[tbirdz]

Hypothetically speaking, what would be the best way to handle voting rights and distribution of power in a domain registrant coop?

Does every domain holder have the same amount voting power, like in a democracy, or do large orgs like Mozilla or Wikimedia get proportionally more votes like large shareholders in corporations do? And if we allocate votes based on stakes invested, what would stop someone from buying their way in and taking over the same way it happened with PIR?

[bwoodcock]

Actually, the whole point of choosing the cooperative form is to avoid doubt and risk in governance. We don’t have to make the choices you’re positing, because our rights are actually enshrined in law. Cooperatives are one of the oldest forms of collective enterprise, and there’s four hundred years of law governing them. The rights of cooperative members (every .ORG registrant, in the case of CCOR) are much more strongly guaranteed by law than are those of, for instance, shareholders of a corporation.

Every member of a cooperative gets an equal vote in all governance decisions, and it’s not possible for the board to change that, that’s guaranteed by law, not contract or charter or agreement or anything. It’s also not possible to create membership “classes” with different rights. Also, the rights of capital are subordinate. Creditors, for instance, get no say in what happens.

That’s governance. Finances are equally clearly defined, but instead of one-vote-per-member, they’re proportional. If the wholesale price of a .ORG domain remains $9.93/year, and the savings (which are the “profits” in a corporation like ISOC) are $4, those savings are guaranteed by law to be distributed back to the members proportionally with the amount of business they did. Someone with one .ORG domain will get $4 back at the end of the year, someone with ten .ORG domains will get back $40, et cetera.

We don’t have to debate these terms, because they’ve been inalienably guaranteed by law for the past four hundred years.

Which is why we picked a cooperative as the best form for self-representation.

[nikitaga]

Democracy is called that because every vote is a person. People are finite, you can't just add more whenever you feel like it.

Voting of shareholders of a company can still be called a democracy because the amount of shares – what's weighing the votes – is finite.

But the supply of .org domain names is effectively infinite, and so any "voting" weighed by domain names would just become a bidding contest.

There are only like 10 million .org domain names. At this rate it will cost just a bit more than $100 million to pass any decision requiring a simple majority, and a bit more if a supermajority is required. This is notably cheaper than the $1.3B acquisition price.

---

If we want to entrench status quo, one solution is to require broad consensus of a sizeable but finite number of large players representing customers including the ones you mentioned.

[bwoodcock]

You could create a corporation with the rules (and problems) that you’re proposing, but in a cooperative the rules are fixed: one vote per organization. Your family .ORG domain gets the same one vote as Microsoft.ORG, as your kids’ soccer league, as the church down the street, regardless of how many domains they register.

Obviously a bad actor could try to game the system by pretending to be multiple organizations, but it wouldn’t buy them anything, because board members don’t have any rights that non-board-members don’t have, and the rights of the members to their financial interests are also guaranteed under law... the bird couldn’t, for instance, vote to pay themselves.

[nitrogen]

Is there a way to distinguish one organization registering 100000 domains (possibly using sub-entities) to get 100000 votes versus 100000 real separately controlled organizations?

Would controlling a large number of votes that way give them some kind of advantage?

[edoceo]

Top 100,000 domains by age as determined by current owner? That's finite and maybe weighted to seniority of concern?

[trothamel]

Wouldn't most of those domains be owned by speculators? I doubt very many legit organizations own more than a handful of domains.

[bwoodcock]

Actually, there are a bunch of large non-profits that register one domain per local chapter, and have thousands of .ORG domains. There aren’t a lot of speculators in .ORG compared to other gTLDs, because there’s a perception, probably correct, that non-profits don’t have deep pockets to buy domains from speculators.