ICA asks ICANN to block .Org private equity deal in damning letter

https://domainnamewire.com/2019/11/15/ica-asks-icann-to-block-org-private-equity-deal-in-damning-letter/

by pierreneter • 7 years ago

247 50 7 years ago

lioeters• 7 years ago

The letter itself: https://domainnamewire.com/wp-content/ICA-Letter-to-ICANN-Bo... [PDF]

japhyr• 7 years ago

I have certainly taken the internet's infrastructure for granted at times. Can someone who follows this more closely say something about how this is likely to play out?

The profit motive is helpful in some areas, but it can just wreck service-related fields.

Sebguer• 7 years ago

The profit motive is helpful when it comes to providing incentives to innovate. There's no room for innovation here - it's purely a cash grab.

frankharv• 7 years ago

Excellent Article and insightful comments setion.

As much as I hated seeing the US Department of Commerce having stewardship of ICANN this recent development this is really a body blow to all .org stakeholders.

I guess we all should have seen this coming when it was spun off to a "Multi stakeholder board".

First an increase in allowed fee's then the private turnover. A well scripted subversion.

Ayesh3• 7 years ago

I find it quite impressive that everyone raised their voices, although ICANN and PIR seem to turn a blind eye to them.

For a registry, their main costs are nameserver costs and ICANN licensing fees (~$25K for gTLDs, not sure for classic TLDs). It's totally unfair on PIR side to jack the prices up just because they can.

echelon3• 7 years ago

These costs don't sound exorbitant.

Are profane TLDs allowed? I'd love to register a particular four letter gTLD. I'm sure it'd make its money back.

rovr138• 7 years ago

Not really profane, but there’s https://get.sucks

Ayesh3• 7 years ago

Initial registration is $185K, and there is a fair amount of back and forth documentation requirements with ICANN, and if someone else requests the same TLD, there will be a bidding as well.

neiman• 7 years ago

This makes me think of ENS project (based on Ethereum) that is making a decentralized TLD. The registry is managed automatically by a smart contract.

Pros? The conditions are equal to all users. Cons? It is a wild west style registry with no governance besides the little the automated algorithm offers.

They're goal, if I understood correctly, is having .eth TLD managed by this decentralized registry. It can be an interesting experience.

[Full disclosure: I'm part of the Almonit project which uses ENS]

MaxBarraclough• 7 years ago

So what's the price paid to reserve a domain? To whom is it paid?

zozbot234• 7 years ago

Namecoin is a lot more popular and better known than ENS, fwiw.

louischatriot• 7 years ago

Raising the price for tld would actually be a good thing, as it would make "domain investing" (domain hoarding) unprofitable.

Let's say a .com costs $1,000 per year. For a legitimate business / organization, that is a trivial cost. For a domain hoarder, that makes keeping domains by and large unprofitable.

Killing this parasitic activity is a good thing.

Kenji• 7 years ago

That's complete nonsense. Many many people hold TLDs for their private websites. That's a thousand dollars for each one of your websites. That's ridiculous, not everyone can afford that. This would be the death of small independent websites. Though I wouldn't be surprised if that's what's happening.

jeswin• 7 years ago

Let's say a .com costs $1,000 per year.

I know you meant this as an example, but $1000 is a lot of money for many students, hobbyists, bloggers and startups.

For that matter, even $100 will put many at a huge disadvantage in low income countries. I'd rather have squatting than make domains unaffordable for the developing world.

frank_nitti• 7 years ago

Would this not also affect individual bloggers, many of which often make the HN front page with high quality content?

Perhaps there is a more sophisticated approach to this problem than simply raising prices across the board.

finnthehuman• 7 years ago

So keeping the domain for my primary email address that I’ve used for 15 years is “hoarding” now?

techsupporter2• 7 years ago

Personal anecdote: If the e-mails I get every few months are to be believed, yes. I was lucky enough to be around on the Internet when domains were free so I have two .org domains (because to have a .com back then was a sign that you were one of those "dirty businesses" who wanted to "sully the InterNet"[0]) that are old enough to buy their own drinks in the States. Both have been used for e-mail and internal naming schemes for as long as I've had them; only one has a web site.

Every few months, I get e-mails asking if I'll sell one or the other for a small sum or donate the domain to the group that's asking. I used to reply and politely decline but the vitriol about my "pointlessly" keeping a domain that I'm "obviously not using" that inevitably comes back now has me shift-Delete e-mails like that. The times, they have changed.

0 - And getting a .net meant showing you were an actual Network Operator. Anybody else remember FTPing the template down from internic.net and sending it to hostmaster and waiting two months for the zone delegation?

techsupporter2• 7 years ago

Except that a .com won't cost $1,000/year because the number of domains registered in it is so large (more than 130 million) that the uproar would be deafening and the registry has no incentive to slice off its nose just to go after squatters.

