Read this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;20&#x2F;org_registry_sale_shambles&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;20&#x2F;org_registry_sale_s...</a>It appears to be a corrupt inside job.

Does any one have a source for the rationale behind the sale? I was surprised it was even considered.

Why did it happen entirely behind closed doors? No way they got this deal together just after price caps were removed. Was this orchestrated beforehand? Domain registrations for Ethos Capital pre-date the change and timing coincides with proposed contract change to remove price caps.What does Andrew Sullivan get for this move? Is Jon Nevett connected as well considering his ties to Donuts which is connected to Abry Partners which was managed by now Ethos Capital CEO?So many questions, all this happening in shadows means we shouldn&#x27;t give any benefit of the doubt.

Again why does ISOC feel they have to do this? Are they starved for funding? This sale directly contravenes several of the founding ideals of the Internet.

People. We are losing the Internet that we all love and care for so deeply. We all need to rise up to fight for the freedom the Internet gives us.

&quot;This is essentially a hijacking of the DNS as far as I&#x27;m concerned.&quot;At the last NANOG, the keynote speaker described three instances where companies have &quot;hijacted&quot; the DNS.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.apnic.net&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;04&#x2F;dns-wars&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.apnic.net&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;04&#x2F;dns-wars&#x2F;</a>The first &quot;hijack&quot; was Versisign wildcarding unregistered .com and .net domains (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Site_Finder" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Site_Finder</a>). The second was OpenDNS redirecting Google searches to an OpenDNS proxy (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20120518025819&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opendns.com:80&#x2F;support&#x2F;article&#x2F;111" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20120518025819&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opendns...</a>).[1] The third is the EDNS client subnet extension.[2]1. Acording to the keynote this led to the creation of Google Public DNS &quot;within 45 days&quot;.2. If I am not mistaken, OpenDNS was an early proponent of EDNS client subnet adoption.

This is essentially a hijacking of the DNS as far as I’m concerned. The sale of .org is heinous; And I’m an unabashed capitalist.There is absolutely nothing defensible about this move that I can see.Is there any argument that this is beneficial to anyone except Ethos and Internet Society? Is it even clear they have the right to sell it?Has every person at ISOC submitted conflict statements? Are they willing to commit to never benefit financially from Ethos controlled entities for 10+ years?

It always astounded me that for the longest time until only recently, you were expected to pay additional money, more than the domain cost itself, for HTTPS security (and if you wanted a wildcard certificate, substantially more money.)I guess when the gTLD explosion didn&#x27;t result in massive new profits for the new TLDs (some are $100+&#x2F;year!), the powers that be decided to focus on existing TLDs instead where there&#x27;s extensive decades-long lock-in effects at play. No one needed company-name.ninja, but good luck giving up your company-name.org to a squatter or worse, your competition.

Now China can simply buy Ethos Capital and run it. It&#x27;s way cheaper than the UN.

No! I agree with you that it seems like it should be cheap but imagine the UN ran it. China would veto &quot;.tw&quot; as just one example of the many problems with government type entity in charge.

How much does it actually cost to run a TLD?Even with the usual governmental bureaucracy overhead I bet it’s be a rounding error. Seems a good fit for something like the UN to take over.

Would it matter? You&#x27;re already locked into years, maybe decades, of brand building. You&#x27;d still need to redirect your old .org indefinitely..ORG should be properly managed and regulated, we shouldn&#x27;t need to attempt to rebuild something because ICANN is corrupt and Internet Society is selling out non profits they promised to serve.

Has the broader group thought about just buying their own tld?With a better governance model.

A couple additional things:
EFF blog post on the topic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;nonprofit-community-stands-together-protect-org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;nonprofit-community-st...</a>Here&#x27;s the initial letter being sent from EFF &amp; others to ICANN and the Internet Society: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;document&#x2F;coalition-letter-sale-public-interest-registry" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;document&#x2F;coalition-letter-sale-public-in...</a>(Disclaimer: I work for the Internet Archive, and we are one of the initial signatories to this letter.)

TBH I’d be happy for the (AM&#x2F;FM radio) airwaves to be privatized if it meant getting rid of the absurd, antiquated rules about not being able to say certain words in song lyrics.

Just wait until you see what they have planned for the airwaves next!

This feels unreal! How is this even happening? Domains are more like the airwaves than a commercial product. How can they do this??

&quot;.org&quot; is almost the standard for all community projects, there will be huge impact if the management went wrong.

Lots of distros are in .org aren&#x27;t they? I see Arch, Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, Centos, OpenSuse, Raspbian, Damn Small Linux, Linux From Scratch, NixOS, Guix, OpenWRT, PfSense, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, Illumos, and probably lots, lots more.GNU is also on .org.Also languages, at least Python, Ruby, Haskell, Rust, Go, Clojure, Racket, Zsh, etc..org seems to be the go-to TLD for open source projects.

Evil or not, Private equity by definition is focused on maximizing profit.You can do the math.

So it goes up by $1 or $15, how does that hurt non-profits? They aren&#x27;t going to out price other TLDs, the market isn&#x27;t that elastic.

Serious question, did you even read the page? Specifically, the part where it makes specific complaints about the 2019 .org registry agreement, such as the ability to raise registration fees without ICANN approval?

We can expect every .org owner, most of them non-profits and many not well-funded, to be squeezed and then shaken down for money. Not tomorrow, but it will start as soon as they think they can get away with it.

Uncapped fees that can be raised arbitrarily.The few other types this happened, it has resulted in exorbitant prices across the board.

Challenging to imagine any potential downsides of granting the management of a commons devoted to nonprofits to a profit-driven monopoly.

PIR currently charges registrars about $9&#x2F;year per domain, with registrars allowed to mark that up however much they want without restrictions-- AFAIK neither the &quot;wholesale&quot; price nor the actual price from registrars is currently price controlled by ICANN.Regardless, I don&#x27;t see how moving .org&#x27;s operations from a non-profit (PIR) to a private equity firm benefits anyone, except the owners of said private equity firm. You&#x27;re basically taking something that could operate at-cost and giving it a mandate to turn a profit-- the only way that happens is if prices go up. Likely a lot.

It costs like 3$&#x2F;year (or less probably) to register a domain name. But once you build your brand&#x2F;website&#x2F;etc you are tied to your domain name, which is tied to that registry.This gives the registry huge leverage over you. That 3$ that it actually costs them to run it can increase to whatever price they think you will be willing to pay and you can&#x27;t not pay it...you would lose your spot and identity on the internet. Its not like with registrars, like godaddy, ghandi, bluehost, etc... that you can switch between in like 24 hrs.IIRC .orgs were price controlled, so the price couldn&#x27;t rise, but with this takeover, the price controls have gone away.

Have a look at The Register&#x27;s article on the subject:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;20&#x2F;org_registry_sale_shambles&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;20&#x2F;org_registry_sale_s...</a>

I haven&#x27;t read the 2019 rules, but if the letter is to be believed, the new rule creates:&gt; The power to implement processes to suspend domain names based on accusations of “activity contrary to applicable law.” The .ORG registry should not implement such processes without understanding how state actors frequently target NGOs with allegations of illegal activity.Under the previous rules, the registry level could (more or less) resist being bullied into taking down a domain due to government pressure, though the government could implement a firewall and threaten other service providers. Now, though, a large country could say &quot;we will block .org domains, or .org DNS resolutions, if you don&#x27;t suspend an activist organization&#x27;s domain globally,&quot; and there would then be a PROFIT MOTIVE to take down the domain GLOBALLY, as the value of the registrar would decrease if .org domains were blocked in that country. And this would be permitted by the 2019 rules. This gives censors tremendous leverage to implement censorship around the globe.I&#x27;m all for the role of private equity in helping companies to grow - while there are certainly firms that operate in bad faith, the PE industry overall doesn&#x27;t deserve the bad rap it gets in the media.But IMO this sale should absolutely be disallowed from a humanitarian and international security perspective. The incentives are just too badly aligned.

