This sounds like exactly what is needed right now!
I'm particularly impressed with the Board of Directors.
From "Charitable Web Leaders Launch Cooperative Alternative for .ORG Domain" [0]:
> Some of the world’s best known charitable web leaders have created a new cooperative that includes all .ORG registrants. The articles of incorporation were filed on January 6, 2020.
> Leaders from Wikimedia, the foundation behind Wikipedia.org; Internet Archive, which runs archive.org; Mozilla Foundation, which runs the Firefox web browser; and Packet Clearing House, are among those who supported the effort to create the Cooperative Corporation for .ORG Registrants (CCOR). CCOR is designed as a viable alternative to selling the dot-org domain to private equity firm Ethos Capital.
Absolutely delighted with this. The internet needs more co-operatives and it would be an unadulterated joy to see a common tld taken into co-operative ownership in this way, especially by such a competent group of people.
I get that something has been setup and that some serious heads are involved but with respect to ownership / control of the .org tld what is being proposed if anything?
Or is this simply a representative organisation to protect the interests of domain holders?
Not dumb at all. As best as I can interpret from the FAQ they’re simply looking for a transparent process around any ownership change, at least for now.
Yep, it's not totally clear yet from their website.
My personal hypothesis is that given an alternative recipient for the .org registry that's better in every respect except for the amount of money they're able to pour into the pockets of ICANN / Internet Society (ISOC), it'll be more difficult for these parties to pretend that the .org sale is about anything except graft.
As we've see from previously, morally flexible members of these organizations (e.g. Richard Barnes [1]) have claimed that the sale of .org to Ethos is really in the interest of the public good! As details continue to come to light, these arguments are going to get continually more difficult to make.
I'm not sure it's realistic the CCOR succeeds in gaining control of .org (although fingers crossed, it sounds like they'd be a far better than owner than ISOC or Ethos), but worst case, they'll force some additional transparency into the process.
They're essentially saying "we have a lot of firepower, you go through with this and we'll be a thorn in your side at court". Now options include going forward as planned, going forward but without doing anything else to raise anyone's ire, going forward with a commitment to governance that makes stakeholders more comfortable, backing down, and maybe other options too.
wikipedia.org, archive.org, mozilla.org, and whatever Packet Clearing House runs stop serving content in favor of a splashpage explaining that .org has sold to a criminal^Wour lawyers say we aren't allow to call then crimials organization, linking to their respective new non-.org domains, and urging everyone else to do likewise. A TLD like .org is only worth it's reputaion, and half of that could be made to evaporate overnight.
Hi. I’m one of the CCOR board members, and I’ll try to answer any questions I can. No such thing as a dumb question.
Yes, the cooperative is of all .ORG registrants, and exists to protect our collective interests. There’s no way to have absolute unanimity among the better part of ten million individuals and organizations, but so far, we’ve heard from several tens of thousands of .ORG registrants, and only three (including ISOC and PIR) were in favor of having a non-competitive redelegation such as the proposed one from ISOC to Ethos.
So, CCOR has three objectives, one short term, one mid-term, one long-term:
In the short term, to stop this backdoor deal, which bypasses the established, multistakeholder, competitive process.
In the mid-term, to get ICANN to launch the multistakeholder-administered, transparent, open competition to select the next .ORG delegate.
In the long term, for the .ORG registrants ourselves to put forward the best possible proposal for operation of .ORG, in that competitive process. If the process is run fairly and we win, we control our own fate. If the process is run fairly and we lose, we still win, because it means that someone even better prepared to serve us than we are ourselves, will have won.
But this is a very mainstream proposal... it’s the established process for .ORG, and the outcome we’re looking for, self-governance, is exactly how .EDU works. Educause is the non-profit association of universities that runs .EDU by and for the educational community.
Don't actually see any one from the National Cooperative Business Association or a director from a coop background.
I hope they are not going down again the route of limiting it to purely American style non profits - which in the past would have excluded the red cross and people like JWZ
Most countries have minimum citizenship requirements for board members, to avoid scams where a company does something bad and there are no board members within their jurisdiction to be held to account.
The U.S. is no different than most other countries in that regard, and CCOR has to be incorporated somewhere. The US has the strongest laws protecting cooperative members, and consequently hosts more cooperatives than any other country, so it’s a good place to get started, and a majority of the founding board members thus had to be US citizens. That can be changed through election if we succeed.
