[shadowgovt]

That's not at all how monopolies work, and nobody is going to break up HBO for having exclusive control of Game of Thrones.

> and it's meaning cannot be replicated with another TLD.

anything-org.us, anything-org.xyz, anything-org.com, or even just disregard bothering with .org entirely since it literally has no meaning; there's no enforcement on the soft policy that it represent non-profits. For example, slashdot.org is owned by BizX.

Old-guard nerds have nostalgic attachment to the .org TLD's history; that's it. It's hardly a case that it's a monopoly.

[ta0987]

What if you already have a .org domain that you actually use?

How would you like it if your phone company started charging you extra to keep your phone number, and told you, there's plenty of other phone numbers you can have, we won't charge extra for those

[shadowgovt]

You mean "How did I like it when my email provider increased their rates?" I switched email providers and updated my email address with my relevant contacts.

It was annoying, but nobody claims seriously that email providers are a monopoly.

[ta0987]

Well, if this is a disagreement over the word "monopoly" I'll just cite wikipedia:

Patents, copyrights, and trademarks are sometimes used as examples of government-granted monopolies.

Third paragraph from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

So, yes, HBO does have a monopoly on Game of Thrones, and my email provider does have a monopoly on my email address.

This is, for example, why they explicitly passed a phone number portability law, because phone companies were abusing their monopoly power over individual phone numbers, to keep people from switching to different providers.

[shadowgovt]

Do you anticipate passage of an email or domain name monopoly law? Could such a thing be passed (i.e. what government would enforce it)?

[ta0987]

No? I'm not sure what the relevance of that is though?

I mean, it would certainly be right for the government to limit the increase in the cost of .org registrations to inflation, or better to cap the profit margin, since costs are likely to decrease, but just because it's right, doesn't mean it'll happen. .org domains are an artificial scarcity that wasn't even created by a corporation. At least the telephone was invented privately, so you could argue phone numbers are fair game, but with domain names even that argument doesn't hold. There's no reason a private company should be extracting economic-rent from it.

[shadowgovt]

Only if one thinks .org has value over .anything-else. If one isn't hung up on having a .org at the end of their URL, there is a world of alternatives.