&quot;issues&quot; == &quot;controls&quot;.The worldwide non-commercial Internet being controlled by an unaccountable private corporation is evil on its face. Burden is on someone to prove otherwise.

Serious question, what are the actual downsides of this, if any? Or is the backlash due to the &quot;private equity&quot; being associated with evil? Doesn&#x27;t seem like anything is actually changing other than who issues .org?

Not sure I agree. If FF &amp; Chrome both supported it...it&#x27;d be in effect in &lt; 5 years total.Just look how quickly DoH is being rolled out, or Google&#x27;s QUIC.Realistically if Google, Mozilla, Cloudflare, Apple, Microsoft, and a few others agree that this move is bad, and wanted to stand up a new .org TLD...they could, and I don&#x27;t believe it&#x27;d be illegal (IANAL).

The problem is that DNS powers the internet as we know it, getting everything ever to switch over is at least another 30 years after you make a protocol (that would also need to have literally no downsides).

The only thing wrong with DNS is that we entrust it to a corrupt government. It&#x27;s time another country step in and take control and replace ICANN.

I can&#x27;t speak for Diaspora, but Mastodon isn&#x27;t any harder to use than Twitter. It&#x27;s mostly network effects that keep people there.

We don&#x27;t want DNS anymore, but we don&#x27;t have a replacement. It&#x27;s the same as Facebook-&gt;Diaspora, Twitter-&gt;Mastodon. The non-centralized versions are too hard to deploy to all the non-techies out there, despite being the &quot;morally&quot; correct architecture.

Namecoin did this, and I think there are similar efforts on Ethereum, but it turns out that the tyranny of the installed base is a real thing.

Islands already exist, with national firewalls, corporate networks, dark nets, etc.  Decentralization of DNS would just take middlemen out of the picture.  A dominant decentralized system would probably handle most requests if one were to ever get off the ground, making it equivalent to what we have now.

&gt; You should have no doubt that, for example, Facebook would make a &quot;the internet&quot; which was 100% Facebook-operated sites.AOL already tried that back when they were still sending floppies through the mail. They were the largest ISP on earth and couldn&#x27;t keep people in their little walled off corner of the internet. I don&#x27;t think anyone else is going to be more successful.

If you decentralize, you don&#x27;t end up with something equivalent to &quot;the internet&quot; anymore -- you end up with several islands of things that (to varying degrees) resemble &quot;the internet&quot;, and run on the same layer 4 fabric, but are largely isolated from one another.I think we actually experience a mild version of this today, where entities publish their all their Twitter&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;Instagram&#x2F;Snapchat&#x2F;Whatsapp&#x2F;Linkedin etc profiles.I can&#x27;t help but see whatever this distributed DNS replacement is as basically being this situation but without the backstop of globally-accessible websites and e-mail addresses. You should have no doubt that, for example, Facebook would make a &quot;the internet&quot; which was 100% Facebook-operated sites.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.handshake.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.handshake.org&#x2F;</a>Handshake Name Service (HNS) is working on this problem from an interesting angle, with some significant institutional support.

&gt; Ever wondered about how you can find the torrent seeders without a centralized entity? The Bittorrent DHT is the underlying tech.The Bittorrent DHT is not fully decentralized, it needs a list of hardcoded bootstrap nodes. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;1181301&#x2F;how-does-a-dht-in-a-bittorent-client-get-bootstrapped" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;1181301&#x2F;how-does-a-dht-i...</a>

GNS from the GNUnet project is the most interesting alternative to DNS that I&#x27;ve come across, and is orthogonal to projects like IPFS and Scuttlebutt (although I don&#x27;t know much about Dat). It&#x27;s basically DNS with DHT and some very cool crypto.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gnunet.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;video.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gnunet.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;video.html</a>

Looks likes you’re wanting the decentralized web [0][1][2].The DNS equivalent technology there is DHT(distributed hash tables) [3] which was used in torrent technology for a few years.
Ever wondered about how you can find the torrent seeders without a centralized entity? The Bittorrent DHT is the underlying tech.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ipfs.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ipfs.io&#x2F;</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dat.foundation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dat.foundation&#x2F;</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scuttlebutt.nz&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scuttlebutt.nz&#x2F;</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Distributed_hash_table" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Distributed_hash_table</a>

Ethereum Name Service is doing something similar on Ethereum.

In this particular case, the problem is not that individual domains can be traded at market prices though.The problem is that organisations have to rent their domains from a central authority that can hike the rent for an entire TLD to some fantasy price.So the hierarchical structure of DNS is clearly what creates an opportunity for corruption and extortion.And let&#x27;s not forget that DNS is ultimately a global issue, which means that the rule of law cannot be taken for granted.Laws have to be part of the solution. But it&#x27;s easier to legislate effectively if the underlying structure doesn&#x27;t invite corruption, authoritarian abuse and market dysfunction in the first place.

It is amusing that you believe government would stop corruption.History proves that to be falseFurther &quot;just make it illegal&quot; under which nations laws? That was the problem ICANN was suppose to solve, no one wanted the internet to be operated under the Laws of the US, which is why in 2016 the US removed itself from Internet Governance.So do we put the Internet under the laws of China? or the EU both of which have Free Expression issues....Which nation? or maybe the UN which has Dictators and human rights abusers in positions of power...Decentralization is far far far better than looking to a government resolution

I&#x27;m not convinced we are talking about a decentralization issue.We could achieve the same result with laws. Just make what is happening illegal, corruption is already illegal.Furthermore, decentralization won&#x27;t solve the basic economy rules of offer&#x2F;demand. Even with a decentralized system, website will still be referenced by natural words (&quot;domains&quot;), which can be owned by only one site-owner at a time, which means there will always be people ready to spent a lot of money to acquire a domain&#x2F;reference.I&#x27;m for decentralization in general, but in the current case I fail to see how decentralization alone will make domain owning fairer

All these Ethereum&#x2F;Namecoin&#x2F;Whatever solutions aren&#x27;t really solutions. They&#x27;re subject to namesquatting, arbitrary prices, arbitrary decisions regarding TLDs and they end up being centralized in the end for various reasons.I think a good solution is to switch to using petnames instead of global names.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.schneier.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2006&#x2F;02&#x2F;petnames.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.schneier.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2006&#x2F;02&#x2F;petnames.html</a>

I&#x27;ve been thinking a lot about the sheer downsides of DNS overall. We need something different. Something decentralized, encrypted, something not reliant on a protocol that hasn&#x27;t kept pace with security and privacy and we need something verifiable that provides accountability.  As others have said TLDs have become a racket. Only the priveleged and nation states have the authority to use the system as a funnel of ridiculous revenue and rate manipulation.  We don&#x27;t need DNS anymore. It&#x27;s become more of a lynchpin to bottleneck and advance control of the few and continues to erode our privacy as it stands today. What&#x27;s next?

The whole deal smells of self dealing, why was Ethos Capital selected to buy the .org registry versus an open bidding process?

