Ethos Capital, as per their website and business model, is a private equity firm, not a VC firm. Very different things. Hard to take people seriously when they don’t know the difference.
Are you here to argue that PE people are somehow more ethical or better at business than VC people? That's going to be a laugh line for anyone who has ever been exposed to them.
Nope. Just trying to help people distinguish the two businesses. PE companies acquire private companies and run them. VC companies invest in founders and they run the company.
If I understand the article correctly, ISOC took a reasonable decision based on (a) they are not supposed to be a registry operator; and (b) "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush". That is, the $75m/annum profit from .org may not last for long, but the $1.1135 billion will be a great endowment fund.
The flip side is the implication (and I hope I read this correctly) is that a bunch of smart but possibly ethically challenged individuals infiltrated ISOC (a non profit) in order to create investment opportunities for themselves down the road.
Considering that the price of a .org will almost certainly be going up soon, I think that $75m/year will soon be $82million. I don't think it's sustainable to pull that amount of money every year from a 1.1 billion endowment.
From the article (not my view): "And yet, those of us in the technology business understand viscerally that nothing lasts forever. What seems like a steady cash cow today may be obsolete sooner than anybody suspects. Personally I think even DNS will be disrupted in the future by some kind of distributed ledger technology beyond even blockchain, like hyperledger or hashgraph or some post-singularity quantum foam."
What a bunch of hand wavy bullshit. TLDs are like property. No one will buy into a system where they lose their valuable property. Facebook, Google, etc. aren’t interested in a decentralized, Wild West internet. The only way they get onboard with an alternative is if they control it and that’s way worse than the current system.
Today they sell .org claiming it’s not forever. Tomorrow they’ll be doing an IPO claiming it’ll be around for eternity.
Back-of-the-envelope I would expect to pull a steady 50 million/year out of a 1.1B endowment. That's certainly less than 75 or 82 million. I guess the endowment gives you more security and flexibility.
> That is, the $75m/annum profit from .org may not last for long
Why wouldn't it? .org is one of the most well-known TLDs, and I see know reason why there would be an exodus away from it (well, apart from this sale itself!) - it's as sure a thing as there can be.
I'm convinced that TLDs will slowly fade away. They're not very intuitive, especially if they're not a .com and the user is not very technical. I know Google would love for search to basically replace the need for them but I doubt that'll entirely happen. But I don't think they are long for this world.
I agree with your analysis that TLDs are mostly useless. But I doubt that's enough reason to believe they'll go away - if history is any indication, IP will seldom go away, whether useful or not, since whole industries tend to spring up around it.
Tell that to Telex, AOL keywords, fax, long distance telephone networks, cassette tapes, pager numbers, the BBS, film developing, etc. There are whole areas of IP and technical ecosystems that --- while they have not completely disappeared --- have become obsolete and their daily use and commercial value has plummeted.
That's the tough part. People overwhelmingly just search for the site they want and go to it that way so it's hard to figure out what would take its place other than some form of search. But a lot of people seem to be thinking about this (I remember Google announcing a while ago that they were looking at how DNS could be replaced).
I don't know what a good answer is. From the user perspective it'll likely look more like a search. but technically? Honestly it could remain DNS just abstract away from the TLDs to make them not mean as much.
The article argues that nothing is forever. There may be technology changes in the future that make DNS providers obsolete. So that money is less guaranteed over time than an endowment.
No, that's not why they did it. They did it because they thought they could get away with it. But the charter of ISOC never was to make a mint of the .org TLD by selling it, and as far as I'm concerned this deal will be reversed at some point or we should simply set up an alternative root and a pox on both their houses.
OpenNIC would be that alternative root although often are they at odds with ICANN creating new tlds that conflict with their own. It seems like the DNS system in it's current form is broken and I'm not convinced an alternative root is the solution but perhaps part of one.
Handshake.org is trying to create an alternative root that is better (along the dimensions of security and governance) than the current system. I can see it gaining adoption especially in light of recent events.
Maybe I'm just cynical, but the fact that the first thing mentioned on their homepage is a cryptocurrency "airdrop" doesn't leave me with a confident feeling about the project's long-term viability.
That's a fair response. That said, it's worth noting:
> The Project Sponsors received a minority participation (7.5%) of HNS in the interest of aligning all stakeholders, including industry. All of the 10.2MM USD collected from Project Sponsors (Funds and Individuals) will be given to Free and Open Source Software projects.
