Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

I don’t understand how this “sale” is legal in the first place.<p>PIR is a legal 501(c)3 nonprofit. You can’t really sell a nonprofit to a for-profit company except in unusual and rare circumstances.<p>In California, I know you need a letter from the state Attorney General to do so.<p>There are also federal restrictions on sales like this, particularly around self-dealing transactions. This transaction was obviously self dealing.<p>Someone seriously needs to dig into this. The PIR board members could be in big legal trouble. And also ICANN, which is a 501(c)3 nonprofit as well and is subject to self-dealing restrictions.<p>This is obvious, plain as day corruption. In the business world, not much can be done. But these are two nonprofits (PIR and ICANN), so something can and should be done. These kind of transactions aren’t normally legal.<p>Like, just read the examples of what an illegal self dealing transaction is in the eyes of the IRS:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boardsource.org&#x2F;resources&#x2F;private-benefit-private-inurement-self-dealing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boardsource.org&#x2F;resources&#x2F;private-benefit-private-in...</a><p>“Keep Our City Beautiful, a membership organization, plants a city alley with elaborate flowering bushes. The alley is not heavily traveled but the decorations increase the attractiveness of the city’s main restaurant whose owner is a member of the organization.”<p>ICANN clearly engaged in an illegal self dealing transaction by allowing their former CEO to enrich himself with a deal that would otherwise not be possible.<p>Edit: please see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21658324" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21658324</a> for a “what you can do right now”

&gt; Make .org domain names &quot;accessible and reasonably priced for all&quot;, including limiting price increases to no more than 10% per year<p>This immediately stuck out to me as a really bad deal.<p>Rising with inflation, somewhere between 1 and 4% per year, would essentially keep prices stable. This is tricky when selling internationally, but roughly possible.<p>Rising by 10% each year is significantly faster than inflation, and would result in a $20 domain name doubling in price in 7 years, or 6x in 20 years.<p>This is the internet we&#x27;re talking about, 20 year time horizons are important and yet still short sighted. In 100 years we&#x27;re talking $275,000 rather than the $400 that inflation would get us to.<p>&gt; Ethos has said that their plan is to &quot;live within the spirit of historic practice,&quot;<p>This is not what Private Equity does. It cuts costs and quality, raises prices, strips assets, and seeks to significantly increase profits. I think it&#x27;s naive and short-sighted to take them at their word, as this article admits they are doing.

Wow, this is the kind of guy running the internet... he just sold out all the non-profits of the world. Jesus.<p>If you read carefully -- despite the title, he works hard to obscure it -- the &quot;why&quot; is he just wants the money.<p>His argument about why it&#x27;s OK -- &quot;Trust me, Ethos is totally trustworthy&quot; -- is absurd and incoherent.<p>First of all, the point and purpose of private equity is to make money. To misconstrue the issue as <i>distrust</i> of private equity is backwards. I trust them 100% -- to fulfill their purpose to make money. They <i>will</i> extract money from this investment as effectively and efficiently as they can. Raising prices quickly is just one thing they might do, by the way. If they can find an opportunity to make a nice and quick profit that devastates .org they won&#x27;t hesitate to take take it if it meets their current investment goals.

The simplified timeline (as I understand it, willing to be corrected if I&#x27;m wrong);<p>1. PIR, or someone very close, seems to have lobbied to have price restriction of .org removed. My understanding is that PIR made the argument that they&#x27;re a non-profit, they have no reason to raise pricing extortionately<p>2. This was passed, despite a large number of comments against the idea, Ethos was incorporated the following day<p>3. PIR sold itself to Ethos, a for profit company<p>The people involved seem to be moving between ICANN, PIR and private firms.<p>Given all these things I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s unreasonable that people are deeply sceptical. Especially with the ambiguity of &quot;no more than 10% per year&quot; being throw around.

This author is just outright naive.<p>&gt;Even in the worst case, if Ethos considers dramatically increasing prices (which, to be clear, we do not expect them to do!), the Registry Agreement for .org requires a 6-month notice period during which domain owners can lock in a 10-year registration at pre-increase rates. This should seriously discourage Ethos from doing this, because it would take 10 years for the new high rate to even take effect for existing registrants, and new registrations would likely fall off right away.<p>No, the worst case scenario is that they jack up prices and then run a massive campaign FUD campaign about non-profits without .org addresses. Or they start selling of Oxfam.org to competitors. Or hell, they start doing differential pricing, gouging the people they think can pay.<p>&gt;We&#x27;re all trying to make the Internet a better place<p>No we&#x27;re not. Don&#x27;t be an idiot. Private equity companies are making money from investments they have no interest in making anything a better place and it&#x27;s insulting to expect people to believe that.