ICANN having little oversights is not an accident. It’s corrupt current and past leaders have ensured that. This organization is supposed to be non-profit international organization. If you ask me “who controls Internet”? it’s these guys. They have managed to convert ICANN into a perpetual personal wealth fund for friends and families.

How is it “in the air”? It is a non-profit registered in California.

It may be useful to note that the US government transferred control of DNS to ICANN in September 2016. I searched HN, and this seems to be the biggest thread from back then: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12612033" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12612033</a>At the time, consensus in the media seemed to be that this would have little effect. However, the debate was quite politicized, as the transfer to ICANN occurred towards the end of the Obama administration, with fruitless opposition from high-profile Republicans.

It seems to me that running an NIC for a major TLD almost has zero marginal cost: for each domain, you automatically interface with ICANN once in a while to update registration info, then serve some NS and associated A&#x2F;AAAA records. So it’s kind of surprising to me that $10&#x2F;yr is already a non-profit price. Am I missing something?

The process of mapping name=IP is not remotely technically difficult, and I&#x27;d dare say most people reading this message could implement the backend to such a system in a few days.Setting up the peering replication and nameservers around the world is considerably harder, but it&#x27;s definitely not a $10 billion+ problem (the current value of registrars and certificate authorities.) A startup funded by YC could handle that easily.Dealing with all the companies trying to sue you over others squatting their domains and having to decide who has the better claim would be the most expensive part.I really hate to say it because it&#x27;s so cliche and overused, but a blockchain-like system could remove the central authority, the server costs, and the lawsuit risks. But it would introduce concerns over trust, most likely.The really hard, unsolvable part is the unwillingness of the browser vendors to support an alternative domain name system. If Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all supported a new TLD outside of ICANN&#x27;s control as a public service (let&#x27;s call it &quot;Let&#x27;s Resolve&quot; which would offer free domains and would be funded through donations), it would be very successful. If even one of them didn&#x27;t support it, nobody would ever consider using it for their websites. Browser extensions, even if they allowed access to intercept domain name lookups, would not work. It would have to be supported out of the box in every major browser, and well, good luck with that. Anything failing to herd those three cats right out of the starting gate is absolutely dead on arrival.Who knows though, maybe they&#x27;ll raise .org prices just a bit too much, and piss off an established non-profit enough to start a huge campaign to create an alternative. But probably not.

Who&#x27;d have thought unaccountable private companies would act in their own best interest?

Corruption and causing financial damages intentionally for having personal benefits on it - especially by abusing a position against the very community they represent - is punishable by law in most country.
Aren&#x27;t they subject of legal proceedings now by violating the law?

At the risk of being overly-nationalistic, this is exactly the sort of scenario that many were worried about when the rest of the world demanded that the US hand over control to an international governing body. Just as you see with - for example - the IOC, many international governing bodies have a dangerous tendency to devolve to the ethical standards of their most corrupt members.

&gt; Ultimately, this is why the DNS and domain name industry feels so shady in general and why for most companies getting a name on the internet is a tortuous process that feels very scammy, which is unfair and costs more than it probably should.Shady is putting it lightly.I once tried to register a nice .wiki domain in order to host a wiki for myself. Those domains weren&#x27;t available anywhere. I had to &quot;request&quot; one from the company that managed the TLD. So I emailed them and they asked me about my &quot;plans&quot; for the domain. Eventually they just said they&#x27;d host it on my behalf. They created a wiki on the domain I wanted, threw ads around it and told me to start contributing.It&#x27;s not really an equal playing field where anyone can buy a domain. They gatekeep not only by charging huge prices but also by simply refusing to sell the domain if they think you&#x27;re not important enough.People should start making more onion services.

We[1] are building on a new project called Handshake[2] which is trying to create a more secure (alternative) root of trust for domain names. It does so by storing certs on a distributed ledger instead of relying on CAs. Though this isn’t the main goal of the project, one of the benefits is that anyone can register their own TLD through a vickrey auction which is much more fair than the current ICANN system.[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;namebase.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;namebase.io</a>
[2]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;handshake.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;handshake.org</a>

&gt;&gt;&gt;Sadly, ICANN has little oversightThis is why the US Dept of Commerce should have never given up control

It&#x27;s funny because every defence I&#x27;ve heard about ICANN is &quot;why did you not participate in the governance meetings?&quot;.

Posting from a throwaway account.I worked at one of the main TLDs for years and was on one of the ICANN boards and got to know the industry well.It is well know amongst the domain name community that ICANN is a poorly run organization, whose directors have in recent years have used their position of leadership to lead decisions from which they are afterwards benefiting themselves economically, in many cases by rushing decisions such as in these case.Peter Dengate Thrush was famous for pushing for the new domain extensions (.anything) as chief executive of ICANN and quitting a month later to become the CEO for a company that was the main bidder for a large number of extensions. Fadi Chehade is doing the same with .ORG by lifting the price cap on the prices of an established domain name and then gobbling up the company that sells those domains.Sadly, ICANN has little oversight and since its kind of in the air and doesn’t report to anyone, the directors get away with what would be legally considered corruption in most of the world. The fact that the internet community and most Internet companies have never care about it makes doesn’t help, since a lot or times the “multistakeholder” model that they claim to use in reality doesn’t work.Ultimately, this is why the DNS and domain name industry feels so shady in general and why for most companies getting a name on the internet is a tortuous process that feels very scammy, which is unfair and costs more than it probably should. But so far we don’t have any good alternatives to the current system.

The SEC are both competent and forceful, and this smacks of self-dealing, which is within their remit.

If we in the United States had a forceful, competent FTC or FCC, perhaps this would be investigated. I don&#x27;t think a Sanders or Warren administration would ignore something like this entirely.

I think all this information should be added to Fadi&#x27;s Wikipedia page [0] so that people can be made aware of it.That is one good way to bring corruption into light.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fadi_Chehad%C3%A9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fadi_Chehad%C3%A9</a>

&gt; ... corruption, plain and simple.That&#x27;s right but the right to get rich by corruption is the most important and most appreciated unalienable entitlement of US weenies, even more important than food or shelter or life itself. After all, in a thoroughly corrupt system all of those can be bought. Only corruption itself cannot be bought if the system doesn&#x27;t already have the necessary level of corruption. It is the US&#x27;s holiest mission to convince the rest of the world of the fundamental importance and indispensability of our way of corruption.

Some further background on what happened. I don&#x27;t see how this can be interpreted as anything other than corruption, plain and simple.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;20&#x2F;org_registry_sale_shambles&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;20&#x2F;org_registry_sale_s...</a>&quot;Former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade personally registered the domain name currently used by Ethos Capital in May and it was registered as a limited company in the US state of Delaware on May 14. That date is significant because it is one day after ICANN indicated it was planning to approve the lifting of price caps through its public comment summary.As such it appears that the plan to purchase the .org registry was predicated on the price caps going ahead and that those behind the deal had intricate knowledge of ICANN’s internal processes.&quot;

Given the history of private equity in hiking up drug prices, I&#x27;m guessing the answer to &quot;what is the magic number&quot; is whatever number generates the most profit, regardless of what is just or whether small organizations can afford it.

They can raise it as high as they want. Yes, it is bad.

They can hike without limit, and they can target the hike. So they could make wikipedia pay 10000 a year when they need to renew.If they had all domains at the same price, price hikes would be much less of an issue.