> Differentiate the dot-org domain as representative of not-for-profit, public-benefit, and charitable purposes, distinct from the intended purposes of other domains.
Does that mean we won't be able to register .org for personal website/blogs?
An email address like bill@gates.name is hardly attractive (I realise this is subjective, but if no one can imagine using the domain like this, then what’s the point of it.)
And besides, there are certainly too many people with the same name for this to be practical.
> The Cooperative Corporation of dot-org Registrants, or CCOR, is the cooperative organization that seeks to embody and collectively represent the community of dot-org domain name registrants, who will be its members.
As a .org registrant that doesn't fit into their enumerated purposes, I don't see how they can claim to represent me.
It would also seem at odds with a further commitment:
> Ensure that the dot-org domain is not used as a point of control or censorship over the speech or conduct of its registrants or their constituencies.
In that it seems to promote the idea that some speech or conduct (such as running a commercial business) should not take place on a .org domain, because of some distinct purpose of the domain.
Well, first of all, you’ve got the same one vote as all other registrants, so you’re neither more nor less represented than any other .ORG registrant.
If you feel that the existing language in the charter, that part of which was largely derived from the original .ORG establishment RFC, and subsequent definitional documents, should be updated in some way, please propose specific edits for debate.
I'm not getting that impression. I own a .org that's neither commercial nor non-commercial; it's for my personal use and has been for the more than two decades I've owned it. Why in .org? Because .org has historically been where "not a business or one of the other domain types" has fallen.
The group's FAQ says .org was "originally intended to be run in the interests of non-commercial Internet users," which is true and, in my view, doesn't exclude individuals, even those who want to use a .org for commercial purposes. I read that statement as "we will prioritize the needs of the 'core' of .org users but everyone is welcome."
I would strongly doubt that people like Esther Dyson, Michael Roberts, and Katherine Maher got into this group to take .org domains away from individuals or to restrict individuals from using .org. Quite the opposite, I imagine; they, in my bet, want to keep it as it is now.
If any of you want to suggest language that you feel better conveys the goal, please propose it. We’d like to make the charter as clear and unambiguous as possible.
I've seen companies that use their name in .com for external communication, but also own a .org for internal email addresses. How would those be affected?
Not at all... .ORG has always been defined the same way, and that’s always included individuals, families, informal projects, just as much as formally-chartered charities, NGOs, and IGOs.
No change is being proposed here. Instead, a formalization and locking-in of existing rights, is being proposed.
Hypothetically speaking, what would be the best way to handle voting rights and distribution of power in a domain registrant coop?
Does every domain holder have the same amount voting power, like in a democracy, or do large orgs like Mozilla or Wikimedia get proportionally more votes like large shareholders in corporations do? And if we allocate votes based on stakes invested, what would stop someone from buying their way in and taking over the same way it happened with PIR?
Democracy is called that because every vote is a person. People are finite, you can't just add more whenever you feel like it.
Voting of shareholders of a company can still be called a democracy because the amount of shares – what's weighing the votes – is finite.
But the supply of .org domain names is effectively infinite, and so any "voting" weighed by domain names would just become a bidding contest.
There are only like 10 million .org domain names. At this rate it will cost just a bit more than $100 million to pass any decision requiring a simple majority, and a bit more if a supermajority is required. This is notably cheaper than the $1.3B acquisition price.
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If we want to entrench status quo, one solution is to require broad consensus of a sizeable but finite number of large players representing customers including the ones you mentioned.
Actually, there are a bunch of large non-profits that register one domain per local chapter, and have thousands of .ORG domains. There aren’t a lot of speculators in .ORG compared to other gTLDs, because there’s a perception, probably correct, that non-profits don’t have deep pockets to buy domains from speculators.
You could create a corporation with the rules (and problems) that you’re proposing, but in a cooperative the rules are fixed: one vote per organization. Your family .ORG domain gets the same one vote as Microsoft.ORG, as your kids’ soccer league, as the church down the street, regardless of how many domains they register.
Obviously a bad actor could try to game the system by pretending to be multiple organizations, but it wouldn’t buy them anything, because board members don’t have any rights that non-board-members don’t have, and the rights of the members to their financial interests are also guaranteed under law... the bird couldn’t, for instance, vote to pay themselves.
Is there a way to distinguish one organization registering 100000 domains (possibly using sub-entities) to get 100000 votes versus 100000 real separately controlled organizations?