IRS Form 13909 can be used to submit complaints about non-profit organizations to the IRS. Here are two pre-filled Form 13909&#x27;s, one for ICANN and one for ISOC. Just print it out, add your personal information to both, and mail it to the address listed on the bottom of the form.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yukari.sr.ht&#x2F;dotorg-form-13909.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yukari.sr.ht&#x2F;dotorg-form-13909.pdf</a><p>Alternatively, this file can be opened with LibreOffice Draw to make edits and prepare your document digitally:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yukari.sr.ht&#x2F;dotorg-form-13909.odg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yukari.sr.ht&#x2F;dotorg-form-13909.odg</a><p>lodraw crash course: F2 + click drag to make a new text box, Ctrl+[ to reduce the font size to something reasonable, red icon in the toolbar along the top to export as PDF. You can send the document by email to eoclass@irs.gov.

Right. This guy was appointed to ISOC by IETF, unfortunately this year, so his term lasts until 2022. However there are 4 board members whose term is up in 2020 [1], one appointed by the IETF. According to BCP77 [2] The IETF will choose its appointee in January. Nominations for candidates for all 4 positions apparently close next week, Dec 6 [3] so anyone who has the time and interest to scrutinise the nominees (or even propose new ones) needs to act on this pretty soon.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.internetsociety.org&#x2F;board-of-trustees&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.internetsociety.org&#x2F;board-of-trustees&#x2F;</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;bcp77" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;bcp77</a> [3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.internetsociety.org&#x2F;board-of-trustees&#x2F;elections&#x2F;2020&#x2F;call-for-nominations&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.internetsociety.org&#x2F;board-of-trustees&#x2F;elections&#x2F;...</a>

I think it&#x27;s worth noting some of the timeline of this [1]:<p>&gt; On May 13, 2019, ICANN announced that they would remove the price cap on .org registrations (despite 98% disapproval in public comments [2])<p>&gt; On May 14, 2019, the private equity firm Ethos Capital was founded by former ICANN chief executive Fadi Chehadé and investor Erik Brooks.<p>&gt; On November 13, 2019, it was announced that the Public Interest Registry (that manages .org) had agreed to be acquired by Ethos Capital, as its first investment.<p>&gt; Subsequently, PIR announced it would abandon its non-profit status to become a B Corporation.<p>Is the author unaware of this, in on the deal, or just remarkably naive?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Public_Interest_Registry" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Public_Interest_Registry</a> [2] <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>

In which a patsy sets out the arguments by which he was manipulated.<p>A large part of his motivation appears to be delusions of grandeur within an organization, the Internet Society, which, up to now, has been of no relevance whatsoever, and which has only now achieved a degree of prominence through an act of apparently naive stupidity.

For all the good you&#x27;ve done in the past and now, Richard, this is just one long disappointing read. Between the lines, the text is &quot;we don&#x27;t have the people to maintain PIR and decided that rather than hire people for it, we should sell it&quot; and then a for-profit shell was set up and PIR was funneled over to it, and now it&#x27;s no longer your problem to have to deal with. From your perspective, that&#x27;s not making things better: that&#x27;s walking away from them. And now you&#x27;ve made it _our_ problem, one _we don&#x27;t have the power to fix_ and from our perspective, that&#x27;s not you making the internet better: that&#x27;s making our internet worse.

&gt; Make .org domain names &quot;accessible and reasonably priced for all&quot;, including limiting price increases to no more than 10% per year<p>There is nothing reasonable about the current prices. It’s literally a few hundred bytes of data mostly static data.<p>“10% per year” means it will double every seven years. “Up to” means they will be doing it at the maximum. And unless this is legally codified I doubt they would adhere to that either.

I wonder if he really believes this when he was typing it. I find it difficult to understand the rationale of selling ORG to private equity and the justify it as good for the internet. I hope this line of BS turns out to be true, but giving ORG over to a bunch of MBAs with experience in day trading does not a confident nerd make.