Is $10 the magic number for &#x27;orgs&#x27;? Say the PE raised it to $20, how bad would that be? If it were $5 and doubled to $10 still as bad? Why is $10 the just amount? What about orgs that can&#x27;t afford that?How high is it ok for the PE to go on fees? Why? (Tone is to point out how arbitrary this all is, genuinely curious otherwise)

There is no added value to justify doing this to .org.It is rent seeking.

paint something with chalk on the pavement before their entrance? Harmless and gets attention

I happen to live down the street from the Internet Society.What could I do in person to emphasize the point?

A downed power line or gas leak only &quot;could&quot; do bad, but that&#x27;s not a reason to dismiss them.

I saw this logic coming from a lot of people trying to push these changes through. They&#x27;ve been good so far, we should just trust them. They stick their heads in the sand and pretend we don&#x27;t need rules because organizations, people, societies follow norms and that&#x27;s enough. Until someone shits all over them, which is why we make rules in the first place. This whole nothing bad has happened yet, we shouldn&#x27;t consider a bad outcome as a real possibility is ignorant and dangerous. The same people who if you look at ICANN mailing lists are still trying to play both sides, with whataboutism type arguments in an attempt to discredit people against .ORG being sold to a private equity company. I&#x27;ve dug into those people a bunch too, they&#x27;re pretty much all connected to registry interests (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reviewsignal.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;24&#x2F;the-case-for-regulatory-capture-at-icann&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reviewsignal.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;24&#x2F;the-case-for-regula...</a>)

the concerns raised include a lot of speculation (in the form of &quot;could do bad&quot; or &quot;has the power to do bad&quot;), and that&#x27;s also a red-flag.I&#x27;m not really sure how to address the idea that we shouldn&#x27;t attempt to understand and interpret what things happening now might mean for the future.

Yeah, this comment <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21612033" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21612033</a> links to an article on the Register which gives a lot more substance to the concerns&#x2F;reactions. That deeper story helps to show where the mistrust comes from.From the peanut gallery, it looks like the ball is in ISOC&#x27;s+Ethos&#x27; court to demonstrate their good faith as stewards...

They lied to get price caps removed on .org and then sold it amongst themselves to profit. I&#x27;m not sure how you trust people that start with a lie. Look into the history of how shady this really was.

I think it&#x27;s fair to see private equity as red-flag, and I feel ideologically aligned with the folks raising the alarm here. OTOH, the concerns raised include a lot of speculation (in the form of &quot;could do bad&quot; or &quot;has the power to do bad&quot;), and that&#x27;s also a red-flag.It&#x27;s interesting to compare ISOC&#x27;s blog (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.internetsociety.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;the-internet-society-and-public-interest-registry-a-new-era-of-opportunity&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.internetsociety.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;the-internet-so...</a>) and the followups like EFF&#x27;s blog (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;nonprofit-community-stands-together-protect-org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;nonprofit-community-st...</a>) and SaveDotORG (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;savedotorg.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;savedotorg.org</a>). They touch on a lot of similar themes of community and transparency - which, on paper, makes it sound like there&#x27;s some meeting-ground.As an outsider to the discussion, questions would be:1. What are some specific problems facing the &quot;.org&quot; registration process for which capital&#x2F;investment would be helpful? (Obviously, there&#x27;s no perfect answer. But as an outsider, it looks like &quot;.org&quot; registration already works about as well as anywhere else, so one needs some examples to animate the problem.)2. Would any of these folks care to improve their engagement&#x2F;trust with each other? Talking more specifics about &quot;Stewardship Council&quot; and &quot;Community Enablement Fund&quot; might help. Or is some reason for bad blood?3. What kind of track record does this private-equity shop have? Have they worked with other non-profit or socially-oriented endeavors? Maybe some founders&#x2F;staff&#x2F;customers can give some positive or negative testimonials?

Wells Fargo, eh? Your example is apt, but perhaps not for the reason you intended (unless you&#x27;re making a subtle joke, in which case I apologize for not catching it.)&gt; This timeline charts the most significant events in the sales scandal that erupted at Wells Fargo [in 2016]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fool.com&#x2F;investing&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;24&#x2F;a-timeline-of-wells-fargos-sales-scandal.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fool.com&#x2F;investing&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;24&#x2F;a-timeline-of-well...</a>&gt; Wells Fargo(WFC)charged customers a monthly service fee to maintain a checking account that many customers assumed was free and the bank is mulling how to respond to people who feel cheated, according to the bank and sources familiar with the accounts.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thecapitolforum.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;Wells-Fargo-2019.08.28.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thecapitolforum.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;Wells...</a>&gt; Wells Fargo and an insurance company it worked with have agreed to pay $432 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by customers who say they were charged premiums for auto insurance they did not need.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newsobserver.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;business&#x2F;article237666879.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newsobserver.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;business&#x2F;article237666879....</a>IMO only fools and masochists would continue to bank with Wells Fargo.Anyhow, Goldman Sachs have no business being anywhere near DNS or &quot;.org&quot; at all, at all. They&#x27;re a bunch of crooks who make Monty Burns look sympathetic in comparison.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Goldman_Sachs#Controversies_and_legal_issues" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Goldman_Sachs#Controversies_an...</a>

This is what they do - finance deals.  This is as notable as saying Wells Fargo issued their home mortgage.

Whenever there are politicans robbing those who they claim to serve, Goldmans are there advising anc charging huge fees.Whether it is this, Greece debt, 1MDB in Malaysia. Goldmans have no regard for their own reputation so we should assume anytime Goldman are advisors that the deal is a massive ripoff for which people should be going to jail. Goldmans may not have always been this way but they sure are now! They&#x27;re a leading indicator of gross corruption.

As if this couldn&#x27;t get crazier:&gt; Goldman Sachs &amp; Co LLC. is serving as financial adviser to both the Internet Society and PIR.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bizjournals.com&#x2F;washington&#x2F;news&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;15&#x2F;reston-operator-of-org-domain-sells-to-private.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bizjournals.com&#x2F;washington&#x2F;news&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;15&#x2F;resto...</a>

Ah man.... the exhaustion I feel... is summed up so well by this comment.

They can have my last two Legos, these blocks are no longer useful to me. They already have most of the blocks under their control anyways.

I think the sentiment was regarding the democratization of knowledge and access, which is shifting more toward an oligarchy. True, more of humanity is coming online. However, they can only participate if they can be monetized and controlled by those with all the wealth and power.

I&#x27;m not sure about the internet but...one MUST share Lego with any and all who want to play.

&gt; Similar to a kid that doesn&#x27;t want to share their legos with the rest of the class.You&#x27;re being disingenuous and needlessly insulting.We wanted to bring the freedom and egalitarianism of the early internet to everyone. Instead we got the jaded, corporate internet, but at least it&#x27;s available to everyone. The GP is obviously mourning the quality, not the exclusivity.

&gt; stolen out from under us.Who is &quot;us&quot;?The internet is available to more people in more countries than ever before. There&#x27;s more content on the internet than ever before. It&#x27;s a part of every day life for nearly everyone in the world.That&#x27;s what&#x27;s happening to the internet. It&#x27;s no longer a corner where quirky tinkerers were the only ones who could access it.And the promise of the internet was never to be just that.It was meant to be a vehicle for humanity (along with all it&#x27;s warts). That&#x27;s what you&#x27;re seeing. The rest of humanity coming on-line.The attitude of &quot;this isn&#x27;t what it was meant to be&quot; presumes that it was meant to be anything at all. Similar to a kid that doesn&#x27;t want to share their legos with the rest of the class.

