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ICA asks ICANN to block .Org private equity deal in damning letter
- lioeters 7y agoThe letter itself: https://domainnamewire.com/wp-content/ICA-Letter-to-ICANN-Board-of-Directors-November-15-2019.pdf https://domainnamewire.com/wp-content/ICA-Letter-to-ICANN-Bo... [PDF]
- japhyr 7y agoI have certainly taken the internet's infrastructure for granted at times. Can someone who follows this more closely say something about how this is likely to play out? The profit motive is helpful in some areas, but it can just wreck service-related fields.
- Sebguer 7y agoThe profit motive is helpful when it comes to providing incentives to innovate. There's no room for innovation here - it's purely a cash grab.
- o-__-o 7y agoSee all of the new TLDs as an example of a cash grab, we all know how they are going to play out once the internet phenomenon peters out
- frankharv 7y agoExcellent Article and insightful comments setion. As much as I hated seeing the US Department of Commerce having stewardship of ICANN this recent development this is really a body blow to all .org stakeholders. I guess we all should have seen this coming when it was spun off to a "Multi stakeholder board". First an increase in allowed fee's then the private turnover. A well scripted subversion.
- Ayesh 7y agoI find it quite impressive that everyone raised their voices, although ICANN and PIR seem to turn a blind eye to them. For a registry, their main costs are nameserver costs and ICANN licensing fees (~$25K for gTLDs, not sure for classic TLDs). It's totally unfair on PIR side to jack the prices up just because they can.
- echelon 7y agoThese costs don't sound exorbitant. Are profane TLDs allowed? I'd love to register a particular four letter gTLD. I'm sure it'd make its money back.
- rovr138 7y agoNot really profane, but there’s https://get.sucks https://get.sucks
- echelon 7y agoI love that the first selling point is > Protect your identity online so that no one can defame your name. This one is an extortion racket.
- dessant 7y agohttp://facebook.sucks http://facebook.sucks > Registrant Organization: Facebook, Inc. https://whois.nic.sucks https://whois.nic.sucks
- saagarjha 7y agomicrosoft.sucks, apple.sucks, and google.sucks are registered by their respective companies as well.
- thayne 7y agoIt absolutely is. And .sucks domains are much more expensive than most other TLDs.
- neiman 7y agoThis makes me think of ENS project (based on Ethereum) that is making a decentralized TLD. The registry is managed automatically by a smart contract. Pros? The conditions are equal to all users. Cons? It is a wild west style registry with no governance besides the little the automated algorithm offers. They're goal, if I understood correctly, is having .eth TLD managed by this decentralized registry. It can be an interesting experience. [Full disclosure: I'm part of the Almonit project which uses ENS]
- MaxBarraclough 7y agoSo what's the price paid to reserve a domain? To whom is it paid?
- zozbot234 7y agoNamecoin is a lot more popular and better known than ENS, fwiw.
- louischatriot 7y agoRaising the price for tld would actually be a good thing, as it would make "domain investing" (domain hoarding) unprofitable. Let's say a .com costs $1,000 per year. For a legitimate business / organization, that is a trivial cost. For a domain hoarder, that makes keeping domains by and large unprofitable. Killing this parasitic activity is a good thing.
- Kenji 7y agoThat's complete nonsense. Many many people hold TLDs for their private websites. That's a thousand dollars for each one of your websites. That's ridiculous, not everyone can afford that. This would be the death of small independent websites. Though I wouldn't be surprised if that's what's happening.
- jeswin 7y ago> Let's say a .com costs $1,000 per year. I know you meant this as an example, but $1000 is a lot of money for many students, hobbyists, bloggers and startups. For that matter, even $100 will put many at a huge disadvantage in low income countries. I'd rather have squatting than make domains unaffordable for the developing world.
- frank_nitti 7y agoWould this not also affect individual bloggers, many of which often make the HN front page with high quality content? Perhaps there is a more sophisticated approach to this problem than simply raising prices across the board.
- finnthehuman 7y agoSo keeping the domain for my primary email address that I’ve used for 15 years is “hoarding” now?