This is what happens when the PR or fund raising people get in charge of a charity - suddenly it becomes all about raising awareness or funds and not about doing....<p>Why provide a service ( like .org ) when you can &#x27;raise awareness&#x27;? Or raise funds for others to do stuff.<p>The great thing about being the fund raising or awareness part is it&#x27;s<p>1. where the money is<p>2. where the exposure is<p>3. and you have no responsibility for actually delivering stuff!!!<p>So you can justify higher salaries for the people running the charity....<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hbr.org&#x2F;2011&#x2F;09&#x2F;you-should-be-able-to-get-rich" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hbr.org&#x2F;2011&#x2F;09&#x2F;you-should-be-able-to-get-rich</a>

&quot;While it&#x27;s true that running .org provided a relatively steady income stream, it effectively staked most of our revenue on a single business, and required a certain amount of our resources to be spent managing that business, distracting from the broader mission.&quot;<p>So, now they don&#x27;t have any significant income stream anymore? Great! So once they run out of money from the sell, they&#x27;re closing down? That is, unless they find some other way to generate a profit to burn on non-profitable-but-good things (like they&#x27;re doing now). For which .org was the perfect fit?<p>I mean, if THEY would have increased prices by 10% per-year for the next few years, well, I think people would have been mad, too. But not as much as now, since at least the money would have flown to some &quot;good use&quot;(tm). But now? Cash flows to private investors, who expect (surprise!) to EARN money on that deal.

What it comes down to is the board wanted a large pile of cash so they could do more of whatever it is they like doing, which apparently is not what many of us think their core mission should be.<p>I look forward to reading how much the board members are being paid now, and how much they will be paid in a years time.

Even if Ethos’ ‘intentions’ are to be taken at face value, $26 is still a ridiculous price for basically no service. But these intentions are essentially worthless or they’d be put in writing.<p>Why would there be no non-profit willing to do this ‘work’ providing this ‘service’ for whatever price you want? You should know, your organization provides much more service for no money at all.

I never actually stopped to consider why they chose to sell of the TLD. I thought this was just a terrible organizational decision. Call me naive, but it didn&#x27;t occur to me that it was about the cash infusion. I can&#x27;t believe they want to jeopardize such an important part of the structure of the internet for a one time cash infusion. Absolutely disgusting.<p>&gt;If we take Ethos at their word<p>What a child

&gt; This transaction will put that bigger mission on a solid footing<p>I don&#x27;t understand how that should be true. Either Ethos would have too pay too much or Ethos would have to be able to run this business more cost effective. Both sounds questionable.<p>&gt; While it&#x27;s true that running .org provided a relatively steady income stream, ... &gt; Establishing a more diverse portfolio of investments will allow us to have more predictable revenue over time.<p>Relatively steady sound pretty predictable to me. It will be interesting to see who from the inner circle will benefit from those future &quot;investments&quot;.<p>&gt; Even in the worst case, ... the Registry Agreement for .org requires a 6-month notice period during which domain owners can lock in a 10-year registration at pre-increase rates.<p>That is wrong: &quot;Registry Operator shall offer registrars the option to obtain domain name registration renewals at the current price ... for periods of one (1) to ten (10) years at the discretion of the registrar, but no greater than ten (10) years.&quot;

One of the big issues with this post is that it is trying to sell the terms of the deal.<p>But the issue people have with it in the Internet Policy Community is not the terms, which we no nothing about.<p>It is that the way it was done is a radical departure from how decisions are normally made.<p>Usually you start by saying &quot;I have a problem&quot;. In this case it would be &quot;We don&#x27;t want to run .ORG anymore.&quot;<p>And then you engage the community in an open bottom-up consultative process to come up with the optimal solution.<p>ISOC applied to run .ORG in 2002. They won a competition to run it against 10 other groups. Here is the original application they submitted to ICANN:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.icann.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;tlds&#x2F;org&#x2F;applications&#x2F;isoc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.icann.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;tlds&#x2F;org&#x2F;applications&#x2F;isoc&#x2F;</a><p>They said things like:<p>&quot;PIR will institute mechanisms for promoting the registry&#x27;s operation in a manner that is responsive to the needs, concerns, and views of the non-commercial Internet user community.&quot;<p>And:<p>&quot;.ORG is the home of non-commercial entities on the Internet&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.icann.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;tlds&#x2F;org&#x2F;applications&#x2F;isoc&#x2F;section8.html#c38E1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.icann.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;tlds&#x2F;org&#x2F;applications&#x2F;isoc&#x2F;sect...</a><p>After running .ORG since 2002, and growing it to over 10 million domains under management under this promise, ISOC&#x27;s Board suddenly and with no prior consultation, decided to privatize it. They took that decision in a private negotiation over less than 3 months.<p>That decision making process is not how the Internet maintains a stable and secure infrastructure. It needs careful decision making to ensure reliable, stable, and resilient operations.