Difficult to do for a nonprofit with a history. This is extortion.

As the article points out, .org is the for non profits like .gov is for governments. It adds legitimacy.

When you have a site you want to keep it at that same domain, otherwise all the links to your site around the internet will break.

&gt; How about we just use different domains?&gt; .org is gone, use .com or .net or any of the other hundred of domains.What about all the broken MX records?

Any worthy .org&#x27;s name will be domain-squatted on the other good TLDs, so they couldn&#x27;t move it over.Changing the domain of a site is very effective at killing a site, and a business or organisation, because all existing links to it break, emails to it break.And if you give up the domain, it will usually get squatted quickly, so the links and emails carry on working - they just go to the squatter&#x27;s site instead.There is no way to update the majority of links to your site, if it&#x27;s been around for a while. You can search for links and ask other site operaters to update, but it just doesn&#x27;t happen much, and it&#x27;s also extremely expensive to do when measured in time to write to thousands of site operators individually.And when you have to change the name at the same time (because your name is squatted on other TLDs), you&#x27;re effectively deleting the name recognition, literature, old podcasts, matching name you already have on Twitter, etc.If you had a good name for a long time, chances are you will struggle to find another one like it, and even if you do, most people will think the new name is something else.On top of that, your email is probably linked to your .org, and people aren&#x27;t going to stop sending to that for years, no matter how much you tell people to via other channels. You can&#x27;t know everywhere your email address and main web address are being kept by someone to use later.And wherever there is a long-standing email domain, there are probably thousands of internet accounts that have that email as their primary or backup&#x2F;recovery, which you will need to keep if you don&#x27;t want to start losing access to other accounts. Updating those is very difficult unless you have been extremely diligent at keeping a database of every account you ever created. In practice, even very diligent organisations who attempt to do this don&#x27;t succeed because accounts tend to be created bydifferent people.Perhaps in extreme startup land where people start a new business from scratch every couple of years, and pay a lot in SaaS costs so hiked domain fees may sseem relatively cheap, this might not seem to matter.But many .orgs have been around for decades, and are low budget but very well esablished.Any many other .orgs are individuals, with email and thousands of online accounts linked to their domain.There is no &quot;just&quot; to a domain name change.

I&#x27;ve been using the same email address, at my own .org domain for 20 years now.Changing that would be a proper PITA, and I&#x27;d hate to have to do it just because ICANN sold out in such a transparently corrupt way.

How about we just use different domains?.org is gone, use .com or .net or any of the other hundred of domains.

More likely, time to move to governed cyber communities, where taxes will go towards providing infrastructure and maintaining rights.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Recursive_Internetwork_Architecture#RINA_compared_to_TCP&#x2F;IP" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Recursive_Internetwork_Archite...</a>

Same. Time for a completely different stack &#x2F; protocol? Like a cloud that is actually a cloud rather than corporate centralization with a side order of surveillance?

I host various things at my house even though my ISP prohibits it... We lost that battle a long time ago too.

Host your own website? I have a web server, I manage a VPN for myself (good for traveling and questionable wifi points).
Much of the joy of the early internet came from the small groups and light website&#x27;s. 
Website&#x27;s at scale gave a want hard time being small. Share what you care about on your own platform.Ignore everyone&#x27;s ring. If you aren&#x27;t hosting a part of the internet you want. Why would you expect others to?

Australia implemented anti piracy dns blacklisting in 2016, and had an additional dns filter for highly illegal content significantly before that.I’ve never heard of anyone get arrested for low level piracy here, so I wouldn’t be all that concerned with requests that hit the piracy filters.

Sorry, you&#x27;re not allowed to leave.Earlier today I was trying to Google a website I found on my PC a while back. (Backing up its disk atm, and don&#x27;t use Chrome sync.)Clicked on an unrelated link, and was already in the process of reaching for the Back button when I realized I was looking at a cert failure (wrong domain in certificate). Heh. Idly curious I hit Continue... And was presented with my first&gt; Content Denied&gt; Access to this website has been disabled by an order of the Federal Court of Australia because it infringes or facilitates the infringement of copyright.&gt; 1800 086 346 for information.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;fwXRlTN.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;fwXRlTN.png</a>After recovering from the shock - this sort of thing only happens in 3rd world repressive countries, right??? - I went back and tried the domain referenced in the cert.Haha I&#x27;ve probably lit a billion lists up like Christmas trees now... I got this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;w37jfFt.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;w37jfFt.png</a>Here&#x27;s the cert error, for reference: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;dZmEcnd.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;dZmEcnd.png</a>

&gt; DNS rent seekingDomains registrars?

What? Data caps had a very good reason to exist. Back in the 3G days if everybody would be online all the time the whole machine would just grind to halt. Nowadays the data caps are (in Europe at least) only a formality.

&gt; Monopoly ISPs with data capsThe fact that data caps ever gained traction doesn&#x27;t reflect well on the old timers ability to explain and protect the true value of their creations for the wider public.Which is weird because they were obviously able to do that with cryptographic algorithms which are way more esoteric.It&#x27;s like teaching a generation of craftspeople to build all the intricate parts of a piano but never noticing nor caring that for some reason they&#x27;re all selling pianos that have a single key.

Is what they are sharing worth anything or is it just crap?

&gt; There is so much creativity shared via the Internet by non-tech-savvy people that just wouldn&#x27;t have been possible via the &quot;old Internet&quot;.Could you explain how you got to that conclusion?It would be impossible for non-tech-savvy people to share things on the internet if there were no omni-present surveillance, manipulation, and centralization, because ... ?

I agree that &quot;Internet&quot; today is full of creative expression of millions of people able to do that mostly due the expansion it has seen into non-technical crowd. And that&#x27;s brilliant.Unfortunately, getting to their creations is ultimately harder: eg. searches for anything will now throw you at some lame stuff on pinterest, which will attempt to lure you into signing up just to find out if they have what you are looking for.Basically, ability to really &quot;browse&quot; that humongous web is now gone. And most of those creations never reach their intended audience.

You mean the death of the nerds-only Internet (a different kind of walled garden). There is so much creativity shared via the Internet by non-tech-savvy people that just wouldn&#x27;t have been possible via the &quot;old Internet&quot;.There&#x27;s certainly many problems with something this gargantuan, but I get very skeptical when people nostalgize and eulogize &quot;the good old days&quot; of anything.I&#x27;ll add, I say this with empathy to your feelings. I regularly feel a very strong nostalgia for those late nights of discovery on the Internet. But I do recognize that Internet involved a fraction of a fraction of the people using it today who are discovering and creating and sharing all kinds of stuff with greater ease than ever before.

Can we not do this sensationalist rhetoric on this forum?If you feel like you got a bone yo pick with a current state of internet, post about a technology that addresses the problem so that people can become aware of it. And save the virtue signaling for reddit&#x2F;facebook.

I think I give up on the Internet that we know today. I&#x27;m too tired to fight anymore. Monopoly ISPs with data caps, DNS rent seeking, the walled gardens, the internet of shit where I cannot walk down my street without getting recorded by every house with a &quot;ring&quot;.I&#x27;m done with it. I don&#x27;t want to partake anymore, I don&#x27;t want to fight it anymore, I don&#x27;t want to care anymore.Let the Google&#x27;s and Facebook&#x27;s have the old Internet. I&#x27;m done with it.The dream is over. The magic is gone for me. The old Internet is gone. Let them have the rest.Maybe then, and only then we will rise up like a Phoenix, with a solution that cannot be stolen out from under us.