The rest was all airdropped in an attempt to get wide distribution / get it in the hands of as many users as possible.
Honestly, that doesn't allay my concerns at all. It all reeks of a pump-and-dump scheme. (I'm not saying that Handshake is trying to execute this scheme, but that they remind me of other projects which have done so.)
The pattern for these projects is pretty predictable: Promise amazing things from a technical project associated with a cryptocurrency token. Premine a bunch of those tokens and give them to insiders, then airdrop the token to create a market. The insiders sell off their tokens, and the project is forgotten.
As I've said previously in other discussions, OpenNIC is, quite simply, in no position to replace ICANN. They're a tiny amateur operation with no organized governance, no formal registries, and very little infrastructure. (Many of their "root" resolvers are hosted on small VPS providers like Linode and DigitalOcean.)
The "devils advocate" first part misses that ISOC was already not operating .org, all of that was outsourced to Afilias, PIR was essentially a vehicle to pay some more graft to another set of musical chairs people that travel freely between ISOC, ICANN, PIR and Afilias.
Honestly if that analysis is correct then on one hand I concede that it does make the decision appear less like pure bribery than I initially thought but on the other it's even worse for .org users.
Maybe I'm wrong to consider this a zero-sum game, but surely if ISOC made a good deal selling .org that means that Ethos Capital got the short end of the stick. That means that eventually they'll realize that they can't make as much money out of it as they had hoped. And then what will they do? Agree to continue operating the TLD at a loss? ell oh ell. It's more likely that they'll either attempt to extort more money from people who can't actually afford to migrate or "strip" the TLD for parts somehow.
On the other hand if ISOC bet on the wrong horse they've lost the Goose that Laid Golden Eggs, and they'll be in a worse position to help the open web. From the point of view of people believing in the ethos (ha!) of what .org is supposed to stand for, it seems like a lose/lose situation.
I still don't really think it made sense to greenlight that deal for purely monetary reasons, I think the people on that board lost track of their objective, which I think is what the author acknowledges in part in his conclusion.
> Maybe I'm wrong to consider this a zero-sum game, but surely if ISOC made a good deal selling .org that means that Ethos Capital got the short end of the stick.
The field of economics, and pretty much all monetary transactions, are about demonstrating that sales (and thus wealth) are not a zero-sum game. Whether that’s true for any particular case, such as this one, can be debated forever still, just often not based simply on that assumption.
Care to expand on your one sentence dismissal of modern economics? Maybe a second sentence describing the means by which this happens, or an example, or even - gasp - a source?
Yes, that's the point. We're here for reasoned discussion. Facile appeals to emotion are always unfair, and always OT on HN. No one was on Mars sitting out the last big economic event.
It's not a dismissal of the field of economics, but of some of the popular businesses and business practices. The science of economics identifies the negative-sum games too. Keywords include, "tragedy of the commons", "externalities". Examples include AirBnB, tobacco companies, consumer IoT, advertising industry.
I think the marginal cost of tobacco companies is clearly negative a negative sum, which is the strongest form of their argument. It’s also clear they are not suggesting the entire economy is zero sum.
Do you feel the Tobacco industry is a net benefit to society? If not then it’s just a question of which industries make the list of net positives vs net negatives.
That's possibly plausible, but it's a lot more complicated a claim than just those industries being bad. To take the example of tobacco, you'd need to quantify the enjoyment smokers get from it, the harm to their lives, the harm to other's lives, the benefit to everyone in the supply chain (from farm workers to farmers to advertisers to executives), the harm to everyone in the supply chain (especially the exploitation of those who are do the actually picking of the tobacco and assembly of the cigarettes), all the politicians who get benefits from, all the harm they cause, and so much more.
It's also the wrong question to ask. It's asking if sum(negatives) > sum(positives). But not all those harms and benefits should be equally important under any rational more framework. For example, I don't think any reasonable person would count the benefit corrupt politicians get from tobacco companies slush funds to be an argument in favor of keeping tobacco legal.
In other words determining if what you said is true is extremely difficult and extremely pointless.
sum(negatives) > sum(positives) is perfectly legitimate -- it's not extremely pointless, nor is it particularly difficult to assess. It's (quite literally) a "pros vs. cons" analysis. It can be complex to quantify, but we do so all the time through modeling. The function needn't be linear in the parameters, and many parameters can intangible (e.g. societal, moral, etc) that are subject to jurisdiction, norms, culture, etc.