- techsupporter 7y agoPersonal anecdote: If the e-mails I get every few months are to be believed, yes. I was lucky enough to be around on the Internet when domains were free so I have two .org domains (because to have a .com back then was a sign that you were one of those "dirty businesses" who wanted to "sully the InterNet"[0]) that are old enough to buy their own drinks in the States. Both have been used for e-mail and internal naming schemes for as long as I've had them; only one has a web site. Every few months, I get e-mails asking if I'll sell one or the other for a small sum or donate the domain to the group that's asking. I used to reply and politely decline but the vitriol about my "pointlessly" keeping a domain that I'm "obviously not using" that inevitably comes back now has me shift-Delete e-mails like that. The times, they have changed. 0 - And getting a .net meant showing you were an actual Network Operator. Anybody else remember FTPing the template down from internic.net and sending it to hostmaster and waiting two months for the zone delegation?
- saganus 7y agoI'm not really informed enough about this to fully understand it, but if I own a .org domain, can anyone explain to me what repercussion can this have?
- crankylinuxuser 7y agoHaving a crazy thought here... So we have things like Tor, which makes a PKI based .onion TLD. What's stopping Us (the people) from making our own TLDs? It really just is a massive amount of groupthink, inertia, and acceptance of who dns is... right? And with IP6 seems like it'd be a wild west on all sorts of TLDs.. But we have these monolithic orgs holding us all back. Hell, I know it's orthogonal to TLDs, but we even had the ANPR ip space sold partially to Amazon ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20475855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20475855 ). Bluntly stated, these orgs that manage underlying infra aren't trustworthy. And that goes without stating ICANN and all those woes.
- simlevesque 7y agoCheck out OpenNIC: https://www.opennic.org/ https://www.opennic.org/
- judge2020 7y agoI posted this elsewhere a while ago but it's relevant to opennic, let me know if something is out-of-date or wrong: The choice to support DNS roots like .oz, .ku, .te, .ti, and .uu is not standards-compliant. Say suddenly a new nation comes into the world and ISO assigns them one of these abbreviations, or one of these “emerging countries” they have TLDs for gets assigned a different cctld, what does opennic do? They made the choice to pre-register a bunch of domains under these reserved 2-letter country codes, so now they either have to A. stop being able to say “we directly support all ICANN-assigned tlds” and keep resolving the existing domains or B. say to the existing domain owners of [their artificial] tld “sorry to be you” as their domain names they thought they owned now become registered to other entities.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- SpicyLemonZest 7y agoThe implicit goal of a project like OpenNIC is to eventually get a seat at the standards compliance table, where they'll be able to convince decisionmakers not to make those assignments in the first place. For now they do (B). They renamed their .free domain to .libre after ICANN registered .free.
- Animats 7y agoWhy is there only one .org registry, anyway? There are multiple registries for .com. I hate to say it, but maybe domain names should be managed on a blockchain, so there's no central authority.
- peterwwillis 7y agoNot having a central authority does not require a bizarre technological solution. You just... Have multiple authorities. You don't even need software to do that. But if you did use software to make management easier, you still wouldn't need blockchain.
- cameronbrown 7y agoOne of the few things like the idea of using a Blockchain for imo
- oarsinsync 7y agoFor each TLD, there is only one registry. This is true for .com as it is for .org. In many (most?) cases, there are multiple registrars, which is who the end customers use to “purchase” their domain from. The registrars (plural) register the domain with the registry (singular).
- detaro 7y agoNo, there is only one .com Registry: Verisign. There's multiple Registrars (the companies you as an individual typically buy your domains at) for .org just as there are for .com
- a3n 7y ago> buy your domains Rent. As far as I know, you can't "pay off" a domain. And most of us are at some usually negligible risk of losing a domain by mistake or because someone bigger wanted it.
- verdverm 7y agoCheckout https://handshake.io https://handshake.io Most likely they will have to play nice with ICANN to go mainstream
- jdkee 7y agoHow was this transaction valued if it was a "private" sale to a private equity firm? Should it not have been done along the lines of a FCC public spectrum auction? Secondly, as I raised this issue previously, why is .org. being commercialized in the first place?