I think the cert issue is because of DNS hijacking by my ISP so that they can (falsely) tell me the site has malware. I can’t view the cert now that I’ve made an exception to it.

What SSL cert are you seeing? The site seems fine to me, and the SSLLabs check looks fine.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ssllabs.com&#x2F;ssltest&#x2F;analyze.html?d=savedotorg.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ssllabs.com&#x2F;ssltest&#x2F;analyze.html?d=savedotorg.or...</a>

Not sure why this is getting downvotes. I&#x27;m seeing the same - Chrome blocks it, then my work VPN does, with the following error:&quot;This site is blocked due to a security threat that was discovered by the Cisco Umbrella security researchers.&quot;

I can’t visit the site. First there’s an SSL cert problem and when I bypass that Verizon blocks it as malware.

I also think ICANN is a very corrupt entity now, with very bad governance at the moment.

Watch the new private group that controls .org revoke their right to this domain.

Already owned by PIR (which runs .ORG and is being sold to Ethos Capital). Sorry, it&#x27;s a group domain fucking. You&#x27;re welcome - Ethos Capital, probably.

Time to have a collectively funded .ngo TLD?

What exactly are &quot;real organizations&quot;? I can think of two long-lived NFPs in my life that can barely afford hosting &amp; domain registration right now.

&gt; This article was brought to you by the domain squatters lobbyBut seriously I don’t see what’s wrong with this sale. There are no restrictions on who can use a .org domain anyways, and the only people price increases really affect are domain squatters (real organizations can afford 10x the current price without batting an eye). I don’t see what’s wrong with this sale

Yes. Why shouldn’t it be? I genuinely don’t understand your argument.

It&#x27;s up to the registrar to make the rules. If nic.io is fine with people outside of that territory to use their tld then it&#x27;s okay.Some TLDs do indeed have stronger requirements. I remember that for a long time getting a .fr was a bit of a pain because you had to prove that you were a french citizen or a french company IIRC.

Is it okay for startups not based in the `British Indian Ocean Territory` to use `.io` for their domain?

I don&#x27;t understand why everything must &quot;grow and adapt ...&quot;.
Can&#x27;t something just stop evolving? Its not like its failing or something, we don&#x27;t need everything to do everything just be good - very good - at what you do.

Seems like he posted a lame joke. The appropriate response would be for other users to downvote him.  I&#x27;ve seen his other comments and he&#x27;ll regularly be downvoted, but I think you&#x27;re overreacting a bit. Perhaps you should stick to making sure HN runs, and aside from that mind your own business?

We&#x27;ve banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

Only entities who could stop this, ICANN (this is being pulled off by insiders including former ICANN CEO). Internet Society - they did this deal in the first place. And... who the hell knows? Could the US Government step in? Maybe? They stepped back during Obama admin, I&#x27;m not a lawyer but someone needs to step up and I&#x27;ve lost faith in both ICANN and Internet Society.

I&#x27;ve always been a bit confused by the relationships among government agencies, ICANN, IANA, the registry-operating entities, etc., and this site doesn&#x27;t seem to explain why the CEO of the Internet Society is the right person to appeal to. Can anyone point to an explanation that summarizes the overall flow of authorities and obligations involved here?

It&#x27;s amazing that .org avoided some powerful group injecting themselves as rent seekers even this long. It&#x27;s a pity we&#x27;ve decided to run society this way generally.

One more argument for taking out name-to-IP translation entirely out of &quot;managing organizations&quot; and moving it onto a fully decentralized blockchain.

Yes, have &#x27;access to the internet&#x27; a universal human right and a UN body to work towards that goal, managing domains.

Where do we put the DNS root then?If you want oversight and international consensus it cannot be placed within a country. Only option I see is to put it under the UN but that will probably ramp up the politics.

The aforementioned companies make more than web browsers. They make entire operating systems. If an OS changes how it interfaces with DNS, it will affect every service that runs on the OS.To be honest I don&#x27;t see this happening any time soon with the major commercial OSes. But in Linux you can install some programs to e.g. send all your DNS queries through a certain encrypted tunnel, and nearly every application installed on that box will happily use that tunnel.

But the value of preserving your existing address exactly, including .org on the end, mostly only exists in browsers, where humans find things initially.Actually, I bet by now it doesn&#x27;t even matter that much even there any more. Consider how the search in google already forms an effective alternative dns for many actual humans attempting to manually go somewhere.If you have a .org domain, you can change all the non-browser uses of the domain pretty easily. The tools in the background of things don&#x27;t care what the names are. You can change them and it&#x27;s really not that much of a disruption.Once someone finds your site, via their browser, you can populate that site with whatever kinds of urls and directions and references you want. Just like no one really cares how ugly and long all the urls to actual things other than the front page are. Your site can include say, the directions to access your API, and those directions don&#x27;t have to say foo.org in them. Even existing api users that break if you have to change your name, can react to that change easily enough.Email is probably the biggest problem. We will all simply have to never pin too much dependency on any single email address. But we already have to do that, so no loss.If you had set up your own domain so you weren&#x27;t at the mercy of google killing your gmail account and killing your ability to prove ownership of everything else in your life, well you would just need to have more than one email registered with everything like paypal etc. So me@mydomain.org can break and you don&#x27;t die from it.You just better realize your domain is going to break and unregister those emails everywhere before it goes into someone else&#x27;s hands. Because when someone else owns a domain, then they can receive all emails sent to any name at that domain, including &quot;reset password&quot; mails.It&#x27;s not the most fun passtime, but it&#x27;s not necessarily the end of the world either.It really is human interactive web browser usage where the exact name matters most. So if cloudflare and google simply sent browsers to the right place and ignored the traditional root authority for .org, or any other name lookup, that would pretty much be good enough.Google could do it already without even violating dns just through search results.

&gt; It only needs Google, Mozilla, Apple and Microsoft to agree and ICANN can be made irrelevant overnight.Of course not. The Web is only a small part of the Internet. DNS is used by way more services than Web browsers.

How about getting the browser and OS makers together to use an alternate DNS system?It only needs Google, Mozilla, Apple and Microsoft to agree and ICANN can be made irrelevant overnight.

Is there a reason why price caps on .org can&#x27;t be restored?

Sure, but, people went into those domains _knowing_ that was the case. .org started with a price cap and I for one thought it would stay that way.

.com has price caps. Imagine what happens when they remove those and they can just price everyone out of their .com names, names they may have had for 25+ years.Imagine a world where whomever has the most money can control your brand. What happens when McDonalds buys the Burger King brand because BK was priced out?.com, .org, and .net are long standing shared resources that should not have unlimited prices. They should be capped forever.

This is the case for all new gTLDs. .pro to .xyz to . accountant, the registry can put any price, be it zero or a million dollars.

Well, there&#x27;s the US government. They could pass a law in theory at any rate. One of the arguments for allowing self regulating bodies like ICANN is they do a decent job but if that ceases to be the case it&#x27;s kind of the governments job to step in.

There&#x27;s no higher authority than ICANN as far as domain names are concerned. That&#x27;s why the letter says &quot;help stop the sale&quot;, not &quot;stop the sale&quot;.