In fact, we do similar comparisons all the time: Annual employee performance reviews, asset appraisals (stock, realestate, bonds, etc), and internal rate of return (IRR) or risk-adjusted rate of return. The models are just models -- they can easily suffer from incomplete data, history, sentiment, and bias, intangibles, sentiment -- but the world makes the decision based on these models all day, every day.
You're right that assessing a model like that is perfectly legitimate, but all the models you mention are much more limited and well-understood than multiple sectors of the economy. The original post in this chain claimed "a good chunk" of the modern economy was net-negative. I don't believe we make similarly hard to quantify calculations every day.
It's also important to note that all the examples you give have a lot more data supporting them than any of these internet comments. If the original poster actually built a model of a "good chunk" of the economy and proved it was net-negative and zero-sum I wouldn't have been dismissive.
Maybe it is, and we just didn't realize it yet: climate change and others destructions of the environment may lead us to situation worse than what we started the twentieth century with. We can't know for sure, but that's not impossible.
And BTW, the OP didn't mqke q claim about “everything”, and just said some of the transactions have a clear negative sum (which is hard to argue against).
The only voice of reason was at the tail end of the video where someone voiced: it is all very good and well to talk about assurance and promises and future guarantees, the problem is we have a conflicting timeline and effectively what we've been presented with is we're being asked to accept the deal on the basis that our concerns will be dealt with, and I don't think it is reasonable and would like to ask that Ethos and ISOC and so on consider simply delaying it long enough to put in place the binding commitments they are clearly willing to undertake before we finalise the deal rather than the other way around.
I raised a similar question but rather asked why they couldn't delay the deal to allow for community and public scrutiny and why everything has to be rushed. I got a response from someone saying the deal is dead in the water if it isn't done by April 1st next year.
I think the deal isn't good for the internet and ICANN shouldn't allow it to proceed. But...
> Maybe I'm wrong to consider this a zero-sum game, but surely if ISOC made a good deal selling .org that means that Ethos Capital got the short end of the stick
Lots of transactions like this aren't zero sum. ISOC gets everything they want to continue their mission forever and escapes a major source of uncertainty/risk. Ethos Capital gets an asset for less than its expected value and tries to leverage the risk to make it worth more.
> eventually they'll realize that they can't make as much money out of it as they had hoped. And then what will they do? Agree to continue operating the TLD at a loss? ell oh ell. It's more likely that they'll either attempt to extort more money from people who can't actually afford to migrate or "strip" the TLD for parts somehow.
If they have the option of 'stripping' the TLD for cash, do you think they'd ever decline to do this?
How often do people notice domains? I've seen many users use Google or similar to find their desired site such as facebook without typing the URL. If it were only an IPv6 address, would people even care?
I notice domains. And I don't trust domains that don't end in .com, .org or a recognizable national TLD.
Besides, the point is irrelevant.
When you build an online brand, you build it by having links distributed on the web, to get the Google juice going, on social media, on forums, etc. Even in business emails you add your domain there for easy reference later.
Then if you have to change the domain, all of those links will be broken.
Perhaps it was incorrect of me to claim that users don't notice domains. I suppose the issue I was getting at was users don't appear to memorize the domain and instead use Google or similar for finding the site they are looking for.
Those links work with domains or addresses no matter if it's https://yourdomain.com/ or https://[2001::1]/. Google finds those domains through a variety of means (social media, collecting other domains from the sites they index, manually submitted domains, etc). Google also indexes addresses.
But links aren't alive; so if somebody once linked to something you wrote/own/built/whatever on some domain, you can't magically transfer that link to your new site if the domain name system decides to jack up prices until you consider moving.
And you're similarly not likely to own an ip address forever, not to mention that if you have any doubts about the userfriendliness of domains, you don't need to wonder about ip-addresses. Ip addresses are worse on all fronts; leaving you back to square one: the DNS gatekeepers own your domain and merely let you use it. Just pray they don't change the terms of that deal.
But we created a system where every x years you're forced to pay whatever the owner of the tld says you must, basically you're being held hostage and can never be freed.
Domains matter because they name a thing. This allows us to create an expectation. This is also what certificates are based around. They certify that "The server you are talking to really has this name". This is important because names have meanings to people.
