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.
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.
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.
From https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2019/11/isoc-pir-.... :
"March 2019:
ICANN receives 3,300 comments uniformly opposed to the change and 6 in favor of removing price caps, and sides with the 0.2% minority.
May 2019:
PIR responded to the comments with an open letter that said,
“We are a mission-based non-profit, and would never betray the trust that you have put into .ORG and us.”
On 7 May, Chehadé registered the domain for EthosCapital.com.
On 13 May, ICANN decided to lift the price caps anyway.
On 14 May, Ethos Capital was incorporated as a new investment firm founded by Brooks. Ethos Capital has two staff: Brooks and Nora Abusitta-Ouri, a former ICANN SVP who later worked for Chehadé and was also a classmate of Chehadé."
The buyer pays the NPV when operated as a profit focused enterprise, then insulates the ISOC from blowback when it actually does this.
The ISOC can then turn around and feign betrayal with the rest of us, its pockets full of money.
But there's no reason that money can't go right back into basic infrastructure. For example, after the Heartbleed bug we learned that OpenSSL was receiving about $2k/year in donations. Surely there are obvious core open-source projects that could use reliable funding: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/tech-...
How is ISOC a dubious charity?
I'd like to place this here for those who only read comments:
.org registry rights belong to a non-profit - the rights were sold to a private equity group - somewhere between 50% and 90% below market rate. It was based on self dealing of the people given stewardship of the non-profit that manages .org
Basically, this is privatization Russian style. Not good. Even if you like privatization, no-bid stuff is just wrong.
Want to help support the democratic institutions which hopefully won't fail us? Look here: https://drewdevault.com/2019/11/29/dotorg.html
OT. Isn't 4% also the rule of early retirement, that is if you can live of 4% of your savings you can retire?
Can anyone clarify if this rule applies for both individual and corporate? If so, how would be even more interesting to know?
An immortal, such as a corporation, has to use a safer number, such as 3%, or 2.5% for operations and 0.5% in fees for the fiduciary management. So the permanent endowment needs to be 40x annual operating costs, and the fiduciary needs to grow it by 3% better than (price) inflation per year. That's relatively easy to do when most of the principal won't be touched within the next 30 years: buy all the publicly-traded stocks that have historically paid regular dividends, and reinvest whatever isn't paid out. On a long enough time scale, that's probably 7% better than inflation.
So the fiduciary could possibly be replaced by a robot that only needs 0.05% annually for maintenance, and then you'd only need to endow 34x annual operating costs to run forever.
The 4% spending ratio theoretically varies with market performance but evens out over time. 7-8% typical returns for a total market index/etf, minus a couple % to account for inflation.
There's so many TLDs today, the ability to raise prices isn't what it was.
Though they could 5x prices and even if they lost 60% of their business, they'll come out ahead. I could understand the worries of .org holders.
This will be a net cost increase, likely a big one (since there are no actual controls), for .org owners.
that is doubling every 7 years thereabouts, far far far higher than inflation or cost bais increases would demand
It was "only two US state courts are in charge of it but the whole world decided to start using it anyway".
No one forced anyone to use the US DNS system. They all knew what they were signing up for when they joined the public internet in the 80s and 90s and haven't spend any time or money lobbying for a change.
Really? Knew as in "ticked a box" or as in "informed consent"?
You could argue that DNS is broken, and that ICANN is bad, but there's no legal argument for .org being subject to foreign governments.
We'll see your "US-owned, US-created" and raise you Margrethe Vestager.
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.
It's like that 'some guy' selling his classic car to a classic car dealer who was walking by, without first testing the price with experts or posting an advertisement.
There seems to be some kind of breach of fiduciary trust here somewhere, heads should roll at ICANN even if all of this was somehow not in violation of any laws.
Valuation of a cashflow is a very well understood thing. There is literally a button on my calculator that just does it. And a built-in function in Excel.
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/NPV-function-8672CB...
"Web pages only last about 100 days on average"[1]
http was nice, we gave it a good spin, it was certainly close enough for the cigar but in all honesty... where you have 100 days to find the content you want to consume it is not even a reasonable approach. I bet a lot of it is still available some place but whoever archived it legally may not distribute it without permission.
I really don't care if TOR, IPFS, freenet or zeronet work out of the box. If it means access to more content its great. I don't even know how to use gopher atm.
