I can't tell if ICANN is trying to publicly clear their own name of any wrongdoing, or if all the added attention has woken them up to how seriously flawed this whole ordeal was (which either by policy or procedure they managed to miss) or both. None of those answers are satisfying. Here's hoping they do the right thing and kill the sale... but even then, I'd be concerned they'd restructure the deal and try again.
I thought ICANN was supposed to be the good guys? You know, the responsible managers of the Internet and providing solid governance which serves as the best argument against any kind of government intrusion? I'm hoping they didn't just grow bored with it and decide to get rid of it. As though it was some sort of dearly loved Google service with mild profitability and little-to-no opportunity for internal career development. ;)
This is the old "announce an inquiry" ploy. This should be familiar to anyone who has watched "Yes, Minister" - or has paid any attention at all to anything ever made in public.
Basically, someone "blows the whistle" and suddenly something that should have gone relatively under the radar blows up on your face. People start asking a lot of difficult questions and making a lot of noise.
So what do you do? You announce a private inquiry (or, to put it in ICANN's terms "We will thoughtfully and thoroughly evaluate the proposed acquisition to ensure that the .ORG registry remains secure, reliable, and stable.").
The point of the inquiry isn't to find out any new facts or correct any problems - it's to stall until this goes out of the public eye (people have short attention spans, and we are in the Holiday season which always helps with "forgetting"), to clear up their names of any wrongdoing (because they reviewed everything thoroughly and found no cause for concern) and to bury the evidence (because some of it will be "accidentally" misplaced into a shredder).
In a month or so, a report will come out saying that there is some cause for concern, but that the danger is either overblown or that their hands are tied so nothing can be done due to this or that circumstance (legal, financial, etc). It will come with a stern paragraph warning that internal guidelines (you know, the ones the public can't see) must be reviewed sometime in the near future (i.e., around the year 2050) to prevent this from happening again, but it will conclude that everyone did their due diligence properly and we were all just victims of circumstances.
In short, better luck next time.
Why yes, people have called me a cynic, why do you ask?
Considering the (ex-)leadership of ICANN is behind both approving the sale and ethos capital, and effectively answer to nobody, I doubt they have much interest in genuine reform.
This. In my view, the moment they turned into the "bad guys" (or more charitably, regulatory captured) was when they put the top level dns namespace for sale with the gTLD program.
Not to mention as Portugal showed us, criminalizing narcotics has zero positive effect. They decriminalized all drugs in 2001 and usage went down, and so did all negative consequences normally ascribed to drug use itself [1].
Time to do something worthwhile with that enforcement power.
Ironically that comes close to replicating the old British system, once world famous along with similar approaches in India, and elsewhere. It ran quietly and successfully for half a century. The tiniest remnants remain, despite the addition of the war on drugs, though it's very hard to get to these days - criminalisation takes priority.
It died with sustained US pressure at the UN as the last gasp of Harry Anslinger, supporter of prohibition who had already given the world Reefer Madness and a load of invented racist "evidence" for the harms of marijuana in the 1930s. His team brought sustained pressure for the globe to adopt a war on drugs. Oh, and there a doctor who single handedly prescribed tens of thousands of prescriptions making a bit of an impact, single handedly, in London sixties drug culture.
It's usually forgotten that the situation improved mainly because of refactored health services around drug use, and not just because they were decriminalized. Simply decriminalizing is very unlikely to replicate the results anywhere.
Pretty sure its more to do with the fact that the bulk of the world's solution to seeing someone on drugs is to throw them in prison where the only source of happiness is more drugs, thus solving the problem once and for all. Addiction isn't something you solve by throwing people in prison.
Regulatory capture is the name for the phenomenon where some governing/regulatory body, charged with regulating/governing some industry for the public good, instead begins serving that same industry to the detriment of the public good.
In this case, ICANN is the body governing all domain names. There are individuals who have moved from employment at ICANN to those organizations involved in the sale of the .ORG tld. Link contains dramatis personae[0].
The movement of individuals between regulator entities and regulated entities (both directions), is often considered a sign of regulatory capture.
There is a common tension, perhaps inevitable, in regulation: Those most familiar with an industry, and therefore with the best knowledge to regulate it, are those who work in that industry. Thus, the best people for a regulator to hire are those who have worked in the industry.