Can someone explain to me what actually operating a registry means? I have always assumed that it basically consists of maintaining a database replicated across a few authoritative servers and handling WOIS information but this can't possibly warrant $25M of yeary expenses.
Administration can consume any amount of money, so long as it isn't getting in the way of the money coming in the door. Just look at universities in USA. They're not doing anything now they weren't doing in 1980, yet tuition inflation was 7% over for most of the period since then. Where did the money go? They hired more assistant administrators, to justify higher salaries for the top administrators. Also the perks are pretty nice.
I doubt even your numeric figure is exact; source?
Anyway, supposing that it is - how do you know that's where the money went? And - how do you know the money went mostly to the same place in most universities?
>They find that supply factors such as wages in the education sector and state appropriations to higher education both play important roles in explaining changes in college tuition inflation. In contrast, they find little evidence that demand factors such as changes in the availability of student loans have a significant effect on college tuition.
This is a pretty general assertion on the rising cost of college, and in the US it's commonly understood that there are a lot of extra admins, but not a lot of extra professors for students; mostly adjunct faculty and never-tenured instructors. Your experience wil vary depending on the public/private, size, department, etc. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-grow...
Even there, net tuition actually paid by students at private schools is also largely flat, as while the nameplate tuition has gone up, few students pay that, as they get grants, financial aid, etc.:
Cause & effect got obscured by compounding factors, including, but not limited to: privatizing student loans, grade inflation, ratcheting up credentials, glut of labor, artificially constraining supply, the textbook racket, the standardized testing racket, the academic publishing racket, the money chase for funding basic research, and others I'm sure I've forgotten.
The technical pieces are running the authoritative NS servers for the tld (lots of sites, anycast, etc), running the whois servers (not so hard anymore, now that post GDPR, they don't return much), and running the registrar facing apis that interface with the live database.
Administratively, I'm sure there's a rather enormous number of customer service requests to deal with from registrars and law enforcement/court orders. Also accounting related to the registrars.
If they were running it themselves, $25M/year seems within reason to me. Affilias can probably do it for less, because they're running a bunch of tlds, so the capital costs of operating the registry are amortizable across all of them. However, PIR could have (and should have) bid that out occasionally, so I'd guess there isn't an obscene margin here.
One thing I noticed in PIR's annual report is abuse. They take down thousands of domains per year due to court orders and all of those need to be reviewed by lawyers. That could be millions of dollars a year.
You also need lots of lawyers just to keep up with what's going on in ICANN (which looks a lot like a full employment scheme for lawyers, lobbyists, and policy wonks). Then they spent over $1M on marketing. It adds up.
FWIW, the economics of .org are easy to look up in the PIR 990, as of 2017. The 990 shows ~90m in revenue with ~75m in profit - which was split 40m to ISOC and 35m to ISOC foundation (a subsidiary of ISOC).
This analysis is highly suspect. It's a great sales pitch sure - but it's false.
So first of all: the overhead for running the registry is unreasonably high. You'd expect there to be considerable room for reducing costs, so the 75M$ per year is artificially low; revenue is around 100M.
Secondly, that revenue is artificially (but reasonably!) low because the price is capped. But guess what? That price cap was just removed; so the actual price may rise considerably; certainly it is not reasonable to assume that under the terms specifically changed for the deal the revenue will stay at just 100M a year.
Thirdly, the risk of .org evaporating is pretty absurd. The cost of a domain is (and should be) pretty trivial compared to the value most people can extract from it; the fact that this is a for-profit business at all is highly questionable - it's as if your street address were owned by a third party, and you can't have anything shipped their at your cost without the acquiescence of a third party. I'm not sure anybody is seriously buying this story of .org becoming irrelevant to the point that people won't pay 10$ (+margin above wholesale) for a domain. But even if you're unsure - the very fact that a private party snapped this up is evidence to the contrary.
Fourthly, it's entirely unreasonable for ISOC to earn even a penny off of this deal. What exactly did they do to earn the right to profit of other people's valuable contributions? Right, nothing - they were just there are the right time. There's no reason they should even be an exclusive party at all, let alone one that operates with a profit motive.
Fifthly, the people involved, and the timing, stinks. If this were all above-board, it should have been public and not have been bought out by insiders almost immediately after those same people are involved in enabling the deal. It's not at all transparent what those insiders were doing, but if it's not plain old highway robbery again, perhaps some transparency would have helped.
