The controversial proposed sale of the .org internet registry to an unknown private equity firm will hit a critical decision point this week, and all the organizations in charge are refusing to talk about it.
On December 9, DNS overseer ICANN put a temporary halt on the sale by sending a letter to the organization that runs the .org registry, PIR, as well as its parent company, ISOC aka the Internet Society, demanding greater transparency over the sale to Ethos Capital as well as answers to a series of questions asked by the wider internet community.
That response is due this week and a response has apparently been sent but no one – not ICANN, ISOC, PIR or Ethos – will talk about it. We still don't even have a list of the questions ICANN claims it asked.
"PIR has submitted responses to ICANN's request for additional information pertaining to the transaction with Ethos Capital, LLC," ISOC told us, having asked PIR on our behalf. "PIR is working with ICANN to release its original notice regarding the contemplated change of control and information it provided in response to ICANN's subsequent request. This information will be released in the coming days pursuant to the principles set forth in ICANN's Documentary Information Disclosure Policy."
We approached ICANN, pointing out that this response clearly indicates active discussions between the organizations as well as decisions being made on the basis of ICANN policies, and asked for comment. ICANN told us a day later that it wouldn't comment.
In the meantime, a group of internet pioneers and former ICANNers – including its first chair Esther Dyson and former CEO Mike Roberts – have said they are setting up a new non-profit organization that they propose take over the .org registry in order to continue to run it as a non-profit, rather than convert to a for-profit corporation, as the Ethos Capital deal indicated.
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After the sale, Ethos Capital, having paid $1.135 billion for .ORG to ISOC, will have to recoup that investment on a scale that's expected of a private equity firm. This week, Ethos revealed for the first time that some $360 million of the purchase price will be financed with a loan. The payments on that loan will have to come out of Ethos's profits, so they will probably need to raise more money per year than ISOC currently does. While Ethos could try to simply increase the number of its "customers" for .ORGs, PIR has tried this in the past, and the demand for the domains has remained largely flat. This is no surprise; the nonprofit sector just doesn't grow at exponential rates.
That brings us to the myriad reasons nonprofits have criticized the deal: every other way that Ethos might increase profits is bad news for .ORG users. And these tactics aren't farfetched: every one of them is already delivering profits in other sectors, often while harming domain registrants and their visitors.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/icann-needs-ask-more-questions-about-sale-org
Previously:
As Internet Pioneers Fight to Preserve .org's Status, those in Charge are Hiding Behind Dollar Signs
ICANN Demands Transparency from Others Over .org Deal; As for Itself... Well, Not So Much
Internet Society Says Opportunity to Sell .org TLD to Private Equity Biz Came Out of the Blue
As Pressure Builds Over .Org Sell-Off, Internet Governance Orgs Remains Silent
.ORG TLD Sold to Investment Firm Ethos Capital
ICANN Eliminates .org Price Cap Despite Overwhelming Opposition
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @10:56AM (6 children)
Internet is done.
Last person to sign off turn the lights off before leaving.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 14 2020, @11:51AM (2 children)
Is the Internet done, or is the World Wide Web done?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @04:18PM (1 child)
That's the thing, now isn't it? The process of tracking and assigning domain names shouldn't be a huge business. It should be more like the post office assigning and tracking postal addresses. Yes, there is expense there, but it's not something that people should be making a lot of money off of. Prices should be there to cover the cost of tracking changes, providing a set of DNS servers that are independent of the local ISPs and any additional cost just to discourage people from going through and registering dozens of domain names with the intention to flip them for profit.
In other words, this should be seen and treated as a utility.
This kind of behavior is just going to push to alternative means of indexing sites. With IPv6 incoming, fixed addresses aren't an issue and there are plenty of ways in which you could have an alternative method of making IP addressing memorable to humans.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @06:45PM
fuck these stupid assholes. we need something like: https://handshake.org/ [handshake.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday January 14 2020, @11:59AM (2 children)
Never give up! That's just what criminals want their victims to do. No resistance makes robbery so much easier.
