give a shit. They have a legal
department which can end Ethos Capital if they like.

However, the reading club with 20 members and yearly income of 300€ cannot
afford a 100€ .org.

.org and the PIR had a dedicated purpose.

~~~
dr_dshiv
But why not just get a .club extension? Shouldn't .orgs be reserved for big
orgs?

~~~
philsnow
no, .org is reserved for organizations that aren't dedicated to making money.
size isn't relevant.

let me turn the question around: why should Ethos get .org? make them drum up
support for some new TLD. This is purely, purely a cash grab, allowed by
regulatory capture, and it should be stopped.

~~~
dr_dshiv
What does "reserved" mean? Anyone can buy a .org. There isn't any actual
restriction.

Well, let's say that a mission driven for profit corporation could ensure that
.org owners aren't for-profit -- and do a better job than the current
committee. Should they be allowed a .org? In my world, I'd say no, since I'd
prefer that .orgs are actually restricted to non corporates.

~~~
philsnow
> What does "reserved" mean? Anyone can buy a .org. There isn't any actual
> restriction.

Fair point. The "restriction" was really a recommendation (from RFC 920 in
1985, in a more polite time on the nascent "internet").

> [...] Should they be allowed a .org?

Who cares? The cat is out of the bag. As of today there are 1514 TLDs [0].
.mil and .gov should still have some requirements, but .org, .net, .com (and
almost all the other TLDs) are all effectively the same thing.

[0]
[http://stats.research.icann.org/dns/tld_report/](http://stats.research.icann.org/dns/tld_report/)

~~~
EvanAnderson
What "recommendation" are you referring to from RFC 920? All I see is:

 _ORG = Organization, any other domains meeting the second level
requirements._

I see nothing about not-for-profit or money mentioned at all in RFC 920. There
are occurrences of the word "commercial", but they're all in reference to the
COM domain. The ORG domain is only referred-to as being for "Organizations".