This is just awful. For everyone wondering &quot;how bad can it really be?&quot;, they can put whatever cost they like to keep your domain registered. I have a small carpooling site for ski fields in New Zealand - snowpool.org . I&#x27;ve run this for 10 years, as a fun side project. If they hike the fees to 3K a year (or whatever) then there&#x27;s just no way I&#x27;d keep it going. I&#x27;ve have to migrate somewhere else, which would be a complete pain in the ass.I find it just awfully sad (and probably corrupt) that this happened at all, and I really hope there&#x27;s some higher authority that can roll this back - or at minimum bring back the price-cap.Very sad times.

It is OpenNIC you need to petition, so that they accept to cause a schism on the .org TLD

Yes, an &quot;About Us&quot; page should be included on that site at least.AFAIK GDPR protects personal data only, so if the savedotorg.org registrant is an entity of any kind then it shouldn&#x27;t be any problem publishing that info.

That could be due to GDPR. Some European registry companies believe GDPR makes the collection and publishing of WHOIS data illegal.ICANN is currently suing a Tucows company in Germany [1] over their refusal to comply with WHOIS data collection, and ICANN published a Temporary Specification that allows&#x2F;requires every other registry to hide WHOIS data globally pending the result of the GDPR court case [2].Of course, that doesnt prevent savedotorg.org from posting their own &quot;About Us&quot; webpage explaining who they are.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.icann.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;announcement-2018-05-25-en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.icann.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;announcement-2018-05-25-en</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.icann.org&#x2F;resources&#x2F;pages&#x2F;gtld-registration-data-specs-en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.icann.org&#x2F;resources&#x2F;pages&#x2F;gtld-registration-data...</a>

I fully support any campaign against the .org TLD hijacking but it would be good to know who&#x27;s behind that savedotorg.org domain name. A whois search gives me &#x27;Registrant Organization: Data Protected&#x27;.I&#x27;d like to know to whom are we giving our email addresses, and what are they going to do with them?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opennic.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opennic.org</a>

At what point does the internet community simply decide to fork the DNS root?
I know it&#x27;s a management nightmare, but the existence of an alternate root would put a cap on the value of the existing one.

Can&#x27;t, like... the biggest DNS servers of the world just turn their backs to the current management of .org and delegate that power to another entity?

Hmm, in my case this would be .de&#x2F;DENIC. Seems to be organized as a cooperative with those members: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.denic.de&#x2F;en&#x2F;about-denic&#x2F;members&#x2F;member-list&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.denic.de&#x2F;en&#x2F;about-denic&#x2F;members&#x2F;member-list&#x2F;</a> So not very promising.But .eu&#x2F;EURid seems to be a non-profit.

If you mostly trust your local government, perhaps your national ccTLD would be fine?

As a plan B. Is there any top level domain run by a non-profit where I can switch to long term?

Why do the resolvers need to follow what ICANN says to use for .org?  They could revolt if coordinated

Is there an effective direct action that can shake ICANN into some sense?I don’t mean this as a serious suggestion, but as an example we could have a “drop dot org” month where resolvers refuse to forward queries to the ORG nameservers.Not a great example because it would have a pretty negative impact on the domain holders, and no impact on ICANN. Can anyone think of a better example, equivalent to saying to ICANN “if you go ahead with this then we’re going to boycott dot org in a way that makes it worthless”?

When I ranted about how the transfer of DNS power under the Obama admin was a bad idea and stuff like this would happen I got called a crazy conspiracy theorist... I&#x27;m getting really tired of being right about bad things, the &quot;I told you so&quot; is very hollow.

Related discussions:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21592297" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21592297</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21582622" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21582622</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21557779" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21557779</a>

If everything is as corrupt as some throwaway states why build a new domain registration system more free and open?I know it&#x27;s work however if done right (or better) a .org should be low cost for a NGO and how about a decent non profit tld so they could have it lower cost or free?Sure it sounds hard but the automation and handling enrolling new domains is the real work

Perhaps the most likely way to stop the sale would be to make a competing offer and outbid Ethos.

I wholeheartedly agree. Letters like this only work for congresspeople, and even then only some of the time. For everyone else, lawsuits, injunctions, and criminal investigations are much more effective deterrents.

I mentioned in my last comment about this being outright corruption by the Americans involved.Now it is time to mention the 1 positive that the USA has that other countries(visibly) don&#x27;t:&gt; The willingness and ability to sue as a collective.org is a domain used by everyone from Wikipedia, UN, Debian and your national dog shelter.Private Equity cares only about one thing: making money. Anybody with a toe in the finance world knows that these are the same people that will do &quot;hostile takeovers&quot; to strip companies of their assets, pile on debt and push out a sale.A class-action lawsuit targeting the PE firm(or parties involved in the sale of .org) and then pushing your State Attorneys to investigate these corrupt individuals at a personal level will have the desired effect that appeals to the moral high-ground won&#x27;t.

Has anyone checked to see how many for-profit corporate websites are using .org? My favorite example is coursera.org.

TLDR: &quot;Dear Mr Andrew Sullivan, even though you already had extensive meetings and plans to sell and you are fully aware of the damage you&#x27;ll cause, and have decided instead to take the money and run, please reconsider.&quot;Why would someone so greedy and tone deaf possibly give a damn about such a letter? He&#x27;s walking away a rich man and he already made his choice fully knowing.If you want to Save .org, abolish ICANN. It&#x27;s time to take our medicine, ICANN with no oversight has predictably led us to an internet controlled by greed and corruption of a few wealthy elite.Appealing to the greedy will get us nowhere.We need to seize power, not to plead.

I think it is possible to do a &quot;name drop&quot; similar to a coin drop and either change the accepted ending for .org or remove ICANN&#x27;s authority over namespace altogether.. One issue might be creating an acceptable authority for certificate registrar&#x27;s, so let&#x27;s encrypt has an explanation of what domains it confirms and how if not via the ICANN derived path.

As a website owner, how do I track down all the alternate roots I&#x27;d need to register with? If each of those charge a fee, how much will I need to spend on each root? If I need to perform an OPS task like flipping to a new external load balancer IP, how many alternate robots do I need to coordinate with, and how much testing do I need to verify each root is updated?

Why can&#x27;t we simply configure clients to use a phonebook we like, rather than the phonebook we don&#x27;t like?Today, it&#x27;s relatively easy to create something like a piece of software and a db of alternative roots. And any clients which have that kit installed are suddenly simply ignoring pieces of what the traditional roots say.Yes it would be fractured for a while. But it&#x27;s no worse than say, dns over https, and the way say, you can&#x27;t reach archive.is while your browser is using doh, but can when you turn doh off. (unless they finally fixed that, but that was the situation for a ridiculously long time after both cloudflare and archive.is were made aware.)We already have such things today, so might as well employ it as well as suffer it.

Have to wonder if this campaign is just going to increase its value further.Is .org really a valid way to verify legitimacy of a non-governmental organization? Should we be looking for another solution here or is this the right hill to die on?

Icannn is a corrupt organization as anyone inside knows.

This been in the making since the start of the year:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.namecheap.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;keep-domain-prices-in-check&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.namecheap.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;keep-domain-prices-in-check&#x2F;</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;programming&#x2F;comments&#x2F;bi6gg5&#x2F;help_keep_domain_prices_in_check&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;programming&#x2F;comments&#x2F;bi6gg5&#x2F;help_ke...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19769952" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19769952</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19763078" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19763078</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19752425" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19752425</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19747512" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19747512</a>

Did a podcast explainer on this here:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wholewhale.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;152-why-we-should-save-org-domains&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wholewhale.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;152-why-we-should-save-or...</a>

Wilbur Ross is even less trustworthy than ICANN. Which is saying something.