If this was supposed to reassure people then I want to meet those people as I have something to sell them. 10% per year price increases are insane! You can’t exactly just change domain names to a cheaper option either, like say insurance. Your whole identity is locked to it.<p>This only makes me more convinced that it’s a bad move.

So much bullshit and so littke valid argument in this big post. But don&#x27;t worry &#x27;Make .org domain names &quot;accessible and reasonably priced for all&quot;, including limiting price increases to no more than 10% per year&#x27; It can ONLY increase of 10% per year. Like if it is a low number...

This is so monumentally wrong that I have to wonder whether some kind of class action lawsuit is inevitable. As the owner of a .org domain name, I feel duped. I thought I was dealing (ultimately, not counting intermediate registrars) with a non-profit organisation that had some permanent commitment to the public good. Now I’m just renting from a landlord whose interests are guaranteed to be the opposite of mine.

&gt; So if we take Ethos at their word, they should be just as good a steward for .org as the Internet Society has been<p>Sigh.. I&#x27;m guessing the author is&#x2F;was not aware of the serious conflict of interest among the decision-makers and private stake holders who passed through the revolving doors of IS, ICANN, PIR, Ethos.<p>Voting with such naivete, especially underestimating the greed of a for-profit organization, is not being a good steward. They&#x27;ve let down the public in this decision.

The Netherlands chapter of the ISOC is objecting to the .ORG sale ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;domainnamewire.com&#x2F;tag&#x2F;internet-society&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;domainnamewire.com&#x2F;tag&#x2F;internet-society&#x2F;</a> ):<p><i>We believe that the 2019 decision of ISOC Global to sell PIR to private equity firm Ethos Capital is not in line with ICANN’s criteria from 2002 and the subsequent promise from ISOC Global. Despite ISOC Global’s assurances to the contrary, we share the misgivings of the international community about giving a single privately owned entity the power to raise tariffs, implement rights protection mechanisms possibly leading to censorship, and suspend domains at the request of local governments. We also fear that ISOC Global’s reputation has been severely harmed by even contemplating this transaction.</i><p><i>We therefore call on ISOC Global’s leadership to reverse this decision immediately, and do its utmost to restore faith in ISOC as the one global organisation that through its many professionals and dedicated volunteers sincerely strives for an internet for everyone.</i>

What is it with international supervisory bodies and blatant corruption (or maybe incredible incompetence)? This has real parallels to the International Olympic Committee and FIFA. I guess the parallels for all of them are a monopolistic position (and in many cases an essentially government granted one) with basically no oversight. Those conditions just seem to breed corruption.

So this is &quot;we need the money to survive, and we completely trust these private equity guys to do the right thing&quot;<p>10%&#x2F;year should be reaping quite some profit after a while. I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if this is a pump-and-dump kind of deal, where PE substantially raise prices and then sell the entity at a big profit, given the effectively locked-in forward profits.

Idealistic greed is different from regular greed. Idealistic greed is always about expanding the mission. To do work that&#x27;s <i>even more</i> important. To reach <i>even more</i> people. To expand the battle or skirmish into a full-on <i>war</i> (see this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21612488" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21612488</a>). It can lead to ruin just as easily as regular greed can, particularly when you consider that the people you end up negotiating with, who often specialize in regular greed, are usually better at it, and aren&#x27;t hobbled and constrained the way you are by your vision or mission.

This is so incredibly naive, and he made at least one decision based on flawed understanding of the 10yr price lock in: only _registrar’s_ need to be notified. It’s up to them to notify registrants. If they were looking at a significant price increase for .org or to lock in existing customers for 10 years, would they notify their registrants? I would think no!<p>It’s extra sad because they had a commercial vehicle with which to further their mission, which could have been a huge asset to the ecosystem, and instead of finding a way to have it be a source of sustainability, they threw it away for a one time cash infusion.<p>The rest of the post is just this guy trying to make himself feel better for an awful decision.

&gt; <i>Many of the current concerns about .org are premised on a presumption that prices will rise</i><p>No, they are based on the fact that it was clearly a backroom deal with no due process that would&#x27;ve NEVER happened if the seller wasn&#x27;t closely associated with the buyer.

“ So if we take Ethos at their word, they should be just as good a steward for .org as the Internet Society has been, with robust ties to the community and an explicit public-benefit orientation.”<p>This man is a fool.