Frankly, the whole cartel (DNS, not merely .org) should simply be dumped; there's just no reason this is private to start with, and most certainly not run with a profit motive; that's just asking to reasons to distort the far more important markets with rent-seeking behavior here. If chrome+safari were to sponsor an alternative to DNS, I'm sure the rest of the browsers would follow; e.g. by using a different protocol (not http(s)) to disambiguate, and by forking the existing (as of some fixed date) DNS domains. Good riddance to those leaches.
The real loser in this deal is us. Not only is trust lost (or already has been from other past DNS goings-on), but we, the registrants, end up paying more, financially and otherwise.
Generally speaking, the underpinnings of the Internet (protocols, certain levels of infrastructure) should always and forever be public, not-for-profit, "open-source", and not patentable, in order to protect the integrity of the system. I'm no expert, so maybe a lot of it is this way already, but DNS seems to be a bastion of for-profit greed.
All of this walks hand in hand with Net Neutrality, in my view -- governance to protect what is a fundamental human right, the free (as in freedom, and to some degree, as in beer) flow of information. And in an ideal world, objectively factual information.
dumb question, but if VCs decided that the venture is profitable under a certain model (aka: no limits pricing), then why doesn't the domain registry just do so themselves?
Issue #1 is 'whether to sell it', issue #2 is the self-dealing and lack of transparency around the sale.
Where was the public information?
Where was the bidding process?
Where was the attempt to get a publicly acceptable valuation?
Why are the 'buyers' of the asset related to those on the inside?
There are serious problems here, it's entirely possible they sold an asset for a fraction of it's value, amounting to a direct transfer of wealth.
I haven't yet heard the point that if .org prices go up too much, nonprofits could abandon it and switch to .ngo, which is better anyway. Many will keep their .orgs even if prices go up 10-fold or more, but what percentage is that from all .orgs?
Why should organizations be forced to change their business cards, website address, all email addresses, letterhead, signage and such because the new venture capitalist vulture owners of .org are a pack of shady rent seekers?
To quote Michael Bolton from Office Space:
Samir: Hmm… well why don't you just go by Mike instead of Michael?
Michael: No way. Why should I change? He's the one who sucks.
> Unlike the more prevalent .org domain, which is also managed by the Public Interest Registry, .ngo will require validation of the registrant's non-governmental status
Yes, and it is slightly amusing to think that an ordinary internet user is going to make a decision about whether to trust .org more than .ngo domains by checking Wikipedia. That's wikipedia dot org...
We've witnessed many companies abandon .ly and .io with time. Plus, .org means "organization". Commercial entities are also organizations, so, not sure why it was chosen for nonprofits. NPO and NGO are way more meaningful abbreviations anyway.
If the mission of the Internet Societies is to connect people to the Internet, one question is why they want to connect people to the Internet. The .org sale communicates that the reason is to extract as much money from them as possible. What they really have a problem with is the people extracting money paying to develop standards, so they strive to extract as much free labor as possible from people as their money is extracted.
TLDs serve as a classification structure for various aspects of human interest, knowledge, creativity and commerce...
Where should the canonical for TLDs come from?
Should a particular interest have its own TLD, regardless of topic - how to measure when to provide a TLD -- is it scale of interested people? is it ideologically based?
As such, should there be a .dem and a .gop? if so, then should them be a .socialist? .nazi? .zionist? etc?
Some of the current TLDs are silly, to me, but what is the barrier to entry and what is the criteria for approval?
And most importantly, WHO APPROVES? Like literally - the names of the people who actually make TLDs happen?
I don't want to be aware of relationships between zillion different companies and organization just to be able to understand how much it will cost to map a string to a number and what BS hoops I will have to jump through to keep that mapping "operational". It's totally absurd.
DNS is a rotten system. It's rotten technically, politically and administratively. It has to be replaced by something distributed. Step #1 is to collectively admit this.
The whole concept that the registry owner has an ownership interest in domains is just wrong. Registrars have gotten uppity. Here are the current terms from Network Solutions:
"Web.com expressly reserves the right to deny, cancel, terminate, suspend, lock, or modify access to (or control of) any goods or services (including the right to cancel or transfer any domain name registration) for any reason (as determined by Web.com in its sole and absolute discretion."[1]
You don't have to put up with that overreach. Compare Gandi:
"You are the owner of the domain name, i.e. the individual or legal person who is declared as the owner as soon as the domain name is registered and visible as such in the "Whois" domain name directory"[2]
Adding an additional pieces of Information to the mix.
