I can't see any way selling .org from a non-profit to a commercial entity who is profit motivated makes sense at all.
In online debates a decade or more ago, I remember people, including myself, used to defend American control of the domain system by pointing out the altruistic and independent nature of the ICANN and their history of being good stewards of the DNS infrastructure thus far. That seems to no longer be the case. This whole deal calls into serious question their current integrity.
> On Wednesday, the iconic yellow-bordered magazine, beset by financial issues, entered its own uncharted territory. In an effort to stave off further decline, the magazine was effectively sold by its nonprofit parent organization to a for-profit venture whose principal shareholder is one of Rupert Murdoch’s global media companies.
I'm not sure that's a valid precedent. National Geographic was facing bankruptcy with a bleak future. Their options were to sell or shut the doors - they took what they believed to be the lesser of two evils.
.org prints money - they have almost no overhead, and a basically guaranteed revenue stream. This isn't a public good that has no other options to survive - it's a bunch of shady board members attempting to enrich themselves at the expense of the public good.
Did you ever get a copy of Nat Geo Adventure / Traveler?
It was one of the sub-magazines that proliferated (probably as they were trying to keep the print business alive). Grabbed a couple in an airport, but they seemed more interesting and focused than the main one.
Interestingly, this act itself proves that whilst the US DOC was, and claimed, to have moved ICANN to international ownership [1], it is in fact still under the control of the US government.
As long as the Internet namespace, or DNS, is governed by US (California state specifically) law, the Internet itself will be operating under the same jurisdiction as DNS is generally considered critical to the function of the Internet.
This is a very strong reason that, just like currency [2], the Internet namespace is also ripe to be decentralized to distributed ownership by the people [3].
The internet deserves to be owned by the people - not any single government.
And like currency, it turns out that it's almost impossible to have a fully decentralized, trustless system for all but the most basic functions. Maybe you prefer that to the current system, but it's not like handwavingly suggesting blockchain makes any of this better. There are all sorts of real-world issues that you can't handle on-chain.
It’s easy to say that a hypothetical system will do everything you want, similar to how Bitcoin salespeople spent most of a decade saying it’d be better than cash and credit cards before trying to claim they’d had different goals all along.
You first need a system which works and scales to plausible levels before we can say anything about whether it’s a viable solution for anything. In particular, it’d be important to have real cost and control information to show that it wasn’t trading ICANN for a different group which has similar control — and the inherent inefficiency of a blockchain means that there’d be more of a likelihood that power would consolidate in a few major players.
(As an aside, Symantec screwing up does not seem relevant to a discussion about ICANN. Perhaps you could explain why you believe it to be?)
> similar to how Bitcoin salespeople spent most of a decade saying it’d be better than cash and credit cards before trying to claim they’d had different goals all along.
As someone following Bitcoin for a long time since just after genesis, I can assure you that replacing cash and credit cards was never on the original agenda but instead a byproduct of the goal. Make no mistake, the goal was always to decentralize currency and give the “power” of money back to the people. That said, in a decentralized system, there can be more than one goal and goals do not need to be unified across participants. That freedom is one of the beauties of decentralization.
As long as a third party central authority controls our money system, we will always be subject to the whims of the few. Bitcoin is helping to liberate us and it’s absolutely working.
> it’d be important to have real cost and control information to show that it wasn’t trading ICANN for a different group which has similar control
This exists by virtue of our trust in cryptography - which for me is absolute.
> As an aside, Symantec screwing up does not seem relevant to a discussion about ICANN. Perhaps you could explain why you believe it to be?
Less directly and more by way of overall system architecture, the separation of DNS and “truth” has caused many issues to the Internet. It’s relevant because Handshake finally combines DNS and truth [1] by essentially completing the once incomplete DNSSEC.
> As long as a third party central authority controls our money system, we will always be subject to the whims of the few. Bitcoin is helping to liberate us and it’s absolutely working.
A bold claim without evidence. In fact, the opposite may be true [1]. This is but one counterpoint; another notable problem is the centralization of bitcoin mining in China [2].
The same can be said about any money system in a capitalist economy (e.g., 1% owns 40% of the wealth in the US [1.1]).
> This is but one counterpoint; another notable problem is the centralization of bitcoin mining in China [2].
I'm not sure this is 'looming' today as the article boldly claims, but centralization is definitely a risk. It's important for everyone to participate in the system as they can for a more equal distribution of ownership - akin to how one should exercise their vote in US elections.
> As someone following Bitcoin for a long time since just after genesis, I can assure you that replacing cash and credit cards was never on the original agenda but instead a byproduct of the goal.
