[ih] the .ORG nonsense machine rises from the dead, patents and public stewardship

[John Levine]

It appears that John Gilmore via Internet-history <gnu at toad.com> said:
>The Internet Society used its pull with ICANN to get tens of millions of
>dollars a year for doing nothing (by getting the monopoly on .org).
>Various people have various opinions on whether that was a good thing.
>(I was on the ISOC Board a bit before that, and like many nonprofits,
>raising funding for ISOC was always a challenge, until then.)

I suppose, but since the alternative was to leave it with Verisign,
and it meant the IETF no longer had to worry about running out of
money, why not.

>ISOC tried to sell that monopoly for a billion dollars to a
>private-equity player (in concert with a couple of high-level people who
>had bolted from the ICANN monopoly to make a killing for themselves).
>The only credible plan to make back the billion for the investor was to
>then jack up the prices of .org domains for every nonprofit in the
>world. ...

I was on the ISOC board at the time, and that is malicious bullshit.
Unfortunately, the prime bullshit purveyor was EFF (who apparently
thought it would be good for their own fundraising) which is why I'll
never be giving them a dime.

ISOC's dependence on an ICANN contracted registry is a huge conflict
of interest, and ISOC and the Internet would be better off if ISOC
were fully independent of ICANN. The stuff about price increases is
self-evidently ridiculous to anyone who knows how gTLD pricing works
-- a large price increase would just make people prepay for a few
years at the old price, giving them time to switch to a different TLD.

So no, they weren't going to do that. The buyer's backers were low
profile rich investors looking for cashflow and diversification. PIRs
current pricing would have done that just fine, paying them about 5%
in an era where bonds paid 2%.

It was also quite remarkable how many people have a weird idea that
.ORG is magic, that it's the only place that non-profits can get a
domain, which it isn't, or that all or even most of the registrants
are non-profits, which they aren't. But we grossly underestimated both
the magical thinking and the vehemence and bad faith of the
opposition, and the stupendous PR incompetence of the buyer, so ISOC
is stuck with PIR forever.

R's,
John