These idiot, wannabe private rent-seeking monopolists are stinking this deal up. There can only be one reason for the lack of transparency: to enable them to sow confusion and hide what a huge rip-off it will be. I hope no one is fooled on that point. Don't give them the slightest benefit of the doubt. Don't believe it for a second when they cite "trade secrets" or "competitive advantage" or whatever other lame excuses they conceive to justify the secrecy.
Just look how Chicago's parking meter privatization deal worked out. Terrible! Well, terrible for the city and the people. Pretty good for the private investors.
About all they really have is capitalist dogma and mystique, the notion that governments are wasteful and inefficient, and the model of competitive, for-profit business is best at delivering maximum value to customers. Conveniently, the "competition" requirement gets dropped from the preaching, and what's left is a monopoly. And what have private monopolies always done? Why, gouge customers for substandard service and shoddy, inferior products, of course. *cough* Comcast *cough*.
I have no doubt that the private equity firm has done a lot more analysis of all the financial implications and consequences of the deal they offer. Whereas the people who propose to sell .org are operating blindly, save for how it will profit them personally to take whatever bribes are being offered. Deep ignorance Is a very bad position to be in when bargaining. Part of a corrupt deal is being entirely too willing to accept the ignorance.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @04:23PM (1 child)
If they want to kill the golden goose, there's nothing stopping people from creating an alternative method of finding sites by human memorable names. The biggest restriction currently is that many people don't have static IP addresses and with IPv6, that should no longer be the case for people that don't want dynamic addressing.
It's just a matter of time before people start creating their alternative methods as between the profit motivated landgrabs, the governments' seizing domain names for things they don't approve of and the limitations of domain names, we will get an alternative.
I remember when I first got online, ring sites were relatively common. They were nothing more than a set of related websites that would link each other into a ring. A website that just lists addresses with memorable names could be set up to act similarly to a DNS server without much trouble. And, I have no doubts that something that's more sophisticated could be worked out, such as alternate DNS servers that specifically route to names outside of the current system.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Thursday January 16 2020, @01:12AM
Search engines are pretty much there for many people. They are probably vaguely aware of domain names, but don't really use them. They just go to Google - or whatever they have set for search, type the name of the site they want to go to, and follow the first link. The actual domain name isn't something they pay attention to. In that sense they really are using a human memorable name to find the website.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @11:45AM (2 children)
> ....Esther Dyson and former CEO Mike Roberts – have said they are setting up a new non-profit organization that they propose take over the .org registry....
Here's hoping they win. A few more details here, https://medium.com/@ccor/charitable-web-leaders-launch-cooperative-alternative-for-org-domain-769b61b40de2 [medium.com]
But in case they don't, we just bought five years of domain name hosting for the little .org we volunteer to run.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Tuesday January 14 2020, @05:58PM
So we will have a bake sale to take on the 10 layers of obfuscating shell company hedge fund capital management firms between this and Thrive Capital, and Unit 8200.
I still can't get over the fact that the thing that "Erik Brooks" Vampire esq. or whoever/whatever that face in a suit really is, did before this was manage a children's concert series where sexual lyrics are changed to just kindof-sexual lyrics.
So glad they must be to have someone like him managing all of those children, aspiring for stardom...hmm. Something about that just stands out. Brown Graduate, gets hired right away to work with 'capital', first assignment, wrangle that kids concert series. And he is right on it. Next thing, purchase .org for 1 billion dollars.
The stuff of legend, the american dream is live on....
/S
https://archive.is/4KMrO [archive.is]
https://archive.is/hloUM [archive.is]
https://archive.is/YxuED [archive.is] (please share widely, I made this yeah but I would rather it spread than ask for credit)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @08:41PM
Is that has-been clown Tim Berners-Lee in there?