Donuts, Inc, was bidding for .Web in 2016, and lost to Nu Dot. Nu Dot then sold the name to Verizon. Somehow this was unfair and they decide to sue them. ( What ? )
Had Donut got .Web, they would have floated the company and make a return of Investment. Since they lost, they figure out their next step / solution was .ORG. And the timeline in 2017 and 2018 seems to confirm that.
104 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 79.2 ms ] threadThe flip side is the implication (and I hope I read this correctly) is that a bunch of smart but possibly ethically challenged individuals infiltrated ISOC (a non profit) in order to create investment opportunities for themselves down the road.
- That ISOC was reasonably justified in taking a lump sum rather than operating a registry.
- That the sale of the registry was corrupt and not in the public's best interest.
Today they sell .org claiming it’s not forever. Tomorrow they’ll be doing an IPO claiming it’ll be around for eternity.
Why wouldn't it? .org is one of the most well-known TLDs, and I see know reason why there would be an exodus away from it (well, apart from this sale itself!) - it's as sure a thing as there can be.
I don't know what a good answer is. From the user perspective it'll likely look more like a search. but technically? Honestly it could remain DNS just abstract away from the TLDs to make them not mean as much.
At least that's my opinion.
> The Project Sponsors received a minority participation (7.5%) of HNS in the interest of aligning all stakeholders, including industry. All of the 10.2MM USD collected from Project Sponsors (Funds and Individuals) will be given to Free and Open Source Software projects.
The rest was all airdropped in an attempt to get wide distribution / get it in the hands of as many users as possible.
The pattern for these projects is pretty predictable: Promise amazing things from a technical project associated with a cryptocurrency token. Premine a bunch of those tokens and give them to insiders, then airdrop the token to create a market. The insiders sell off their tokens, and the project is forgotten.
ICANN owner who also owns Donuts, Inc (they own all the new TLDs .donuts, etc) buys .org from former owner (ISOC) who is also now much richer.
Maybe I'm wrong to consider this a zero-sum game, but surely if ISOC made a good deal selling .org that means that Ethos Capital got the short end of the stick. That means that eventually they'll realize that they can't make as much money out of it as they had hoped. And then what will they do? Agree to continue operating the TLD at a loss? ell oh ell. It's more likely that they'll either attempt to extort more money from people who can't actually afford to migrate or "strip" the TLD for parts somehow.
On the other hand if ISOC bet on the wrong horse they've lost the Goose that Laid Golden Eggs, and they'll be in a worse position to help the open web. From the point of view of people believing in the ethos (ha!) of what .org is supposed to stand for, it seems like a lose/lose situation.
I still don't really think it made sense to greenlight that deal for purely monetary reasons, I think the people on that board lost track of their objective, which I think is what the author acknowledges in part in his conclusion.
The field of economics, and pretty much all monetary transactions, are about demonstrating that sales (and thus wealth) are not a zero-sum game. Whether that’s true for any particular case, such as this one, can be debated forever still, just often not based simply on that assumption.
Yes, a good chunk of them are really negative-sum games, once you include all secondary stakeholders in the calculations.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21725341
Do you feel the Tobacco industry is a net benefit to society? If not then it’s just a question of which industries make the list of net positives vs net negatives.
It's also the wrong question to ask. It's asking if sum(negatives) > sum(positives). But not all those harms and benefits should be equally important under any rational more framework. For example, I don't think any reasonable person would count the benefit corrupt politicians get from tobacco companies slush funds to be an argument in favor of keeping tobacco legal.
In other words determining if what you said is true is extremely difficult and extremely pointless.
In fact, we do similar comparisons all the time: Annual employee performance reviews, asset appraisals (stock, realestate, bonds, etc), and internal rate of return (IRR) or risk-adjusted rate of return. The models are just models -- they can easily suffer from incomplete data, history, sentiment, and bias, intangibles, sentiment -- but the world makes the decision based on these models all day, every day.
It's also important to note that all the examples you give have a lot more data supporting them than any of these internet comments. If the original poster actually built a model of a "good chunk" of the economy and proved it was net-negative and zero-sum I wouldn't have been dismissive.
