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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday November 27 2019, @02:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-worry,-be-happy dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

One week after the news the non-profit .org internet registry was to be sold to a private equity firm, the board of the organization that has to approve the purchase met in private to discuss the situation.

Four days later, on November 21, that organization – ICANN – has yet to say a word about what it discussed or decided.

This past weekend, the board of the organization that is selling the rights to .org, and which will likely make $1bn or more from the sale, the Internet Society, met. On both the Saturday and Sunday, the proposed sale was a key topic of conversation. It has just to provide any details on what was discussed or decided.

The same cannot be said for those opposed to the deal.

One of the earliest indicators that the deal was going to meet a very different response from the internet community than the Internet Society (ISOC) expected came in the form of an article written by one person who has set up and run their own registry.

Co-founder of the .eco top-level domain Jacob Malthouse wrote an impassioned plea online that began, “I woke up this morning feeling a profound sense of loss.” An environmental campaigner as well as a former staffer of ICANN, Malthouse compared the sale of the .org registry to the paving over of forests.

The proudly non-profit .org registry, that had for years sold its domains for just $1 to non-profits in developing countries, is “our Yosemite,” Malthouse opined, referring to America's world-famous national park. In selling it to a for-profit private equity firm, he argued, “we’ve lost more than a digital Yosemite. We’ve lost our principles. We can do better. The millions of nonprofits who rely on .org deserve better.”

That sentiment was quickly echoed in the broader internet industry community, which, even in the era of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, continues to rely on mailing lists as its main form of communication.


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 28 2019, @12:54PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 28 2019, @12:54PM (#925622)

    That is incorrect. The current implementation of DNS is 100% centralized under ICANN which in turn oversees about a dozen centralized "authorized" servers for name resolution.

    It's the reason that domains, which are little more than an entry in a database no larger than the average users could store locally, are now a multibillion dollar industry requiring annual rent, when there's no reason they are not effectively free.

    The one and only reason the current system is not breaking worse than it already is is because it poses a sufficient barrier to entry to internet participation. Of course $10 a year or whatever is not itself the barrier, it's paying at all. In a world with a more logical domain system you should be able to establish a named presence on the internet for $0 (aside from the obvious requirement of a preexisting internet connection).

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 28 2019, @01:10PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 28 2019, @01:10PM (#925625)

    e.g. Imagine if Facebook charged $0.01 per month for access. Anybody anywhere could afford that quite trivially, yet they'd nonetheless lose hundreds of millions of users. The barrier to entry is not the cost itself, but setting up the payment method itself and then persisting it. Imagine an internet where we had just as many people involved, but it wasn't centralized. It'd probably still go to shit eventually, but it's at least closer to the ideals we all had in the 90s prior to the Eternal September. As an aside this is another reason that decentralized money is also something we must eventually adopt, but that's rather more difficult both to solve both on a technical level as well as overcoming governments/federal banks who derive immense power from its centralization.