Would controlling a large number of votes that way give them some kind of advantage?
Actually, the whole point of choosing the cooperative form is to avoid doubt and risk in governance. We don’t have to make the choices you’re positing, because our rights are actually enshrined in law. Cooperatives are one of the oldest forms of collective enterprise, and there’s four hundred years of law governing them. The rights of cooperative members (every .ORG registrant, in the case of CCOR) are much more strongly guaranteed by law than are those of, for instance, shareholders of a corporation.
Every member of a cooperative gets an equal vote in all governance decisions, and it’s not possible for the board to change that, that’s guaranteed by law, not contract or charter or agreement or anything. It’s also not possible to create membership “classes” with different rights. Also, the rights of capital are subordinate. Creditors, for instance, get no say in what happens.
That’s governance. Finances are equally clearly defined, but instead of one-vote-per-member, they’re proportional. If the wholesale price of a .ORG domain remains $9.93/year, and the savings (which are the “profits” in a corporation like ISOC) are $4, those savings are guaranteed by law to be distributed back to the members proportionally with the amount of business they did. Someone with one .ORG domain will get $4 back at the end of the year, someone with ten .ORG domains will get back $40, et cetera.
We don’t have to debate these terms, because they’ve been inalienably guaranteed by law for the past four hundred years.
Which is why we picked a cooperative as the best form for self-representation.
My biggest caution here is to establish early on a culture of solidarity, not charity, in the foundational values of the organization. Same goes for community-based human-centered design, where those with power are facilitating the design process for whatever the users decide are their problems and appropriate solutions.
Otherwise, codependency and hierarchy are allowed to flourish.
34 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 72.6 ms ] threadI'm particularly impressed with the Board of Directors.
From "Charitable Web Leaders Launch Cooperative Alternative for .ORG Domain" [0]:
> Some of the world’s best known charitable web leaders have created a new cooperative that includes all .ORG registrants. The articles of incorporation were filed on January 6, 2020.
> Leaders from Wikimedia, the foundation behind Wikipedia.org; Internet Archive, which runs archive.org; Mozilla Foundation, which runs the Firefox web browser; and Packet Clearing House, are among those who supported the effort to create the Cooperative Corporation for .ORG Registrants (CCOR). CCOR is designed as a viable alternative to selling the dot-org domain to private equity firm Ethos Capital.
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[0]: https://medium.com/@ccor/charitable-web-leaders-launch-coope...
Or is this simply a representative organisation to protect the interests of domain holders?
Sorry if these are dumb questions.
My personal hypothesis is that given an alternative recipient for the .org registry that's better in every respect except for the amount of money they're able to pour into the pockets of ICANN / Internet Society (ISOC), it'll be more difficult for these parties to pretend that the .org sale is about anything except graft.
As we've see from previously, morally flexible members of these organizations (e.g. Richard Barnes [1]) have claimed that the sale of .org to Ethos is really in the interest of the public good! As details continue to come to light, these arguments are going to get continually more difficult to make.
I'm not sure it's realistic the CCOR succeeds in gaining control of .org (although fingers crossed, it sounds like they'd be a far better than owner than ISOC or Ethos), but worst case, they'll force some additional transparency into the process.
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[1] http://www.circleid.com/posts/20191127_why_i_voted_to_sell_o...
Yes, the cooperative is of all .ORG registrants, and exists to protect our collective interests. There’s no way to have absolute unanimity among the better part of ten million individuals and organizations, but so far, we’ve heard from several tens of thousands of .ORG registrants, and only three (including ISOC and PIR) were in favor of having a non-competitive redelegation such as the proposed one from ISOC to Ethos.
So, CCOR has three objectives, one short term, one mid-term, one long-term:
In the short term, to stop this backdoor deal, which bypasses the established, multistakeholder, competitive process.
In the mid-term, to get ICANN to launch the multistakeholder-administered, transparent, open competition to select the next .ORG delegate.
In the long term, for the .ORG registrants ourselves to put forward the best possible proposal for operation of .ORG, in that competitive process. If the process is run fairly and we win, we control our own fate. If the process is run fairly and we lose, we still win, because it means that someone even better prepared to serve us than we are ourselves, will have won.
But this is a very mainstream proposal... it’s the established process for .ORG, and the outcome we’re looking for, self-governance, is exactly how .EDU works. Educause is the non-profit association of universities that runs .EDU by and for the educational community.
