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I found this article incredible (despite the tabloid-like headline) on this subject: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."
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> 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.
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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.
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There are many examples that I am currently too lazy to point at that clearly prove that "lifetime license" or "lifetime guarantee" are promises that are basically never kept.Your idea would turn into yet another way to extract even more money from customers without actually bringing additional value (or guarantees) to the table. :(
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> "lifetime license" or "lifetime guarantee" are promises that are basically never kept.Not in the parachute selling business...
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I'd be worried that whatever new tld I switched to would just as easily do the same thing (start charging stupid money for it), with a big enough tld at least then you'd have enough critical mass to stage a protest (e.g the .org thing here)
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This is a case where incentives, in the way that HNers use the term "incentives", don't work.The cost of a domain name is supposed to dis-incentivize buying up domain names simply to squat and/or serve ads, but clearly the price isn't high enough to dis-incentivize that. And we can't raise prices, because then it dis-incentivizes legitimate users. The problem is that the cost of domain names is a larger dis-incentive to legitimate users than it is to domain squatters. If a domain is $10 and a squatter sells domains for $100, then they only have to sell 1 in 10 domains to break even, so risk is very low: they don't have to really be overly concerned with only buying domains that will sell. And that's a simplistic model: the reality is that squatters have much more sophisticated valuation models, and have therefore have much higher profit margins, keeping their risk even lower. Sometimes domains sell for tens of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, the risk is very high for a legitimate user. If you have a company or a nonprofit, you basically have to choose a name that's marketable, memorable, relevant to your business/nonprofit, and unique, on the first try. This can literally make or break a business. And once you have that name, there's basically only one ideal URL for that name: yourbusiness.com or yournonprofit.org. So you have a supply of one and a demand of this might make or break my organization so cost can be pretty much "what is the maximum you can pay?". As such, if the max you can pay isn't enough for the domain squatter to want to sell, you just don't get the domain, and your organization gets a sub-standard web presence. I don't think we can overestimate the impact of this problem. I've worked for a company which owns your-business.com rather than yourbusiness.com (these are examples obviously--it would be unprofessional to give out actual names). Their marketing is very explicit about the dash, and potential customers still end up at the squatted non-dashed domain, which is only getting more expensive as the company becomes more successful. Luckily their value proposition is large enough, and clients sophisticated enough, that the friction of actually getting to the site isn't as large enough barrier to prevent growth. But if your business is a lower-margin business with less sophisticated clients, that would be a big enough barrier to prevent success entirely.
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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.
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> 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.
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Or separate the entity from the address. If you move, the post office forwards correspondence for 6 months and you are free to communicate an updated address to people who send you things and visit you.Whether this should be done and on what level will definitely be interesting. How sure am I that I want my old email address to be telling spammers where I 'live' now?
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What if a signed version of the content was always accessible, content addressable, in the Internet Archive? Does it matter than what the current namespace is?
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> in the Internet ArchiveI would wager that 95% of web users do not even know that IA exists, let alone that they can use it. > Does it matter than what the current namespace is? As long as it's the only thing a browser will consider to retrieve information, yes. Which is why cool URIs don't change.
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> I would wager that 95% of web users do not even know that IA existYou are far too optimistic. It's probably more like 99.999999%
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> 99.999999%That would mean only 80-odd people know about IA, which seems a tad low :P
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> 99.999999%That would mean only 80-odd people know about IA, which seems a tad low :P I suppose that means that for most people, 99.9999% of the world's population don't know they exist. Interesting thought. I wonder which living person is known of by the largest percentage, and what that percentage is?
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Hipsters are going to start measuring themselves in nines of obscurity.
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That's helpful.But branding, let alone domain names, is proof that namespaces matter. And have immense market value.
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> 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.However, that has another problem in that it increases the opportunity for fraud via. The benefit of a small number of tlds is that the most memorable part is typically the most unique and provides human-distinguishable identity, but that's out the window if you've normalized mybusiness.com, mybusiness.biz, mybusiness.business, mybustiness.bz, mybusiness.bus, etc. Typosquatting still exists with .com, but it's far more manageable that the above.