Similarly, those most qualified to advise on matters associated with regulation are those who have crafted the regulation. Thus, the best people for an entity in industry to hire to manage regulatory compliance are those who have worked for the regulatory body.
It reads to me like they are trying to kill the deal, but stay within their strict rules.
The line: "The Registry Agreement requires a standard of reasonableness for ICANN’s determination." reads like they are gearing up for a way out.
I have to admit that the last 2 paragraphs do sound like they are trying to weasel out of responsibility though.
> I thought ICANN was supposed to be the good guys?
Through the lens of ultra-capitalism, "the good guys" are a market imbalance to be exploited. A variation on "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain"
In hindsight, the fragility of overall Internet governance was incredibly obvious. Even if this .org sale goes ahead, the governance is still fragile because there are many other aspects to the Web / Internet that are still run by "the good guys" and therefore likely to already be in the sights of the morally bankrupt.
The question is, what can we do about it?
How do we react to the .org sale to ensure that inevitable future shenanigans will be met by increasingly profit-negating blowback?
The long term fragmentation effects this may have on the web are... difficult to predict.
>Through the lens of ultra-capitalism, "the good guys" are a market imbalance to be exploited.
That's actually through two lenses: it's the image through lens of ultra-capitalism through the lens of Marxist thought. The mainstream economic position would be that "the good guys" are neutral as far as the market is concerned, which is mainly interested in satisfying the average of the goals of whoever is spending money. In this case the domain owners are spending the money, so this scandal would be "uncapitalistic" in the sense that the buyers aren't being served.
> The mainstream economic position would be that "the good guys" are neutral as far as the market is concerned
Maybe if you look at the market "blueprints", a static template not taking into account the dynamics of the actual system.
There are at least two ways the markets will work to erase those moral values that do not directly contribute to profit. One, moral values held by people are strong preferences, and as such they'll be exploited, as GP said. An ethically sound option will command a premium over the default state, because people who want it value it more, for non-monetary reasons. Two, given a mostly amoral demand, companies that compromise morals to lower costs/increase profits have a competitive advantage over those with integrity, forcing the latter to either abandon their principles or risk getting outcompeted.
You can also connect those two points together by noting that individuals are also competing - against each other for status, against the ever rising costs of living. The end result is such a low ceiling on morality as we observe. You can't possibly, at the same time, care about or even afford getting clothing made without slave labor, food made without extreme animal cruelty, jewlery and electronics that don't have blood of innocents in their supply pipeline, smart technologies that don't abuse people's privacy and prop up surveillance. Also note note that, when people are willing to express their ethical stance on any of those issues, a whole mini industry pops up - willing to sell you purportedly ethical goods at huge markup.
Yes, the market is as morally neutral as an internal combustion engine is a hunk of metal that's carbon neutral when it sits on the shelf. Things change when you fuel it up and turn it on.
(Now, I'm not saying "markets are bad". But they do have perverse side effects that need to be kept in mind and accounted for, before they consume the very civilization they helped build.)
>I thought ICANN was supposed to be the good guys?
You could say that about every government, yet there's widespread corruption in most (or all) countries[1]. There's even corruption in democratic governments that are directly accountable to their citizens every few years (via elections). Given the way the ICANN board is appointed is... indirect at best, thinking that ICANN are the "good guys" is wishful thinking at best.
To be clear are you suggesting the private sector would do a better job managing this? After all, we're criticizing their transfer of the TLD to the private sector. They can't be both the hero and the villain in the same story can they? Surely I'm missing something?
At least the goal of the public sector is to serve the public whereas the goal of the private sector is to serve the interests of there shareholders.
If this was a private company on both sides wouldn't we just be hailing it as a big win for shareholders and/or demanding the government step in and intervene?
There are some people who think when it comes to DNS ICANN should basically be frozen - no new gTLDs, no wildcard DNS, no supporting domain name seizure, no price or policy changes, and so on. Just delegating to each TLD's providers, and maybe some policing of providers' behaviour.
If you believe that, hypothetically the best choice would be some sort of private nonprofit, independent of the government but bound to inaction by charter.
Whether being directly controlled by government would be an improvement is somewhat debatable - would lawmakers be reasonably hands-off, like they are with things like GPS and NIST time services? Or would the opportunity to block pornhub/piratebay/wikileaks prove irresistible?