How does he mention LetsEncrypt and not have http redirect to https on his site?

Its fine because we&#x27;re good and we get more money and Ethos are just simply good guys so that&#x27;s good and nice so I voted &quot;Yay&quot; and now things are better because my organisation can keep me in a good job doing basically nothing whilst corporations buy up and exploit the internet.

It seems like a slap across the face that they offer <i>as a defense</i> a 10% increase which <i>compounds annually</i>. That isn’t a defense... it is a stunning illustration of the problem! Even the cable companies would be jealous (while their own customers are cutting the cord left and right).<p>Worse, 10%&#x2F;year isn’t a contractual limitation; it is but a statement of “intent”. It is nothing short of malfeasance to have sold a non-profit’s operations without sufficient safeguards. And to a private equity firm? Outrageous incompetence if not criminal in action.<p>His article doesn’t justify the transaction or allay reasonable concerns. In fact, he seems to be presenting the case for why this transaction is crooked if not criminal!

I&#x27;m a .org domain user. My email is a .org, my website is a .org. It&#x27;s [my name].org. I&#x27;ve registered through 2029 now. Hopefully by then this whole nonsense has passed. Honestly domain names have been handled very poorly over the past 10 years, between this and the ridiculous gTLD system. They are just becoming super-expensive vanity items for corporations to get nice redirects.

IMO, putting &quot;Ethos&quot; in the name of your private equity firm makes it a little bit too obvious that you don&#x27;t want people to realize that you care about nothing but money.

&quot;(...) what Ethos themselves have said about their intentions (...)&quot; means nothing. They can change their mind, put new directors in a month that will have different opinions etc. What&#x27;s important is what they can legally do and how incentives are structured. Giving monopoly to private equity and expecting good things to happen is a joke.

How can you let market economics mix with something as basic as where your organization registers its name?<p>Perhaps private equity could also take control of oxygen supply? If prices get out of control, perhaps the market will make other respirable gases available?<p>I’m sure I’ll regret writing something so emotive, but I really resent being backed into what feels like could easily be labeled a loony-left corner on this debate. Is this .org sell off an exercise in driving those who lean even slightly towards moderately left economics into insanity, incapacitating them?

Whatever he thinks of Ethos or the statements they are making isn&#x27;t relevant anyway. It&#x27;s a private firm, it can be itself bought and sold, acquired, merged, etc.<p>What happens if Google or Facebook or whatever suddenly wants to control .org? They just have to shell out a few millions?

Interesting to see how people are bound to their selective perception if they can somehow profit from it.<p>Ethos will squeeze every last drop out of this opportunity.

Sell to a private equity firm that tries to maximize profit from those assets. Yeah, what couldn’t go wrong with that. At least this individual has admitted liability for his part in this TLD’s forthcoming downfall.

I&#x27;m kind of amazed that this website (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.circleid.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.circleid.com</a>) is not served via https and even the login is posted to a http endpoint. There&#x27;s even a redirect from https to http.<p>You would think that &quot;A World-Renowned Source for Internet Developments&quot; would be on top of that.

&gt; limiting price increases to no more than 10% per year<p>Oh, well. That&#x27;s okay then.

Out of curiosity, did anyone actually ask expressly Richard how he voted and why he voted this way?<p>I mean, <i>escusatio non petita, accusatio manifesta</i>:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Latin_phrases_(E)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Latin_phrases_(E)</a><p>or &quot;he who excuses himself, accuses himself&quot;

I hate this justification of doing bad stuff with ‘for the greater good’ excuse.

&gt;&gt;&gt; the Registry Agreement for .org requires a 6-month notice period during which domain owners can lock in a 10-year registration at pre-increase rates. This should seriously discourage Ethos from doing this<p>Or the could announce a massive increase to get all the .org owners to register for 10 years to give them a massive influx of capital right away, then divest that capital in to some other venture, then sell PIR to someone else. I am sure Verisign would love to buy it, or Donuts<p>the Internet Society can not stop them from off loading it in a couple of years after they extract their money from the .org space.

So...how much does it cost to run gTLD these days? Perhaps the time is right to set up a non-profit to run one at actually affordable prices, instead of the current ripoff and the future .org price increases.

Why change something that&#x27;s working well? For profit, that&#x27;s why. The author is either dumb or invested.

SaveDotOrg.org is a great place to start following this issue. Lots of nonprofits organizing to defend .org.

fair is fair, so i vote for selling .MIL and .GOV to a for-profit company.<p>brb, i&#x27;ll make one. i promise not to hike prices too much (in the first year).