As someone who was also there, I stopped reading at this point. The things getting circulation were bold predictions about replacing cash and credit cards in daily life and anyone who questioned that inevitability was dismissed as not understanding it. Everyone knew it was an attempt to dress up “use your money to make me rich” in a more noble guise but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
I disagree with the claims about effectiveness, but this is otherwise correct.
Bitcoin emerged from the Cypherpunks crowd; while nobody has positively IDed the 'real' author of the paper, the ideological motivations are rooted in anarcho-capitalist thought. The operative theory is really not that different than Grover Norquist's; attack the tax base and the state withers. Grover is just less ambitious.
The flaw in the bitcoin thesis is that the internet is powerful tool of centralized control and reinforces authoritarians, not the opposite.
I'm resigned to losing internet points any time I open my mouth about bitcoin. I'm neither a cheerleader nor an opponent, so approximately nobody involved likes what I say about it.
We probably disagree on other things bitcoin-related, but right here I think it is only about how we're defining 'success'. I agree that it is an existence-proof for decentralized currency, and am not trying to downplay the significance of that.
I think Bitcoin was stopped, it was adopted by a secondary tier who were only using it to speculate, then it was brought into the tax systems of governments, now it's treated as principally something other than for daily transactions.
It's so volatile it's useless except for speculators.
Greed ruined it, I feel, like it does with everything else.
> What are the issues that can’t be handled in the Handshake blockchain ecosystem?
From the handshake FAQ: 'There are no social or technical guarantees with the renewability or ownership, this is an experimental system, please read the code to see details of how it currently works'. That's below the bit where they auction them off to the highest bidder. There are plenty of issues with ICANN, but it isn't a toy with a short term profit-maximization scheme attached...
> That's below the bit where they auction them off to the highest bidder. There are plenty of issues with ICANN, but it isn't a toy with a short term profit-maximization scheme attached...
The blockchain auctions domains off to the highest bidder thru a blind Vickrey auction [1] wherein the winner pays the amount of the second highest bid.
After the auction completes, the coins are burned (provably destroyed).
Both the legacy ICANN system and new TLDs on Handshake [2] are working together in harmony.
To be clear, everything on the internet including the internet itself started as an experiment.
> That's below the bit where they auction them off to the highest bidder.
The hns paid for winning an auction are destroyed.
> There are plenty of issues with ICANN, but it isn't a toy with a short term profit-maximization scheme attached.
Handshake is anything but a short term profit-maximization
scheme! The Handshake developers took $10 million of VC money and donated it to free and open source foundations: https://handshake.org/grant-sponsors/
It's under US law like any other entity operating within our borders, but it's not really under US government control anymore, which seems to have been to everyone's detriment.
Some organisations are granted special status - for example, CERN is built straddling the frano-swiss border and can issue its own diplomatic vehicle registrations. Not to mention things like the UN building in New York.
If for some reason the US thought ICANN shouldn't be subject to US law, they could do something similar. Being inside a country's borders doesn't always mean being subject to its laws.
Of course, the corruption in the .org selloff doesn't make me feel ICANN needs less oversight. And it's questionable whether the US can grant independence it cannot revoke, at least from an international realist perspective.
The sad part is, giving up control doesn't seem to have stopped other nations from slowly severing themselves from the global conversation like the Great Firewall and Russianet.
People having a passing familiarity with all the TLDs increases security. You know to trust Microsoft.com but it would be easy trick someone into clicking a link to Microsoft.c0m or some such.
In 2018 the Supreme Court decided the case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission case in favor of the cakeshop, which had originally refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. The couple sue the cakeshop, claiming illegal discrimination (in Colorado) but the cakeshop won the case not because of its merits, but because US Supreme Court ruled that the members of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission were biased... against Christians.
Don’t forget to take into account that religious liberty is a real thing in the US... literally the first thing spelled out in the Bill of Rights. That’s why the court considered the state commission’s bias against the religious person’s exercise of their sincerely held belief. Plus, you know, the whole “state can’t compel speech” thing (also part of the Bill of Rights) kind of makes the resulting decision pretty unsurprising.
They are referring to the supreme court case revolving around a bakery in Colorado who refused to make a wedding cake if it was going to be served at a gay wedding.
Sure, I've never heard it described that way. That makes it sound like the point of asking to be served is to punish and frustrate the bakery. I've never heard civil rights protests called the "serve my lunch racist!" debate.
The sentiment behind the phrase "bake my cake bigot!" seems to trivialize the issue of being discriminated against by a public business and incorrectly attributes malice to the person being discriminated against.