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I have some familiarity with the .com/.net stuffYes the registry is incredibly cheap to run, it’s the name servers themselves that are so expensive (from what I understand this is partially due to uptime requirements.)
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Can you clarify a bit here?I believe most people, when executing a name look up, will usually just end up talking to one of a battery of ISP provided DNS servers. So while the registry's name servers need to feed those servers (and probably be heavily redundant and reliable) they wouldn't actually end up handling an insane amount of traffic. I'm actually a bit curious now if there are any sorts of requirements on how much traffic registrars need to be able to support or if everyone just over-resources and still makes enough money that the question has never been deeply investigated.
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I worked for a Registry (.coop) and sat next to the lead, interestingly we (poptel) also bid for .org back in the day and lost to the shysters that are selling outYour right you have to have multiply redundant systems in four continents with everything running on HA kit with auto switch over diverse routing for power and data and I think hot standbys as well.
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I don't know if there are stats available, but the requests per second has got to be huge.There are a ton of ISPs, and many of them run regional recursive servers. Each of those servers is going to see a ton of different domains that they need to query at the registry servers. Most registries are serving glue records with a 1-3 day TTL, but ISP caches may not have enough memory to keep the long tail names in cache for that long, and the long tail is long. There's millions of domain names to query the registry servers for.
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With a short TTL being standard to allow quick changes and such a wide range of domains you're going to get a lot of cache misses and have to go to the TLD to get the answer.
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I suspect what the new gTLD program has really done is to make com/org/net seem even more trustworthy and premium because people can no longer keep up with the influx of new gTLDs ( all 1200 of them!).
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I'm not generally sympathetic to the "domain investor" types, but this quote from domain investor Rick Schwartz I feel is spot on and has been my thought since "day one" of the new TLDs> "As we go into the seventh year of the new gTLD experiment, they are meaningless. They haven’t been adopted by almost anybody. Circulation is poor. So many registrations are questionable or penny-promotional. The majority are parked and not in use nor will they ever be. And 99.9% of the people on this planet could not name a single one of them! Not a one!" Full article: http://domainincite.com/25103-di-leaders-roundtable-4-big-pr...
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Mostly the new gTLDs (actually I think the ccTLDs are at fault, but I'm going to whine anyway) mean I no longer know where to put the dots in a domain name. Is it CoolBanan.as? CoolBana.nas? Cool.Ban.an.as? Fuck it, I'm going to the grocery store instead.
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That's fair. I'm hoping this'll become less true over time as folks get used to there being lots of TLDs.
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Is this happening? Actual question if there is someone here who measures this sort of thing..io seems to have been accepted by the tech community, as the place to go when you can't get your .com or .net. Maybe .ai too. Are there any new gTLDs gaining acceptance in the wider community?
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.io is an interesting example - because it is quite expensive yearly, poorer techies avoid it.So anyone who thinks .io is as good as .org is probably not price sensitive, and might be contributing to the worry that .org will go the same way eventually. .ai is even more expensive, but I haven't noticed .ai domains being used for things I visited, only heard that they are used.
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ccTLDs are vulnerable to censorship by the country owning them.
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.gg has seen decent adoption in newer gaming related sites. But that's the only one I can think of right now.
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Not only is .gg expensive but phonetically awkward on the telephone, something I didn't consider when registering my main domain years ago.
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Every time I see a ".gg" domain, I read it out as "gee-gee" -- a colloquial term for a horse...
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And registrars not charging 20+ USD per year for non-dot:com gTLD domains!
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This is a big problem for me. I will buy novelty domains on sale, then abandon them after a year because the renewal price is so much higher than the 1st year promotion. At least com and net are fairly consistent year to year.
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comcast, at&t and verizon have ~60% gross profit
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'gross profit' has a very specific meaning that is unintuitive. It doesn't include fixed costs or taxes. It's much better to look at profit margin, which is what they actually make. For Comcast's case, it's like 11.5%.
