[ptest1]

I don’t understand how this “sale” is legal in the first place.

PIR is a legal 501(c)3 nonprofit. You can’t really sell a nonprofit to a for-profit company except in unusual and rare circumstances.

In California, I know you need a letter from the state Attorney General to do so.

There are also federal restrictions on sales like this, particularly around self-dealing transactions. This transaction was obviously self dealing.

Someone seriously needs to dig into this. The PIR board members could be in big legal trouble. And also ICANN, which is a 501(c)3 nonprofit as well and is subject to self-dealing restrictions.

This is obvious, plain as day corruption. In the business world, not much can be done. But these are two nonprofits (PIR and ICANN), so something can and should be done. These kind of transactions aren’t normally legal.

Like, just read the examples of what an illegal self dealing transaction is in the eyes of the IRS:

https://boardsource.org/resources/private-benefit-private-in...

“Keep Our City Beautiful, a membership organization, plants a city alley with elaborate flowering bushes. The alley is not heavily traveled but the decorations increase the attractiveness of the city’s main restaurant whose owner is a member of the organization.”

ICANN clearly engaged in an illegal self dealing transaction by allowing their former CEO to enrich himself with a deal that would otherwise not be possible.

Edit: please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21658324 for a “what you can do right now”

[zrm]

Not only that, isn't there a sense in which a TLD is not actually property at all? The DNS operates by consensus. There are a bunch of root server operators who all agree who operates the .org TLD and then list those NS records in their root servers.

What stops people from getting together, agreeing that a private equity firm would be a poor steward of the .org TLD, choosing somebody else to operate it instead, and pointing the NS records there instead?

Nobody really owns the DNS. It's a thing that works because there is a broad consensus on how it should work. If the consensus is that this is a dumb idea then what's stopping people from choosing not to go along with it?

And staging a coup over this would set a good precedent that these types of flagrant money grabs are not to be tolerated.

[wwweston]

It’s correct enough to say that DNS is an application of consensus, but rather than considering that a distinction vs property, one might consider asking themselves in what sense property itself isn’t consensus.

[zrm]

Property is not based on consensus. Even if millions of people think Jeff Bezos has too much money, with nowhere near consensus that he should have it, a court will still convict anybody who tries to take his stuff.

The DNS really does operate on consensus. There is nobody forcing everybody to do it a particular way. We get real consensus because everybody has a strong interest in not creating global namespace conflicts through forks. But that doesn't mean you can't make a change to fix a mistake, it only means you need to get enough support behind it for it to become the consensus position.

[throwaway2048]

However, a sufficiently large mob can easily take everything Bezos has, no matter what any court says.

Property is absolutely based on consensus, property beyond anything you control with your direct person is very much one of those polite fictions society collectively agrees to, like money and laws.

If the large majority of people, for whatever reason, decided to stop agreeing, such fictions would cease to exist.

[zrm]

A thing doesn't exist by consensus just because a consensus against it could destroy it, because a consensus against pretty much anything could destroy it. What makes it exist by consensus is that a rough consensus in favor of it is required to sustain it.

This isn't true of things like property rights which could be sustained even with only minority support provided the minority had a sufficient military advantage.

It is true of DNS because consensus is inherently required to prevent it from fragmenting and ceasing to exist as a single global namespace.

[throwaway2048]

If tomorrow somehow everyone's memory got wiped so they could no longer remember say, Mt. Rushmore, It would continue to exist.

If the same thing happened with Bezos's wealth, it would cease existing, or at least the concept of him owning it would cease existing.

That's the difference. Ownership of property is entirely within people's minds.

[klarstrup]

It's true, property exists exclusively as something someone enforces with violence directly or indirectly.

[IshKebab]

If everyone agrees that Jeff Bezos has too much money and that we should make an exception to normal property laws and strip him of his assets, that's exactly what would happen!

But most people don't think that. They wish they had as much money as him, maybe they think society is unfair to allow someone to have so much money. But you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who supports arbitrarily stripping someone of their (current) property.

[stjohnswarts]

I agree, even the current political elites aren't so daft as to say if 80% of the population is vehemently opposed to any US citizen having say more than 1 billion dollars in wealth, the Congress can surely enact taxes to insure that happens. Lucky for Bezos there is only a (large) minority that would like to see that happen so his Billions are currently safe.

[kortilla]

> But you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who supports arbitrarily stripping someone of their (current) property.

Isn’t that what the Warren wealth tax is?

[VMG]

> a court will still convict anybody who tries to take his stuff

the ruling will be enforced if there is a consensus that it is a just ruling

[zrm]

> the ruling will be enforced if there is a consensus that it is a just ruling

The Supreme Court regularly makes rulings that are contrary to popular opinion. I see no evidence that the rulings are not being enforced despite the lack of consensus that they were just. They also regularly make rulings that align with the slight popular majority but the popular opinion is still about evenly split with no clear consensus one way or the other, and those rulings are enforced as well.

[retrac]

Following unpopular laws is itself a consensus, one where abandoning the rule of law altogether is seen as more harmful than enforcing one unpopular ruling.

[stjohnswarts]

The current Supreme Court is hard right and currently under Executive Mandate, I wouldn't put anything past them if their overlords demand something of them.

[Iv]

OpenNIC is actually a parallel organization to the ICANN and they manage a register that is in sync but with a bunch of additional TLDs.

They could decide to fork .org and lobby ISPs and DNS to use their register instead.

[jagged-chisel]

Who owns the root DNS servers? Can those owners be convinced to stage such a coup? If not 100%, then you have forked a TLD.

[gorgoiler]

Edit: sorry, re-reading your coup plot I see you wanted the owners of {A..M}.ROOT-SERVERS.NET to collude in direct action. It’s not an implausible idea at all, if the worst comes to the worst, even if it’s quite extreme. My original comment misses your point a bit...

...

If you want to fix this by direct action on the root servers, rather than ORG’s nameservers, the it doesn’t matter who owns the current root servers.

Their config is baked into your resolver’s installation files or source code, and my naive understanding is that it takes only one patch to change each one:

https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/bind9/blob/master/lib/dn...

...though the changes would be fragmented until the patch had been rolled out to 100% of resolver codebases and all instances of each resolver updated and restarted. Not an easy solution without coordinating people as well as software.

[zrm]

It takes two to tango. Once you get majority support then the holdouts are the ones forking the TLD, and since forks are not in anybody's interest a consensus would be reached.

[saalweachter]

It's been tried and failed.

If I recall correctly it was OpenNIC which established some TLDs independent of ICANN. ICANN stomped on one of them, and ultimately won, with OpenNIC conceding control of the TLD. (Everyone peered the ICANN data and no one the OpenNIC, and OpenNIC stopped registering or serving the conflicting domain themselves.)