You can read more at [1] - in short, critics of the new gTLDs would argue that:
1. It doesn't deliver the claimed increase the supply of domain names, as no-one would build a business or brand on whatever.info without securing whatever.com
2. It does shake down domain registrants for cash - if you already own whatever.com you'd better get whatever.info and whatever.sucks before someone else squats them.
3. These factors mean .info domains and suchlike are a stereotype of sketchy sites, which is a negative feedback loop.
> At least the goal of the public sector is to serve the public whereas the goal of the private sector is to serve the interests of there shareholders.
Goal, yes. In the abstract. Unfortunately, humans run everything. Most humans are decent and will try to uphold the public good. Some get into positions of control and decide they can profit off of it, so why not?
Society's constant struggle is to keep these greedy F*'s from screwing the rest of us. Just like freedom must be paid for, so must we constantly root out corruption and greed.
I fully agree that there are varying degrees of corruption in every government and organization, but using CPI to support this is kinda pointless because it measures perception of corruption, not actual corruption (much harder to measure). It stands to reason that even if there’s absolutely no corruption in a government, people who’re unhappy with living standards, resource allocations, etc. will still perceive corruption (and on the contrary, satisfied people may not perceive corruption where it exists).
> There's even corruption in democratic governments that are directly accountable to their citizens every few years (via elections).
Imagine if this kind of 'accountability' was applied to the rest of society. Oh, you robbed a bank? Well, you're banned from this branch for 4 years! Don't do it again!
If you don't know anyone in an organization that holds your interests then you cannot expect for your interests to be considered.
It is very unreasonable to expect any set of people in any setting at any time, whose views you don't know, to hold your interests or expectations.
"Good people" would be very different to you and a self interested opportunist.
If the rules have changed such that it is broken and the sale goes through then great. If that is what it takes to bring awareness to prevent the next. Sitting and hoping that your interests are considered never ever works.
I don’t know any traffic engineers but I expect the, to be basically right rpwith speed limits and road construction rules which are in my interest. Etc.
I don’t think it’s really possible to live one’s life with a completely zero-sum cynical-interest model.
Speed limits are established with the intent of road safety and have measurements that can be audited such that they can be modified to find the best fit. That is not applicable here.
What can ICANN or any of us measure here that would block the sale? Trust? Former ICANN CEO is likely trusted is he not?
If ISOC hadn't removed the .org price restrictions, I feel like this could have been defensible. Farm out the management but hold the new stewards under a strict leash, fine. (Of course it wouldn't have gone for $1B+ in that case.) But coupling it with the unrestricted price increases is just indefensibly corrupt and hopefully illegal given that ISOC was never intended to profit from .org in the first place.
The people behind this deal are ICANN insiders who know the rules intimately; in some cases they may have written the rules. It's hard to imagine that ICANN won't approve the deal.
> The people behind this deal are ICANN insiders who know the rules intimately; in some cases they may have written the rules. It's hard to imagine that ICANN won't approve the deal.
If that's the case, maybe the US government needs to reclaim authority over ICANN, which it had until a few years ago, and assert that authority to reverse this decision. There needs to be some kind of effective oversight.
The majority of people don't live in the U.S. Why should the U.S. government hold such control? If the argument is that they invented the internet, (hardly entirely accurate), they certainly didn't invent the World Wide Web.
I don't even agree with them having .gov, them regaining .org would be a disaster.
If anything, some sort of multi-national, strictly non-profit charity should be setup for this, or if not, the U.N. as a last resort.
As we've seen already with the current set up where they are a small non-profit charity these places can get corrupted when there's enough money dangling in front of the right people.
> That's not an argument. Any regressive policy could and has been justified in those terms.
Yes, it is. The US government has an institutional history of overseeing ICAAN, so it's the most practical organization to take on that role on short notice.
I think you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Your preferred multi-national solution would likely take years to negotiate, which means it's not really even a solution at all, as far as .org is concerned.
Now that is not an argument. The majority of people don't <insert nearly anything>. The net did pretty well under American stewardship. Sure there was Tipper Gore, but everything worked out. Every time some faceless UN bureaucrat mused about taxing email, or charging extra for "long distance" routing - it was nice knowing that there was a historically sane hand on the wheel. You want something like the EU in charge? Their copyright legislation is the most nakedly corrupt barrier to entry I've ever seen. This kills the net.
Then why didn't they just approve and get it over with. Seems they want to wait a while, see how their stakeholders feel about it in a few months and then either approve or not. Or they want to send the message to ethos that they want their cut as well, of course.