I hope they are not going down again the route of limiting it to purely American style non profits - which in the past would have excluded the red cross and people like JWZ
Are you arguing that we shouldn't limit .org to nonprofits at all? Or that we shouldn't limit .org to American-style nonprofits?
The U.S. is no different than most other countries in that regard, and CCOR has to be incorporated somewhere. The US has the strongest laws protecting cooperative members, and consequently hosts more cooperatives than any other country, so it’s a good place to get started, and a majority of the founding board members thus had to be US citizens. That can be changed through election if we succeed.
> Differentiate the dot-org domain as representative of not-for-profit, public-benefit, and charitable purposes, distinct from the intended purposes of other domains.
Does that mean we won't be able to register .org for personal website/blogs?
And besides, there are certainly too many people with the same name for this to be practical.
> The Cooperative Corporation of dot-org Registrants, or CCOR, is the cooperative organization that seeks to embody and collectively represent the community of dot-org domain name registrants, who will be its members.
As a .org registrant that doesn't fit into their enumerated purposes, I don't see how they can claim to represent me.
It would also seem at odds with a further commitment:
> Ensure that the dot-org domain is not used as a point of control or censorship over the speech or conduct of its registrants or their constituencies.
In that it seems to promote the idea that some speech or conduct (such as running a commercial business) should not take place on a .org domain, because of some distinct purpose of the domain.
If you feel that the existing language in the charter, that part of which was largely derived from the original .ORG establishment RFC, and subsequent definitional documents, should be updated in some way, please propose specific edits for debate.
The group's FAQ says .org was "originally intended to be run in the interests of non-commercial Internet users," which is true and, in my view, doesn't exclude individuals, even those who want to use a .org for commercial purposes. I read that statement as "we will prioritize the needs of the 'core' of .org users but everyone is welcome."
I would strongly doubt that people like Esther Dyson, Michael Roberts, and Katherine Maher got into this group to take .org domains away from individuals or to restrict individuals from using .org. Quite the opposite, I imagine; they, in my bet, want to keep it as it is now.
If any of you want to suggest language that you feel better conveys the goal, please propose it. We’d like to make the charter as clear and unambiguous as possible.
No change is being proposed here. Instead, a formalization and locking-in of existing rights, is being proposed.
Does every domain holder have the same amount voting power, like in a democracy, or do large orgs like Mozilla or Wikimedia get proportionally more votes like large shareholders in corporations do? And if we allocate votes based on stakes invested, what would stop someone from buying their way in and taking over the same way it happened with PIR?
Voting of shareholders of a company can still be called a democracy because the amount of shares – what's weighing the votes – is finite.
But the supply of .org domain names is effectively infinite, and so any "voting" weighed by domain names would just become a bidding contest.
There are only like 10 million .org domain names. At this rate it will cost just a bit more than $100 million to pass any decision requiring a simple majority, and a bit more if a supermajority is required. This is notably cheaper than the $1.3B acquisition price.
---
If we want to entrench status quo, one solution is to require broad consensus of a sizeable but finite number of large players representing customers including the ones you mentioned.
Obviously a bad actor could try to game the system by pretending to be multiple organizations, but it wouldn’t buy them anything, because board members don’t have any rights that non-board-members don’t have, and the rights of the members to their financial interests are also guaranteed under law... the bird couldn’t, for instance, vote to pay themselves.
Would controlling a large number of votes that way give them some kind of advantage?
Every member of a cooperative gets an equal vote in all governance decisions, and it’s not possible for the board to change that, that’s guaranteed by law, not contract or charter or agreement or anything. It’s also not possible to create membership “classes” with different rights. Also, the rights of capital are subordinate. Creditors, for instance, get no say in what happens.
That’s governance. Finances are equally clearly defined, but instead of one-vote-per-member, they’re proportional. If the wholesale price of a .ORG domain remains $9.93/year, and the savings (which are the “profits” in a corporation like ISOC) are $4, those savings are guaranteed by law to be distributed back to the members proportionally with the amount of business they did. Someone with one .ORG domain will get $4 back at the end of the year, someone with ten .ORG domains will get back $40, et cetera.
We don’t have to debate these terms, because they’ve been inalienably guaranteed by law for the past four hundred years.
Which is why we picked a cooperative as the best form for self-representation.
Otherwise, codependency and hierarchy are allowed to flourish.