And BTW, the OP didn't mqke q claim about “everything”, and just said some of the transactions have a clear negative sum (which is hard to argue against).
Link: https://vimeo.com/377655043
The only voice of reason was at the tail end of the video where someone voiced: it is all very good and well to talk about assurance and promises and future guarantees, the problem is we have a conflicting timeline and effectively what we've been presented with is we're being asked to accept the deal on the basis that our concerns will be dealt with, and I don't think it is reasonable and would like to ask that Ethos and ISOC and so on consider simply delaying it long enough to put in place the binding commitments they are clearly willing to undertake before we finalise the deal rather than the other way around.
I raised a similar question but rather asked why they couldn't delay the deal to allow for community and public scrutiny and why everything has to be rushed. I got a response from someone saying the deal is dead in the water if it isn't done by April 1st next year.
> Maybe I'm wrong to consider this a zero-sum game, but surely if ISOC made a good deal selling .org that means that Ethos Capital got the short end of the stick
Lots of transactions like this aren't zero sum. ISOC gets everything they want to continue their mission forever and escapes a major source of uncertainty/risk. Ethos Capital gets an asset for less than its expected value and tries to leverage the risk to make it worth more.
If they have the option of 'stripping' the TLD for cash, do you think they'd ever decline to do this?
Besides, the point is irrelevant.
When you build an online brand, you build it by having links distributed on the web, to get the Google juice going, on social media, on forums, etc. Even in business emails you add your domain there for easy reference later.
Then if you have to change the domain, all of those links will be broken.
As they say... Cool URIs don't change ;-)
https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html
And you're similarly not likely to own an ip address forever, not to mention that if you have any doubts about the userfriendliness of domains, you don't need to wonder about ip-addresses. Ip addresses are worse on all fronts; leaving you back to square one: the DNS gatekeepers own your domain and merely let you use it. Just pray they don't change the terms of that deal.
I just renewed and I've got another 10 years. Things will be sorted out by then.
Domains matter in links.
Domains matter because they name a thing. This allows us to create an expectation. This is also what certificates are based around. They certify that "The server you are talking to really has this name". This is important because names have meanings to people.
Anyway, supposing that it is - how do you know that's where the money went? And - how do you know the money went mostly to the same place in most universities?
This sounds like a baseless generalization.
PS - I'm not from the US.
>They find that supply factors such as wages in the education sector and state appropriations to higher education both play important roles in explaining changes in college tuition inflation. In contrast, they find little evidence that demand factors such as changes in the availability of student loans have a significant effect on college tuition.
Take a university that provides decent statistics:
http://irp.dpb.cornell.edu/university-factbook/employees
click workflow trends. The workforce composition is virtually unchanged over the past 20 years.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.30.a...
Expenditures in real per-student dollars are up, but at nothing like 7% a year. Tuition is up because of disinvestment by state legislatures:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-m...
Even there, net tuition actually paid by students at private schools is also largely flat, as while the nameplate tuition has gone up, few students pay that, as they get grants, financial aid, etc.:
https://research.collegeboard.org/trends/college-pricing/fig...
Cause & effect got obscured by compounding factors, including, but not limited to: privatizing student loans, grade inflation, ratcheting up credentials, glut of labor, artificially constraining supply, the textbook racket, the standardized testing racket, the academic publishing racket, the money chase for funding basic research, and others I'm sure I've forgotten.
Source: Worked in higher ed.
Administratively, I'm sure there's a rather enormous number of customer service requests to deal with from registrars and law enforcement/court orders. Also accounting related to the registrars.
If they were running it themselves, $25M/year seems within reason to me. Affilias can probably do it for less, because they're running a bunch of tlds, so the capital costs of operating the registry are amortizable across all of them. However, PIR could have (and should have) bid that out occasionally, so I'd guess there isn't an obscene margin here.
You also need lots of lawyers just to keep up with what's going on in ICANN (which looks a lot like a full employment scheme for lawyers, lobbyists, and policy wonks). Then they spent over $1M on marketing. It adds up.
So first of all: the overhead for running the registry is unreasonably high. You'd expect there to be considerable room for reducing costs, so the 75M$ per year is artificially low; revenue is around 100M.
Secondly, that revenue is artificially (but reasonably!) low because the price is capped. But guess what? That price cap was just removed; so the actual price may rise considerably; certainly it is not reasonable to assume that under the terms specifically changed for the deal the revenue will stay at just 100M a year.