They will in a month, or just after new year, issue a press release, that they studied/talked to all "relevant" parties (and information) and request one meaningless (in the long run) change in the deal and then bless it to go forward.
The only sane outcome is clawing back .org from PIR, regardless of what they intend to do with it now. They've shown themselves to be bad stewards that view it as purely monetizable asset.
I doubt the will would be there even if it were legal. But one can dream.
They've been held to... bank account. This is being done by ICANN insiders and there is no accountability mechanisms at ICANN. The organization is captured. The .ORG contract renewal wasn't even looked at by the board, it was handled by staff. It was pointed out letting staff do it avoids oversight mechanisms (coincidence? probably not). The board oversight group also all had to recuse themselves to the point there wasn't enough people to perform any actual oversight. ICANN is a captured and corrupt organization. Very few people who aren't being compensated to be there spend any time it seems, thus registry interests win.
"Public announcements by PIR, ISOC and Ethos Capital contain relevant facts that were not required in the request for approval."
What facts?
Why were those facts not required?
Sounds like under the system in place there is little due diligence expected to be done by ICANN before a decision is made -- none of these public facts were "required", let alone anything non-public.
At least we know someone is reading the public announcements.
1. Create a non-profit to buy `.or` as a new gTLD. Legally carter it so that the stakeholders are distributed and it can never be taken private.
2. Pre-reserve `.or` domains for all existing `.org` domains.
Optional:
3. Give free lifetime registration to any org stakeholder that redirects their domain to the `.or` version and/or displays a banner about PIR's malfeasance.
4. Any new `.org` registrants are barred from registering a `.or`
5. Buy back `.org` when it becomes worthless and give it back to the stakeholders.
In practice it would be possible, if it was extraordinarily thought to be worthwhile, for ICANN to agree with the relevant UN group that this code should never be issued. The UK code is not available but is "extraordinarily reserved" and so it doesn't cause a conflict. EU is also reserved even though the European Union certainly isn't a country.
In light of the recently posted Knight Hospitaller twitter thread, perhaps the Malta loophole may work again (or perhaps have Oregon secede and become a Maltese colony, on paper)
"On 14 November 2019, PIR formally notified ICANN of the proposed transaction. Under the .ORG Registry Agreement, PIR must obtain ICANN’s prior approval before any transaction that would result in a change of control of the registry operator. Typically, similar requests to ICANN are confidential; we asked PIR for permission to publish the notification and they declined our request."
Unbelievable. The brazenness of this heist continues out in the open.
Has anyone looked at PIR's 990 Forms and has knowledge of business operations in the sector. It looks like from their expense sheet PIR contracts all of the actual management of the their TLDs to Afilias. What is the breakdown of responsibility here? What does PIR actually do?
PIR chooses and supervises the contractor that runs the TLD. I don't know if maybe, once upon a time, PIR ran the TLD itself, and then decided to contract it out.
It's not an unreasonable thing to contract out. Afilias runs multiple TLDs, and there are many operational things that would have a cost benefit from sharing; for example, running the anycast network of authoritative servers in as many points of presence as possible --- each PoP requires capital investment and time investment to setup and run, but servicing additional load may be possible at a much smaller marginal cost.
We should have a peer-to-peer DNS driven by some consensus system like blockchain. Why do we allow critical pieces of internet infrastructure to be centralized?
There is no mandate to trust the root DNS servers. Someone like Google (8.8.8.8) or Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) could just start registering their own .org domain names and nobody could stop them.
The resulting shitstorm would be so enjoyable to watch.
Previously the CEO of Cloudflare has been against making 1.1.1.1 return anything non-standard, because even a single instance of that would ruin the integrity of DNS.
Given the headwinds the browser DNS-over-https efforts have run into, I wouldn't expect them to want to try it.
But I was pondering the merits of eg: a regional block of ISPs declaring they'd like to try, and seeing the effect that had on the value of the 'legacy operators'
What a shitfest this would be. How much money do you think some governments would be willing to spend to take over the entire DNS system? Don't you see what they did to Bitcoin?
I thought ICANN was supposed to be the good guys? You know, the responsible managers of the Internet and providing solid governance which serves as the best argument against any kind of government intrusion? I'm hoping they didn't just grow bored with it and decide to get rid of it. As though it was some sort of dearly loved Google service with mild profitability and little-to-no opportunity for internal career development. ;)