I really don&#x27;t like the internet and humanity in general for threads like this. Calling a particular person names like navie, idiot, gaslighter, corrupt, fool, greedy, insane, malicious, patsy, disingenuous, child, disgusting, unethical, etc, the way people in this thread have, is never a good thing.<p>It&#x27;s really not cool when the target is a person. Receiving dozens of people angrily accusing you of evil is upsetting, and can lead to fear, anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. I&#x27;ve seen people experience it. You may not care about this person&#x27;s welfare, but you should, if you want to be an ethical human being.<p>It also doesn&#x27;t help any idea you think you have, but it reinforces you emotionally to believe it, even on the really rare chance that you <i>might</i> not have expert information, and are just reacting to your limited understanding of a subject.<p>And it galvanizes opinions (your own, and of others) because of how the emotion and anger is shared by so many people. It makes you believe all the things people are saying, and you don&#x27;t even stop to think critically. I know, because I too have decided to agree with the crowd here before when they dog-piled on others, only to find out the opinion everyone had (including my own) was pitifully inaccurate. I later wanted to provide some correction, but good luck fighting a mob when it wants to feel right.

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.<p>Ethos Capital paid $1.135 billion for total, unconditional, purchase of the PIR from ISOC.<p>ISOC just &quot;grabbed the opportunity when Ethos presented it,&quot;<p>ISOC have reviewed Ethos’s governance plans and approved them, but will have no means to enforce compliance with those plans.<p>The deal must be approved by the end of the 1st Quarter 2021 or it fails. The exact date is still confidential.<p>It must be approved by two bodies – ICANN and the Pennsylvania Orphans Court, which is a specialist court for estates and trusts.<p>The PIR is incorporated in Pennsylvania and this court must approve changes in the PIR charter in order for Ethos Capital to take ownership.<p>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”<p>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><p>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.

I&#x27;m surprised no one mentioned that Barnes works for Cisco:<p>&gt; Richard Barnes is Chief Security Architect for Collaboration at Cisco<p>Cisco has had backdoored equipment and far too many security vulnerabilities. They supply equipment to suppressive regimes like China, allowing these countries to block, filter, and monitor internet traffic in an effort to suppress human rights.<p>Someone who works for a company like that should not be trusted with important decisions related to fundamental parts of the internet.

Privatizing previously public services have always turned out badly. This will be no different.

This is nothing but the author attempting to justify his unethical decision to himself. I hope he lives long enough to recognise, and potentially correct, his mistake.

The only thing I got out of that was &quot;we want money.&quot; There&#x27;s no real justification for what they did. What&#x27;s worse, and also condescending, is the crap about taking Ethos at their word.<p>So let me get this straight; you typed out all these words to hide your real intentions (you want money) and we&#x27;re now supposed to trust you vouching for a private equity firm? Please. Get the hell out of here. Put some more effort into your schemes.

I come away from reading that completely convinced that the decision to sell .org will be a terrible one for internet users and .org name holders.

If the management of .org customers was as distracting as he claims (I believe it), it would have been better to, instead of selling it, open up the administration to bids where the private companies have to reach certain goals and ensure certain provisions. If the management company can&#x27;t do it or they start breaking their contact, control reverts back to the Internet Society.

It is not only naive, there is the classic &quot;appeal to authority&quot; fallacy in the mix too! Someone wanted to badly do some damage control, which does not seem to have achieved it purpose.<p>And yes, as someone stated, privaty equity companies want to make money from their investments, believing anything else as their &quot;goal&quot; is utter foolish.

It&#x27;s obvious the author and apparently their entire board didn&#x27;t believe their role was an important one.<p>In the end it sounds like whoever was doing the voting ended up putting the wrong people in charge.<p>Would be useful to have a public reference listing the names of those who made this vote so future non-profits don&#x27;t make the same mistake.

This is the first time in many years on HN I see HN commenters commented unequivocally 100% against the author.