ICANN members are not powerless, even if organizing and kicking ICANN out is a lot of work.

Except at least the American bureaucrats were accountable to the Department of Commerce, and ultimately elected officials.ICANN is accountable to nobody, whatsoever, in any capacity.

In 1998 Jon Postel briefly &quot;hijacked&quot; the DNS root zone. Formal control over DNS had always belonged to the US government, but Postel commanded such universal respect from the internet community that they were willing to follow him, as head of IANA, over the government contractor that &quot;officially&quot; ran the root at the time.This of course is why ICANN was created, to bring governance of the Internet closer to the community that developed and maintained it. But now ICANN has become just as remote and unaccountable as the bureaucrats and contractors it replaced. And Postel is long gone, and the Internet community has grown so big and fragmented that no one person will ever have anywhere near the towering position he once did.So now what do we do?

savedotorg.org campaign now over 6000 letters in under 36 hours. over 200k visits.

Most of your points are valid. That&#x27;s why I&#x27;m suggesting Mozilla support it. It would be a lot less &quot;shoddy&quot; if someone shepherded it. I think it is the right idea.The last point is only true because they aren&#x27;t recognized, which recognition would immediately fix, therefore it is moot.

OpenNIC is a poorly managed amateur project, built on shoddy infrastructure that was thrown together in the early 2000s -- it&#x27;s completely incapable of acting as any kind of peer to the ICANN root. In particular:- Their resolvers are not consistently available. Many of them are hosted on public cloud hosts (which also raises some questions about their security), and outages are not uncommon.- It&#x27;s not clear that they support DNSSEC, or that they have any plan to do so.- The governance of the OpenNIC-specific zones that they offer is even shoddier than the DNS root itself. Most of them have no registry&#x2F;registrar distinction, no domain transfer process, no WHOIS services, and sketchy to nonexistent abuse policies.- Since OpenNIC TLDs cannot be resolved on the public Internet, it&#x27;s impossible to issue a SSL certificate for one.

Full disclosure here, I am the host of the &quot;.epic&quot; TLD on OpenNIC.Knowing the maintainers of the project and the community at large, I doubt they&#x27;d take kindly to opening up the project to Mozilla&#x27;s support&#x2F;control. They&#x27;ve ran a tight game, relying on their own money and individual donations. Opening it up to Mozilla&#x27;s big money would bring the democracy aspect of the project into compromise.Personally, I&#x27;d find it interesting to see where OpenNIC would go with that kind of investment, though. I&#x27;ve poured plenty of my time and money into the project, and would like to see it grow. Perhaps not at the expense of the projects principles, though.

Existing .org domains they can&#x27;t move without overwhelming disruption, so most will just pay whatever it costs. But for the future, we need to move the Internet towards having peering relationships with TLDs such as OpenNIC.net.Motivations:* This issue of .org being sold for profit* The fact that OpenNIC had to rename their TLD domains (e.g. .free to .libre) when ICANN created a colliding .free domain, demonstrating clearly that they are not peers.Internet technologies such as browsers and operating systems should recognize ICANN and OpenNIC roots as peers, with DNSSEC to both. Should ICANN decide to create a .libre domain, existing browsers and operating systems should consider it a DNS attack and not recognize it. I think an organization like Mozilla ought to (1) flesh out any technical challenges, (2) support OpenNIC and (3) push for this.

I guess it makes sense to renew now for as many years as you can?

I&#x27;ve found it curious that while there&#x27;s a relationship to trademark for US domains (the .com&#x2F;.org&#x2F;.net ones) in anti-cybersquatting law and UDRP, the USPTO doesn&#x27;t have a mechanism to tie a domain to a mark.This would be useful if we could register our marks and tie it to a domain, along with the standard application fee. At least for certain TLD&#x27;s (.com would be a good candidate).FWIW, I have a long history of dragging registrars through the mud to get clients&#x27; domains back. As of this time, I am in a dispute with GoDaddy over a domain that was deleted because GoDaddy sells a &#x27;business registration&#x27; service. My client renewed this thinking it was for his expired domain, GoDaddy updated the WHOIS nameserver records and the site came back online. 45 days after the initial expiration GoDaddy dropped the domain without notice and a broker picked it up. I can&#x27;t even go through UDRP on this because the client never registered their trademark.

I&#x27;m talking about something akin to onion addresses:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;.onion" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;.onion</a>

you&#x27;re describing ip addresses and domain names

Half-baked idea for an alternative to domains:Let every site have a UUID, kinda like TOR addresses, and let the host&#x2F;servers as well as users specify multiple human-readable shortcuts for that UUID.So HN might get o4u20j4c9qwybv3u0p2hnxjq4k1n4vmcsvtvm2666kjn123 and no other site should ever get the same ID until the heat death of the universe, and you could access it by any name you want.Something like that would be resilient to impersonation, takeovers, brand renaming, and other issues.

Could we include .book while we’re at it? Seems like the handling of that TLD went really wrong...

For more information about this transaction, please see this post from one of the Internet Society Board of Trustees members who voted for the sale (as did they all unanimously) - Why I Voted to Sell .ORG - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.circleid.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;20191127_why_i_voted_to_sell_org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.circleid.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;20191127_why_i_voted_to_sell_o...</a>

Hey! Sorry about that. I was trying to learn how to use the platform on my phone. :) Do you want me to delete the comments? Or can you delete them?

You&#x27;ve created multiple accounts just to post on this issue. Single-purpose accounts aren&#x27;t allowed on HN, and neither is using the site for political battle, even on an issue where the community is largely in agreement. Could you please take a look at this reply I posted to your other account? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21660175" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21660175</a>You&#x27;re certainly welcome to participate as a community member, which means following the guidelines at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a> and using the site as intended, for intellectual curiosity. But it&#x27;s not ok to use it as a platform for a cause, no matter how good a cause it may be.Also, please don&#x27;t copy&#x2F;paste comments here. That lowers signal&#x2F;noise ratio and breaks the site guidelines, which call for curious conversation.

ISOC CEO does not consider the public reaction or petition significant. He stated that a mere 10,000 signatures when there are millions of .orgs indicates lack of public concern or any serious opposition to the deal.Ethos Capital paid $1.135 billion for total, unconditional, purchase of the PIR from ISOC.ISOC just &quot;grabbed the opportunity when Ethos presented it,&quot;ISOC have reviewed Ethos’s governance plans and approved them, but will have no means to enforce compliance with those plans.The deal must be approved by the end of the 1st Quarter 2021 or it fails. The exact date is still confidential.It must be approved by two bodies – ICANN and the Pennsylvania Orphans Court, which is a specialist court for estates and trusts.The PIR is incorporated in Pennsylvania and this court must approve changes in the PIR charter in order for Ethos Capital to take ownership.This is because “the Orphans’ Court judge is the ultimate defender and protector of the fund in question, and the Orphans’ Court will protect that fund and ensure that the fund is distributed to the correct beneficiary”There is a good introduction to this court at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.skhlaw.com&#x2F;pennsylvania-orphans-court-101-all-the-basics-you-need-to-know-before-venturing-in&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.skhlaw.com&#x2F;pennsylvania-orphans-court-101-all-th...</a>This means that if the Pennsylvania Orphans Court has not reached a determination by 1st April next year, or if that decision is being challenged in a manner which delays implementation, the deal fails.