I'm not attributing any ill-intent to you but wanted to give feedback on that terminology which is why I asked the question. Thanks for your response.
When I read about the cake shop story, I believe the reason I didn't automatically side with the gay couple was because it appeared they visited multiple shops, specifically looking for a shop that would not accommodate their request to make an overtly "gay-themed" cake. Even when they found the shop that was sued, the baker offered to make them alternative cakes, just not one that had their preferred phraseology. It seemed more like they were trying to make a point/easy cash grab, which ultimately backfired.
And I'm glad that you've illustrated my point perfectly. Having misinterpreted my statement to be homophobic, you've chanted the magic words to summon the specter of censorship.
Where exactly do you see homophobia in their comments?
See, this is the problem right here. Whenever people like you hear something they disagree with you'll start screaming "bigot" or "homophobe" or "nazi". How are we supposed to have a mature, civilised discussion about these things?
When you know that Ethos Capital (that wants to buy .org) was co-founded by an ex-ICANN CEO, and that it employs several other former high-ranking ICANN staff, then it starts to make a lot of sense.
And centralization of decentralized entities isn't a question of if - it's a question of when.
Decentralization has so many downsides compared to centralization when things are going "right" that centralization has competitive advantages over decentralization.
Except that centralization will eventually give rise to corruption =p. It's and endless debate I guess. But for an organization like ICANN my vote goes to decentralization.
Their argument is that .org is akin to a school owning large playing fields in the middle a rapidly expanding city.
Selling off some or all of an asset that has become unexpectedly valuable can fund the organisation’s wider mission with a windfall endowment.
No one buys such an argument in this case because, just as sports are a big part of school, so too is it ICANN’s core mission to provide equitable access to names in TLDs — or at least that’s what most people would say it is.
(Apologies if this ruffles the feathers of anyone fighting a school playing field sell off battle, especially if you also own yourschool.org too.)
That's a good analogy IMO, they put short time finance above the altruistic aims they're supposed to engender. At least the school do it for the students, and not to enrich private individuals.
If icann is broken, which it seemingly is given this catastrophe handling of .org, then the solution is pretty obvious. Remake icann with a strong and clear purpose and goal of making the internet infrastructure more stable and safer. Selling off all the different part of icann to for-profit companies will have the usually effect when the goal become to farm taxes on commons.
I don't agree with it, but the reasoning goes like this:
It makes sense for both parties because for the seller the investment gains from the capital they're getting from this transaction will be similar to what they're making from running the registry. But they no longer have the headaches of running the registry.
For the buyer, well, it's a monopoly so the sky is the limit. Even if current seller is able to raise the prices, they might not want it due to the backlash this would cause. Current buyer is less constrained by this.
I'm not sure much of value is lost. the .org TLD has not been a strong signal of credibility for some time now. for example, "4chan.org" has been registered since 2004. AFAIK, there has not been any requirement to actually show that the registrant is a non-profit for decades.
with the possible exception of .gov (and local equivalents), people should not be encouraged to use TLDs as a positive signal of credibility. imo, the only things that matter are that domain should point to the expected entity (eg, wellsfargo.com points to the bank, not a phishing site) and that disputes over who gets to use a specific domain get handled in a reasonable way.
You point to one example (4chan) yet there are probably hundreds of thousands of counter-examples of usage of ORG domains.
There is no perfect solution of course, but generally speaking ORG domains have been used to signal that you are an organization vs. a corporation, and potentially a non-profit.
That said, just like in the real world, individuals are encouraged to do their research and confirm that one is what they claim to be (just like door-to-door charity workers) before engaging.
> There is no perfect solution of course, but generally speaking ORG domains have been used to signal that you are an organization vs. a corporation, and potentially a non-profit.
what I'm getting at is: if ICANN never enforced the convention in the first place, and they are selling it to someone else who also doesn't intend to enforce it, what should I expect to change?
when it comes to security in particular, conventions that are usually (but not always) followed are often worse than having no convention at all. it sets dangerous expectations for lay people.
> what I'm getting at is: if ICANN never enforced the convention in the first place, and they are selling it to someone else who also doesn't intend to enforce it, what should I expect to change?
I think the biggest concern with this sale is around pricing more than "correctness of use", where I agree with you the ship has long sailed.
Selling PIR to a for-profit company, a private equity firm no less, means you can pretty much 100% guarantee that in the future pricing would be increasingly profit-driven.
In online debates a decade or more ago, I remember people, including myself, used to defend American control of the domain system by pointing out the altruistic and independent nature of the ICANN and their history of being good stewards of the DNS infrastructure thus far. That seems to no longer be the case. This whole deal calls into serious question their current integrity.