Bad move: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;the-economist-explains&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;29&#x2F;why-is-america-giving-up-control-of-icann" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;the-economist-explains&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;29&#x2F;...</a>

What a fucking moron!<p>1. No, 26$ is obviously not a sane, let alone a reasonable price for a domain registration. For comparison, you can register .de for &lt; 4 EUR&#x2F;year, so at a price of 26$ this is redirecting 220 million dollars of funds that were donated for charitable work to definitely not charitable profit for these investors--or 160 million more than right now.<p>2. The price increase is capped at <i>only</i> 10% per year? Are you fucking kidding me? Do you seriously not have a clue how exponential growth works? .org has existed for 34 years, if you add another 34 years of increases of &quot;only&quot; 10%, you are at 255$ per year. Or, as he himself calculated, it&#x27;s more than doubling the price in ten years, which would be just crazy.<p>3. &quot;They promised they&#x27;d be good!&quot; ... seriously? You seriously can not see the problem with a transaction where a profit-seeking entity obviously explicitly avoids actually promising anything (that is: making any of those &quot;promises&quot; legally binding)? After all, it is possible to actually promise all those things in a meaningful way, that&#x27;s what the legal system is for.<p>4. &quot;Give back to the .org community through a Community Enablement Fund&quot; ... or in other words: Appropriate charitable donations where the donors have already decided what causes they should go to and redistribute them to their liking. Can anyone really be too stupid to see through this and be in a position to make such a decision?<p>5. &quot;While it&#x27;s true that running .org provided a relatively steady income stream, it effectively staked most of our revenue on a single business, and required a certain amount of our resources to be spent managing that business, distracting from the broader mission.&quot; ... WTF? And running it in the future will not require any resources? Does this guy not understand basic financial math either? Like, if you buy a business, you pay for expected profits, i.e., after you you have subtracted expected expenses, i.e., if you sell a business, you still &quot;pay&quot; for all the future expenses? Selling a business does not magically create money, it only shifts the cash flow to the present day. <i>The only way selling a business can increase your cash flow is if the buyer increases prices or reduces costs.</i><p>It&#x27;s all so obviously from the bullshitting playbook you can hardly believe anyone would actually believe any of these &quot;arguments&quot; to be of any value, when the path to actually guaranteeing all of these things that we are supposed to just believe is so obvious.

Limit price increases to 10% a year!!?!??! Tone deaf AF.<p>I cannot believe someone actually wrote that down.

Always remember that theese are the people in charge of running the internet.<p>I really hope he didn&#x27;t have too much say in the important things at Let&#x27;s Encrypt. Because statements like this really damage the little trust I have left in companys.

So basically his two reasons are: “they gave us money, and I think they’re worthy”

Please, Barnes&#x27; &quot;reasoning&quot; is not naiveté. Barnes and his colleagues understand exactly what they are doing. The Barnes article is evidence of nothing but contempt for its intended audience.

I wonder what Network Solutions thinks of this? If you register a .org through them, they offer 100 year registration for $999.<p>The registries do not allow a domain to be registered for more than 10 years in the future, so the way NS implements this is by initially registering it for 10 years for you, and then automatically registering an additional year each year.<p>That only works out for NS if prices don&#x27;t rise too much over the next 100 years.<p>I haven&#x27;t read their terms to see if they have some sort of escape clause to get out of the 100 year deal if prices rise too much.

Looks like OP is based in Washington D.C.<p>Guess he was feeling left out when it came to all the lobbying money and croney corruption.<p>Strange he never addressed the fact that a new non-profit wasn&#x27;t set up to control the domain.

You can never take a corporation at its word. If you relied on promises that you obtained (limits on price increases, etc) you should have gotten all of that language into a legally binding contract. Even if current management of Ethos is committed to what you say they promised, management changes, companies run into trouble, and future management may come under pressure to extract more revenue.<p>Also, what&#x27;s the justification for 10% annual increases? Their costs aren&#x27;t going up faster than inflation.

There is a reason the author is on the board that gets to decide this. I wish the relevant people would just pocket the money and book a plane ticket to an offshore location, rather than bragging about it on social media. That way at least some people other than the hedge fund would get something out of this deal. I can understand simple corruption. I too need a fast-ish sportscar and a decently sized mansion to fuel my habits. But this, I cannot understand at all.

Judging by the numbers, you can guess they sold for somewhere in the $100m-$1B range. Hard to resist. And also known as corruption, when it comes to public services.

If anyone believes Ethos will stick to increasing prices by no more than 10% a year they&#x27;re dreaming. This is a private equity firm, not a non-profit.

Hoping for &quot;just&quot; a 10% price hike annually is like hoping that a mugger just steals your phone and wallet instead of stabbing you in the gut.

Renewing my .org domains now for as long as I can.

Quick question - www.internetsociety.org - did you get a sweet heart deal or are you on the same future track as everyone else?

