I wrote about this too - linked in the article.
<a href="https://lancewiggs.com/2019/12/01/did-isoc-leave-1-billion-on-the-table/" rel="nofollow">https://lancewiggs.com/2019/12/01/did-isoc-leave-1-billion-o...</a><p>The travesty is that ISOC has given up a sure-fire stream of $55+ million/year in tax-free income, along with the ability to easily grow that to over $100m/year with price increases - all for just over $1.1 billion.<p>As any r/personalfinance reader can tell you a rule of thumb for endowments is to spend a maximum of 4% of your assets each year. This means $44m from the $1.1bn, which means ISOC is immediately worse off than they were forecasting for this year (~$55m). Alternatively use the Yale method, which in today's low-return market will yield similar or worse results.<p>Moreover it's clear that ISOC are not behaving as the sharpest of investors, so we can imagine that the endowment might be be poorly managed or over-spent.
Related past threads:<p>"Save .org": <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677</a><p>"Take action to save .org": <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664582" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664582</a><p>"Why I Voted to Sell .org": <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656960" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656960</a><p>"ISOC sold the .org registry to Ethos Capital for $1.1B" <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667355" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667355</a>
Wow, the level of corruption and self dealing here is remarkable. Chehadé was the CEO of ICANN until a couple of years ago.<p>> On May 7th, Chehadé registered the domain for EthosCapital.com.<p>> On May 13th, ICANN decided to lift the price caps anyway. The decision was made by ICANN staff, not its board, evading the obligation to publicly carry out due diligence and explain board decisions.<p>> On May 14th, Ethos Capital was incorporated as a new Boston-based “investment firm”, founded by Brooks — who stepped down from running the 60-person team at Abry to do so. Ethos Capital has two staff: Brooks and Nora Abusitta-Ouri, a former ICANN SVP who later worked for Chehadé. [0]<p>Then a couple of months later, surprise, .org gets sold to Ethos Capital... Almost as if this was the plan the whole time...<p>Here's hoping that somehow these crooks actually end up in jail...<p>[0] <a href="http://blogs.harvard.edu/sj/2019/11/23/a-tale-of-icann-and-regulatory-capture-the-dot-org-heist/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.harvard.edu/sj/2019/11/23/a-tale-of-icann-and-r...</a>
I wonder what the level of awareness of this is in the nonprofit community itself. Something like the National Council of Nonprofits would seem to be in a good position to file a suit or at least raise awareness among its members who might be interested in forming a class.<p>While a major charity like the Salvation Army certainly doesn’t care if a single, sub-$100 annual expense doubles or even goes up by a factor of ten, thousands of small organizations across the country might care enough to band together and take action.
> Take a page from the Donuts book: create multiple price tiers for popular domains, up to 100x the base rate.<p>> Raise rates for long-time owners of common words. They weren’t using that premium space anyway.<p>This is forbidden by the .org registry agreement, 2.10(c): <a href="https://www.icann.org/sites/default/files/tlds/org/org-agmt-html-30jun19-en.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.icann.org/sites/default/files/tlds/org/org-agmt-...</a>
"Sullivan suggested that their goal is to return roughly the same annual revenue as they have been getting from PIR — around $50M. Of course this time it would come without the possibility of expanding the underlying business year by year."<p>This hurts my head. Needless to say, the returns on this fund will be _far_ less assured than the returns on simply maintaining the .org business as it was (especially with Goldman managing the fund).<p>Impressively, even ISOC comes out a loser from this deal. Only Ethos wins, but then, that was surely the point.
I bought an org domain back in the 90s, and have been using it as my personal domain (i.e. also primary email address) ever since.<p>While, granted, I was perhaps a little silly to go org (it seemed like a good idea back then!), it's mildly terrifying that my personal footprint on the web of 20+ years can now be held to ransom by a random VC firm, and to keep my own email address I might have to pay an additional $$$ annually.<p>Sigh.
My favourite part is that they didn't own it really. We told them to run it for us. It's like if my property management guy sold my house and took the money.
Are registries allowed to charge different prices for different domain names?<p>E.g. can they ask google.com for $1B to renew and mygrandmascookiecompany.com for $20 to renew?
I find it very curious that NPR has not covered this story, _and_ that they are notably missing from the list of organizations that signed at savedotorg.org. Especially because they are a .org!<p>I mean, I'm not trying to imply it should be attributed to malice, but are they asleep at the wheel or what?
This is one of the most blanetly and openly corrupt transactions in modern history. It saddens me that it looks like they are going to get away with it as well..
This is a good chance to stop our dependence on DNS and move to things such as .onion domains instead (which by the way help avoid the whole certificate CA mess).
Isn't there a technical resolution possible here where outsiders set up a new root for .org and people can change their allegiance and leave them to rot? That way Ethos capital (what a disingenuous name) paid $1B for nothing at all.
Ok honest question fellow comment reader - what are you going to do about it? This is the 5th or 6th article I’ve seen on this transaction, with hundreds of comments each.<p>Ethos Capital does not give 2 shits about your comments here.<p>Are you writing to the DA like this article suggested? What else can you do?<p>Myself, I don’t personally care that much. But I see a lot of people here obviously do, and I don’t really see that energy translating into action. I would like to see it move forward in a positive direction, so I’m asking the question of you - you don’t like it, what are you going to do about it besides complain here?
Can the URL be updated to use HTTPS, which is fully supported on blogs.harvward.edu?<p><a href="https://blogs.harvard.edu/sj/2019/12/02/the-dot-org-fire-sale-sold-for-half-its-valuation/" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.harvard.edu/sj/2019/12/02/the-dot-org-fire-sal...</a>
For all the people who keep saying there's no application for blockchain: here's one. Namecoin was a bad implementation, but the concept is sound.<p>Letting companies control domain names serves no purpose. They don't prevent domain squatters, they've censored on behalf of governments in the past, and now they're allowed to gouge nonprofits on .org domains.<p>A decentralized domain name system wouldn't solve all these problems, but at least we wouldn't be paying rent-seeking middle-men to provide terrible service.
I still can't really believe someone can sell a building block of the world wide web like .org tld. Who runs .net? .com? .edu? .info? Can they be sold, too?
Is there a benefit to locking in pricing today for say 10 years? I assume the major registries, such as namecheap and godaddy, will allow a longer term buy in?
I'm probably going to regret asking this and I apologize for my ignorance but I thought .org's were all government and nonprofit. I didn't think anybody owned it nor that the entire domain could be sold?!
The reason it sold at half it's valuation is because the valuation was bullshit.<p>It's like some guy claiming his classic car is worth 25,000 dollars. If nobody is offering 25k for it then it's not worth 25k. Period, end of story.