The .org domain is a tenth the size (about 14 million domains) so it's possible that a massive price hike could go through with no one able to stop it--as we're discussing here--but in doing so, you've thrown the baby out with the bath water and made a whole lot of historical domains with no commercial purpose (remember that .org has usually been where "non-business" groups and individuals register) prohibitively expensive in order to tackle a speculative problem.

Ensorceled• 7 years ago

Wow. That's around 1% of some of my clients take home simply to have a web site for their small business. This drives everybody to "Facebook pages" instead of their own website hosted on Wix, Wordpress or Squarespace.

Speaking of parasitic activity ...

detaro2• 7 years ago

I know several organizations using .org for which 1k would be a substantial chunk of their yearly operating budget.

willvarfar• 7 years ago

its an interesting discussion you are starting.

I would have to seriously reconsider my domain if it cost a lot of money.

Perhaps domain registrars could do a lot to stop a lot of hoarding if they charged progressively by the number of domains with the same payment details?

Of course, perhaps registrars don’t want to stop hoarding?

andrew29842• 7 years ago

The average price a domain investor sells a domain for is around $2,000. That's a one time charge, and then after that they pay just about $10 a year to renew.

And people register alternative domains rather than one an investor owns because they don't want to pay that amount.

So I don't agree with your thinking.

And in some countries $1,000 is a lifetime's earnings.

saganus• 7 years ago

I'm not really informed enough about this to fully understand it, but if I own a .org domain, can anyone explain to me what repercussion can this have?

duud• 7 years ago

Your annual renewal cost will go up.

ohashi• 7 years ago

And ICANN removed any sort of price cap (used to be 7% per year) because fuck non profits and consumers.

crankylinuxuser• 7 years ago

Having a crazy thought here...

So we have things like Tor, which makes a PKI based .onion TLD. What's stopping Us (the people) from making our own TLDs?

It really just is a massive amount of groupthink, inertia, and acceptance of who dns is... right?

And with IP6 seems like it'd be a wild west on all sorts of TLDs.. But we have these monolithic orgs holding us all back. Hell, I know it's orthogonal to TLDs, but we even had the ANPR ip space sold partially to Amazon ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20475855 ). Bluntly stated, these orgs that manage underlying infra aren't trustworthy. And that goes without stating ICANN and all those woes.

simlevesque• 7 years ago

Check out OpenNIC: https://www.opennic.org/

judge20202• 7 years ago

I posted this elsewhere a while ago but it's relevant to opennic, let me know if something is out-of-date or wrong:

The choice to support DNS roots like .oz, .ku, .te, .ti, and .uu is not standards-compliant. Say suddenly a new nation comes into the world and ISO assigns them one of these abbreviations, or one of these “emerging countries” they have TLDs for gets assigned a different cctld, what does opennic do? They made the choice to pre-register a bunch of domains under these reserved 2-letter country codes, so now they either have to

A. stop being able to say “we directly support all ICANN-assigned tlds” and keep resolving the existing domains

B. say to the existing domain owners of [their artificial] tld “sorry to be you” as their domain names they thought they owned now become registered to other entities.

SpicyLemonZest3• 7 years ago

Right, it's mostly based on inertia and acceptance. There are 6 figure startup costs to making a new TLD - enough to prevent people from polluting the namespace on a whim, but not out of range for a large coordinated effort.

andrew29842• 7 years ago

Lots of people have tried to create these "alternative roots" to the traditional DNS. It's a chicken and egg problem. In order for website owners to choose these alt domains, they need every browser, email system and software to support them. In order for the browser makers et al to support them, they need millions of people to be using them.

Animats• 7 years ago

Why is there only one .org registry, anyway? There are multiple registries for .com.

I hate to say it, but maybe domain names should be managed on a blockchain, so there's no central authority.

cameronbrown• 7 years ago

One of the few things like the idea of using a Blockchain for imo

oarsinsync• 7 years ago

For each TLD, there is only one registry. This is true for .com as it is for .org.

In many (most?) cases, there are multiple registrars, which is who the end customers use to “purchase” their domain from. The registrars (plural) register the domain with the registry (singular).

detaro2• 7 years ago

No, there is only one .com Registry: Verisign. There's multiple Registrars (the companies you as an individual typically buy your domains at) for .org just as there are for .com

a3n• 7 years ago

buy your domains

Rent.

As far as I know, you can't "pay off" a domain. And most of us are at some usually negligible risk of losing a domain by mistake or because someone bigger wanted it.

verdverm• 7 years ago

Checkout https://handshake.io

Most likely they will have to play nice with ICANN to go mainstream

peterwwillis• 7 years ago

Not having a central authority does not require a bizarre technological solution. You just... Have multiple authorities. You don't even need software to do that. But if you did use software to make management easier, you still wouldn't need blockchain.

jdkee• 7 years ago

How was this transaction valued if it was a "private" sale to a private equity firm? Should it not have been done along the lines of a FCC public spectrum auction? Secondly, as I raised this issue previously, why is .org. being commercialized in the first place?

ICA asks ICANN to block .Org private equity deal in damning letter

Related Stories