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right, exactly - I'm ~200 times angrier at Comcast for their $22.7 billion in profits than I am at Verisign for their $100 million.
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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.
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Absolutely true.My buddy managed money for the kind of non-profits everyone has heard of at one time or another. Tends to be that once they get big enough they find themselves recipients of endowments that they can invest however they see fit. They tend to put that capital to work in whatever yields the highest return. Know what offers the best returns? Stuff that tends to cause the problems the non-profit might have been set up to stop. Becomes a self sustaining ecosystem where the investments from the societally damaging corporations pays to sustain the cleanup effort.
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I suppose that it's only a pity that after 26 years in nonprofits--eight different .orgs--that I have never experienced this. Beware anecdotal data.
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Why do they do that? Are they extracting the profit out of the nonprofit somehow?
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Nonprofits still have to "make a profit" on the services they provide if they want to be a going concern. Unless you've got some big project to dump it into, it goes into an endowment for "a rainy day". Which then starts looking for places to park that money.Some of the biggest nonprofits also have the biggest endowments and/or asset holdings - colleges/universities, hospital systems, religious leadership, etc etc. Fundamentally, most non-profits are still run like a for-profit corporation and provide services in exchange for money, they just don't have publicly traded shares, dividends, etc. Think Harvard or hospital systems, not ACLU or Red Cross.
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I mean, it's easy to justify:"Our organization does good work with the money we have." "We could do more good work, or better work, with more money." "Therefore investments/endowments we receive should be invested inwards, to increase the amount of money we have available with which to do good work." You can see, of course, how this kind of cycle could become more about the money than the good work.
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Exactly. And that's actually how the .org sell was justified. From http://www.circleid.com/posts/20191127_why_i_voted_to_sell_o... :"This transaction will put that bigger mission on a solid footing — so that the Internet Society can provide much more substantive help to nonprofits than merely leasing domain names, and with more continuity over time. While it's true that running .org provided a relatively steady income stream, it effectively staked most of our revenue on a single business, and required a certain amount of our resources to be spent managing that business, distracting from the broader mission. Especially as PIR has grown over time, this situation has become increasingly untenable. Establishing a more diverse portfolio of investments will allow us to have more predictable revenue over time, and to take a longer-range perspective when it comes to achieving our mission. "
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Other than managing .org no one can say what ISOC’s so-called mission is nor point to any evidence of them doing it. The salaries they pay themselves however are substantial.
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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.
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Should they though? In the current climate that seems risky, if your donation to the university wasn't used for education but instead spent building infrastructure on Africa then some folks would likely decry that investment as being self-serving (trying to build good PR to cover up some perceived bad event that recently happened), or it might be decried as being injust (sure, they invested into that village, but the neighboring village was so much worse off), or it might be controversial (did you know that the village you gave money to was the home of the mother of the former dictator that raised a child army over here)... or it might just be decried as being wasteful (if the university has so much money to spare why should I donate to it - they're just lighting money on fire trying to fight causes that have no relation to education).I think there isn't an easy answer to this question and just letting the ball of cash grow bigger honestly might be the only "safe" decision we've left open to universities... that said pumping it into mutual funds managed by the president's husband or giving steep raises to administrators also looks terrible from the outside.
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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!
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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.
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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!
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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?
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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.
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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.
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Nothing is sacrosanct to those people. They don't care about the technology like we do, it's just a way for them to make their money. They'll destroy all of it just to get their way. They won't lose any sleep over it.Part of me hopes every TLD gets hit by this so that the exploitation becomes unbearable and people are forced to create a better system. Hopefully we'll end up with something that can't be subverted by these corporates.
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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..
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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.
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With so much to be outraged about, we're all burned out on outrage... to put it another way, the battery's in dire need of a recharge.
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>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
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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.
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> I really want to believe that the new owner will play niceI do too, but everything that the players involved in this have said and done strongly indicates that "playing nice" or even behaving relatively responsibly isn't in their DNA.