This is nonsense; it ignores the huge conflicts of interest and the obvious elephant in the room: nobody is going to pay a lot of money for something unless they expect to get a lot of money out of it, and the only way to get a lot of money out of .org is to extract it from the largely non-profit .org domain holders.

A great pity that Poptels (Worker Coop) bid did not succeed over the internet society.<p>I worked for one of the other bidders for .org as did Ivan Pope.<p>Don&#x27;t suppose Billg or some altruistic rich people want to fund us to get the Band back on the road :-)<p>Only Half Joking I am sure that Ivan And some of the Poptel team would be up for it

this is dystopian. is there anything we can do? i can’t think of anything... government won’t help, the org which we trusted to protect .org is the one screwing it, are we completely powerless?<p>if this battle is lost, what greedy move can they make next? how can we get ahead of that now?

If you want to complain to ICANN about the sale you can do it here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;survey.clicktools.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;survey&#x2F;response.jsp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;survey.clicktools.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;survey&#x2F;response.jsp</a>

I&#x27;m worried that somebody with staggering naivete like this is on the board of Let&#x27;s Encrypt as well.<p>I wonder if he&#x27;d have the same lack of qualms about selling that to a private equity firm...

This article just makes matters worse. Saying nothing would have been better. Not selling would have been the best.<p>This seriously falls in the &quot;I didn&#x27;t know you could do that category&quot; for me.

“Limiting price increases to only 10% per year”<p>Let that sink in for a minute. In only 10 years, it’s going to cost 10x what it does today to register A NAME.<p>Technology was supposed to prevent things like this, not enable it.

Giving a monopoly to a private company that is only interested in maximizing profit will end badly. This is obvious. The author is deluding himself to think any other outcome will happen.

Anyone care to give an analysis of how this will affect small-timers who want to register .org domains in the future in comparison to registering a different top-level domain?

&quot;Hey guys, now we run the .org registry we&#x27;re providing valuable security to the registry users through synergistically responding to key realtime threats. As such, in order to now return correct IP addresses _every_time_ we need extra funding and so there is now a $100 security fee per 100k requests. But, in keeping with our forthright policy to stimulate internet growth the domain renewal fee is only 10% higher than last year. We&#x27;re also freezing all updating of equipment as it might introduce security vulnerabilities.&quot;<p>-- new .org registry owners, next year, probably

I would love to see the author do an AMA here and attempt to address all the counter-arguments in this thread!

Andre Sullivan of ISOC needs to resign. ISOC international needs to get rebuild based on integrity and trust.

Whatever man, this is straight up grimy and both parties disgust me.

Happy Thanksgiving! Why do I have to wake up to this horseshit.

&gt; So if we take Ethos at their word<p>It is unfortunate that we have a business culture where to take someone at their word is not only naive but so reckless that the duped gets most of the blame rather than the duper.<p>And yet, here we are. This is the reality. Taking a private equity firm &quot;at their word&quot; is so foolish that it&#x27;s hard to believe the author isn&#x27;t being disingenuous.

This looks like a puff piece masquerading as blog entry.

the author can&#x27;t even be bothered to implement proper TLS&#x2F;HTTPS on their website (Mozilla blocks it)... and they voted for domain names?

Is the 10% increase for <i>individual</i> domains or <i>on average</i>? If it&#x27;s on average, that means those with the most valuable domain names can expect increases of 300% or more soon...

i would question how much money is this guy making on the backend from this newly formed &quot;ethos&quot; corp... smells pretty rotten

&quot;Because that is where the money is.&quot;

&gt; 10% per year<p>AKA doubling every 8 years.

&gt; If we take Ethos at their word<p>This guy must be new to this whole Crony Capitalism thing.

Oh thank god! They said they would be good.<p>I’m glad there’s no recorded instances in history where that turned out to be a patent lie.

&gt; The Internet Society does great work protecting the Internet and bringing it to the people who need it most — work that is way more impactful than leasing domain names. This transaction secures that work&#x27;s future and independence.<p>Is “lease” the understanding others have regarding the relationship among a registrar and registrant?<p>Isn’t the registrar intended to operate the supporting infrastructure and no more? Where does the concept of a “lease” enter the transaction?

How relevant is a TLD anymore? There are so many options. Most people seem to use Google, and then after visiting the site, they use whatever the autocomplete in their address bar is. Or, they use an app.<p>At least in India, I&#x27;ve seen most people doing this on their smartphones. Nobody likes to type in the address bar anymore.