[Chapter-delegates] PIR, .org, grassroots and astroturf.-

[John Levine]

In article <346277b5-3b8a-5f98-9ec5-ce2060fc8582 at isoccanarias.org> you write:
>Really? We want to deal (in a very near future) with this kind of issues?
>
>Opinion | The Meaninglessness of the .Org Domain - The New York Times
>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/opinion/dot-org-domain.html
>
>If PIR don’t fix it, IMO the whole blame will be against ISOC; if we 
>sell PIR for avoid issues like that, we in ISOC are bad netizens, or 
>worse than that...

Just to make it clear, .org has been open to anyone since the day it
was set up, long before PIR took over .org.  Non-profits have never
been the majority of the registrants.

Sort of ironically, PIR is the victim of its excellent marketing.
They say that PIR is a great place for non-profits, which is true, but
people hear that as it's *only* for non-profits which has never been
true.

PIR is working on improving registrant quality, keeping out malicious
registrants such as malware droppers and phishing.  .org already does
better than other TLDs but of course can be even better.  Here's some
numbers:

https://thenew.org/org-people/about-pir/resources/anti-abuse-metrics/

For astroturf pressure groups, while I don't like them any more than
anyone else, they are legal in the US, and I would not want to have
the job of deciding what was astroturf and what was not.  That's
basically censoring people because you don't like them.

It is possible to have a TLD strictly limited to non-profits, which is
.NGO/.ONG.  Any non-profit can register in it, but since under 3000
have done so, we can see that non-profits are not interested in moving
from .org.  (It wouldn't help the astroturf issue, since most of them
are registered as non-profits, too.)

R's,
John