Thirdly, the risk of .org evaporating is pretty absurd. The cost of a domain is (and should be) pretty trivial compared to the value most people can extract from it; the fact that this is a for-profit business at all is highly questionable - it's as if your street address were owned by a third party, and you can't have anything shipped their at your cost without the acquiescence of a third party. I'm not sure anybody is seriously buying this story of .org becoming irrelevant to the point that people won't pay 10$ (+margin above wholesale) for a domain. But even if you're unsure - the very fact that a private party snapped this up is evidence to the contrary.
Fourthly, it's entirely unreasonable for ISOC to earn even a penny off of this deal. What exactly did they do to earn the right to profit of other people's valuable contributions? Right, nothing - they were just there are the right time. There's no reason they should even be an exclusive party at all, let alone one that operates with a profit motive.
Fifthly, the people involved, and the timing, stinks. If this were all above-board, it should have been public and not have been bought out by insiders almost immediately after those same people are involved in enabling the deal. It's not at all transparent what those insiders were doing, but if it's not plain old highway robbery again, perhaps some transparency would have helped.
Frankly, the whole cartel (DNS, not merely .org) should simply be dumped; there's just no reason this is private to start with, and most certainly not run with a profit motive; that's just asking to reasons to distort the far more important markets with rent-seeking behavior here. If chrome+safari were to sponsor an alternative to DNS, I'm sure the rest of the browsers would follow; e.g. by using a different protocol (not http(s)) to disambiguate, and by forking the existing (as of some fixed date) DNS domains. Good riddance to those leaches.
Generally speaking, the underpinnings of the Internet (protocols, certain levels of infrastructure) should always and forever be public, not-for-profit, "open-source", and not patentable, in order to protect the integrity of the system. I'm no expert, so maybe a lot of it is this way already, but DNS seems to be a bastion of for-profit greed.
All of this walks hand in hand with Net Neutrality, in my view -- governance to protect what is a fundamental human right, the free (as in freedom, and to some degree, as in beer) flow of information. And in an ideal world, objectively factual information.
Where was the public information? Where was the bidding process? Where was the attempt to get a publicly acceptable valuation? Why are the 'buyers' of the asset related to those on the inside?
There are serious problems here, it's entirely possible they sold an asset for a fraction of it's value, amounting to a direct transfer of wealth.
Not if it's only 15x profits!! And those profits are more or less guaranteed.
To quote Michael Bolton from Office Space:
Samir: Hmm… well why don't you just go by Mike instead of Michael?
Michael: No way. Why should I change? He's the one who sucks.
> Unlike the more prevalent .org domain, which is also managed by the Public Interest Registry, .ngo will require validation of the registrant's non-governmental status
TLDs serve as a classification structure for various aspects of human interest, knowledge, creativity and commerce...
Where should the canonical for TLDs come from?
Should a particular interest have its own TLD, regardless of topic - how to measure when to provide a TLD -- is it scale of interested people? is it ideologically based?
As such, should there be a .dem and a .gop? if so, then should them be a .socialist? .nazi? .zionist? etc?
Some of the current TLDs are silly, to me, but what is the barrier to entry and what is the criteria for approval?
And most importantly, WHO APPROVES? Like literally - the names of the people who actually make TLDs happen?
DNS is a rotten system. It's rotten technically, politically and administratively. It has to be replaced by something distributed. Step #1 is to collectively admit this.
"Web.com expressly reserves the right to deny, cancel, terminate, suspend, lock, or modify access to (or control of) any goods or services (including the right to cancel or transfer any domain name registration) for any reason (as determined by Web.com in its sole and absolute discretion."[1]
You don't have to put up with that overreach. Compare Gandi:
"You are the owner of the domain name, i.e. the individual or legal person who is declared as the owner as soon as the domain name is registered and visible as such in the "Whois" domain name directory"[2]
[1] https://assets.web.com/legal/English/TermsOfUse.pdf [2] https://contract.gandi.net/v5/contracts/18056/DomainNameCond...
Donuts, Inc, was bidding for .Web in 2016, and lost to Nu Dot. Nu Dot then sold the name to Verizon. Somehow this was unfair and they decide to sue them. ( What ? )
Had Donut got .Web, they would have floated the company and make a return of Investment. Since they lost, they figure out their next step / solution was .ORG. And the timeline in 2017 and 2018 seems to confirm that.