Good stuff is happening[2] but where they apparently chose to make it an extension is pretty lame.
also..
If the user types "salvation army" into the browser we know what they want. Selling the rights to deny access is not what we need.
[1] - http://blog.archive.org/2015/02/11/locking-the-web-open-a-ca...
.onion isn't a direct competitor for DNS. It does some of the things DNS does (e.g. a consistent identifier that sticks even if your IP address changes), and even does some things DNS doesn't (e.g. encrypted transport), but the names aren't human-readable. And it compromises the security if you try to pretend that they are by generating pretty keys, because the random junk on the end there is important.
Namecoin, on the other hand, is a direct competitor for DNS.
However, DNS itself is pretty well federated. You're at the mercy of the TLD operator, but that only means you need to be careful to choose a trustworthy one. On the other hand, if you had asked last year which of the TLD operators would be the least likely to screw you over, a lot of people would have said .org, so... maybe there is something to this whole cryptographic trust thing.
For many decades (before smartphones) the phone system lacked human-readable names and yet was extremely popular with non-technical users. Similarly, most web sites probably do not benefit much or at all from a human-readable name.
A bigger problem with .onion is probably the fact it is accessible only via a system (Tor) that has significantly longer response time than a standard web site tends to have.
> Raise rates for long-time owners of common words. They weren’t using that premium space anyway.
This is forbidden by the .org registry agreement, 2.10(c): https://www.icann.org/sites/default/files/tlds/org/org-agmt-...
This is one of the reasons why people around the world are a little sceptical of American exceptionalism.
I can't believe ANY possible explanation (not even incompetency in this case) except direct or indirect bribery.
Really sad to see more and more of theses cases where Non-Profits sell out (e.g. OpenAI), I wonder whether this is a byproduct of people sozialized in the age of hyper-capitalism and consumerism...
I renewed my .org for 10 years.
I'm hoping this incident will provide new energy to these efforts.
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.
Sigh.
E.g. can they ask google.com for $1B to renew and mygrandmascookiecompany.com for $20 to renew?
So Ethos wouldn't be able to screw over existing registrants with non-uniform renewal pricing.
Source: Section 2.10(c) of https://www.icann.org/sites/default/files/tlds/org/org-agmt-...
For .com, .net, .org it has historically not been possible to price discriminate like this.
For the "new TLDs" (the explosion of new extensions we have seen in recent years), the registry contract is different and they are indeed allowed to do this. They call it "premium pricing".
Part of the big outcry about the recent changes to .org is that it brings it closer to the "new TLD" model, which disfavors the registrant.
"Save .org": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677
"Take action to save .org": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664582
"Why I Voted to Sell .org": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656960
"ISOC sold the .org registry to Ethos Capital for $1.1B" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21667355
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.
Technically .org is not just for American style "non profits", I it was and should be any thing else that doesn't fit the other big 5 eg jwz.org.
That was the problem a lot of shady stuff goes on in the Charity world ("but its for charity") notorious for bullying often much worse than the behaviour of wall street or city bankers and traders.
I feel that a more sensible approach such as ours would have been better served - as coop members tend to be stroppy bastards and would have stood up for the common good - a lot of our ISP side in Manchester where members of alt 2600 .
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).
Impressively, even ISOC comes out a loser from this deal. Only Ethos wins, but then, that was surely the point.
If they invest with GS, see how much is left after 5-7 years.
That's the problem - you have to get organizations - some of whom are deeply invested in making money off of DNS - to agree to not do so.
Or you just ignore the existing system and build a new one... once enough desirable sites are in the new one, then the old one will fade away.
Ethos Capital does not give 2 shits about your comments here.
Are you writing to the DA like this article suggested? What else can you do?
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?
> On May 7th, Chehadé registered the domain for EthosCapital.com.
> 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.
> 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]
Then a couple of months later, surprise, .org gets sold to Ethos Capital... Almost as if this was the plan the whole time...
Here's hoping that somehow these crooks actually end up in jail...
[0] http://blogs.harvard.edu/sj/2019/11/23/a-tale-of-icann-and-r...
I mean, I'm not trying to imply it should be attributed to malice, but are they asleep at the wheel or what?
https://blogs.harvard.edu/sj/2019/12/02/the-dot-org-fire-sal...
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.
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.