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You should perhaps transfer your domain to another registrar who will allow the standard maximum duration of 10 years (as of now) and then renew the domain for another five years right away. Cloudflare could be an option to transfer to, though I haven’t used it.
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Good idea. My personal .org domain is up for renewal right now. I guess it's time to lock it in for now.
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That's a good start, but maybe also purchase a separate non-.org domain and start the process of migration ASAFP.
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to future readers: namecheap will let you do 9 years.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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"?
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> when*if? This is basically never going to happen. TCP is too entrenched.
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> ... and it could use its power to sell the browsing data of users of .orgsBy what mechanism is this possible?
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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.
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... 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?
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> Ethos ... could use its power to sell the browsing data of users of .orgsIs this possible? Can all top-level domain name owners view all browsing data on their domain?
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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.
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Isn't gTLD by convention? It is technically feasible to set up a shadow registry and route to that, operated as a NPO.
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Attempted? It already happened.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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> However, the reading club with 20 members and yearly income of 300€ cannot afford a 100€ .org.Correct, I already seen that happen where smaller club shut down their web page because a hosting provider was unreliable. Since the lack of funds and expertise to move their WP site
they now use facebook instead.
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But why not just get a .club extension? Shouldn't .orgs be reserved for big orgs?
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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.
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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.
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> 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/
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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".
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No its not its anything else, this was one of the problems in the process before this one.
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> Shouldn't .orgs be reserved for big orgs?Why should it be? The size of the orgs has never been a criteria in the past, and the majority of nonprofits using a .org domain are small.
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What if there was a grandfather clause for existing orgs, so there is no funny business on pressuring people to change their domain.But I also feel like it would make sense to have a domain extension that meant something. Right now it seems like it does, but it doesn't.
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They aren't and they never were.On which basis would you restrict registrations from country x, where founding some organization is free or even comes with tax benefits while you'd allow registrations from countries requires some kind of operating income? It doesn't make any sense.
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I don't understand. Can you clarify what you mean by "registrations from countries requires some kind of operating income"?
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Why should it? .Org is about an ethos of philanthropy, which a club just doesn't have.
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A club is certainly more pro-humanity than some of the existing misathropic stuff there like internet.org. Philanthropy doesn't have to be about giving money.
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Per RFC920[1], which defined the initial TLDs, the ORG domain was for "Organizations". It doesn't say anything about "ethos", not-for-profit status, etc. It's for "organizations".I'd love to see a citation re: this "not-for-profit" designation being codified somewhere by IANA. It's not supported by RFC 920. [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc920
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I'd also love to see something indicating it is for big organizations only, which is patently false. Obviously it is irrelevant why it has that ethos as long as it in fact exists (if you want to pretend the general public doesn't see .org as generally indicating a service to humanity rather than a commercial venture, we can just agree to disagree). Also, in the doc you link it is clearly, evidently, for non-commercial organizations since .com comes first and covers all commercial entities, and.org is for all other entities. It is part of the Public Interest Registry. The point is there is a legitimate reason to want to use it, even if you are small - and no good reason to force small NGOs to abandon it other than to increase profit extraction from non-commercial organizations.
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I don't have a thing to say re: "big" vs "small" organizations using the ORG domain. Nor does the RFC say anything about it. (Perhaps someone else in the discussion was talking about organization size, but it wasn't me...)re: public perception vs. definition - I'm not "pretending" anything. The RFC doesn't call out that ORG is for not-for-profits, or for organizations related to any particular "ethos" or philosophy. People can think what they want about it, and organizations can try to use the public perception of ORG to influence public perception of their organization however they want. That doesn't change what the RFC says, which was my only point. The RFC doesn't specify who it is for, beyond "Organizations". This notion that ORG was "reserved" for not-for-profits seems to be completely lacking in evidence.
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I think it's an implicit read, that is, given that anyone commercial should be using .com, anyone using .org should be non-commercial (and likewise non-educational, non-governmental, non-military).That being said, it's not like .org has, in practice, ever been exclusively for non-commercial entities or non-profits.
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