[longtailofsighs]

I love a lot of what the EFF does, but this campaign, and many other organizations involved in it got a lot wrong. The real issue, that in fairness the EFF leads with, was the change in the .org contract, not the sale itself. The most robust overview of the whole thing that I have read can be found here: https://www.internetgovernance.org/2020/05/01/no-real-winner...

Whether people like it or not the operation of the DNS, including .org, is a commercial endeavor. It doesn't make sense to focus only on .org, when a) Registrars not Registries are the real place to try and protect Registrants. b) Org has always been open to anyone, and their are likely as many, if not more civil society organizations in com, net, and other tlds.

[techsupporter]

> Whether people like it or not the operation of the DNS, including .org, is a commercial endeavor.

It's about disparate impact, as is the case in many things that have extensive histories around them.

That .org was allowed to drift from its original mission of being the "catch-all / noncommercial" zone of the DNS doesn't mean we shouldn't work to nudge it back to that original ideal. At a minimum, allowing what is arguably a public good (DNS is a limited space, though less limited than phone numbers or RF allocations) to be transferred and barricaded is not good.

[longtailofsighs]

I don't disagree that the DNS is a public good. And fascinatingly unique in that it's global public good, reasonably successfully managed without government intervention.

If the barricading is in reference to price increases, then again it's not the acquisition that enabled this, it was the contract change with ICANN. Registries transfer ownership all the time. .Biz was acquired by GoDaddy this year, and Afilias who run .info as well as the technical backend for .org was acquired by Donuts. No one made a fuss about these, which is another reason why the .org upset feels arbitrary. Is there something inherently bad with those acquisitions?

I'm not sure I understand the drifting comment. .Org continues to position itself as a place for everyone. It's not clear to me what policies you think are drifting from that.

What I think people continue to miss is that by and large the Registry is far, far less involved in the life of any particular domain than the Registrar. Their policy choices, pressure points, and regulatory requirements are substantially more impactful than those of the Registry.

[Macha]

Nobody cares about the .biz acquisition because nobody cares about .biz. A lot of the early additional gTLDs got tarred as "scammy places for people who didn't care enough to find a .com". On the other hand, people can think of .org sites they use and don't like the thought of them being potentially held to ransom by rent seekers

[Mauricebranagh]

Yes some of the front a centre use of "non proffit" by the EFF is a little worrying.

One of the other bidders when ISO won - wanted to limit .org to strictly USA defined non profits which meant that Red cross ect would not be allowed to use .org

[geofft]

This is like saying "Whether people like it or not the King of France is sovereign." Why is the operation of the DNS a commercial endeavor, and what would go wrong if it were not be the case? There are a huge number of examples of successful internet infrastructure projects that are non-commercial, perhaps with commercial participants or sponsors but not commercial themselves. (The IETF, Let's Encrypt, and Linux all come to mind.)

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2020-09/root.html (posted on HN a while ago) says that the DNS root servers get about 10^11 queries per day, or one million queries per second. Hitting 10K queries per second on a single server is entirely doable, so you would just need 100 cloud VMs to handle the entire root DNS load.

I realize the TLD servers are more loaded than the roots, but it's still not so much traffic that it's entirely out of the question to make it a community-run service on the basis of traffic / engineering effort. So what other reason is there that it must be commercial?

(Note that there are over 10 million .org domain names, and they charge fees of about $9. Even if you cut fees to $1, that's still plenty of money for both infrastructure and labor. You could hire a team of ten SREs at very-senior-FAANG salaries and still have a bunch of money left over.)

[tialaramex]

The IETF probably isn't a useful example because it's a fairly strange thing. You probably couldn't (and shouldn't try to) do very much else that way. It's doubtful whether for example it constitutes an "organisation".

It has no formal legal existence whatsoever, so it can't own anything, including money, nor enter into any sort of contract with anybody, it doesn't have members, and the staff who make things happen aren't working for the IETF per se.

Something like ISRG (the organisation that provides the Let's Encrypt service you mentioned) is much more conventional, there's a not-for-profit legal entity in a specific place with employees, equipment and so on. It would be reasonable to run a TLD that way, and in fact I assume some of them are indeed run that way.

[geofft]

Who owns ietf.org etc.? I guess the answer is the Internet Society, which created the Public Interest Registry which currently owns .org (and which was the entity that intended to sell PIR to Ethos Capital), so maybe the IETF was a bad example for that reason too :)

[longtailofsighs]

This why is a choice made by the NTIA in the late 90s, I think. And, to be fair, the coordination of the DNS via ICANN is a non-commercial affair.

I just don't think it's worth entertaining the idea of trying to de-commercialize the operation of the DNS. You've got about ~450 families of gtld Registrars, some 200 or so Registries including behemoths like Verisign. All with contracts, obligations, shareholders, infrastructure etc. You can't put that genie back in the bottle, or at least not without a myriad of consequences.

[rhizome]

>Whether people like it or not the operation of the DNS, including .org, is a commercial endeavor

Whether people like it or not, this doesn't have to mean privatized, nor profitable.

[longtailofsighs]

You're right that it doesn't have to, but I certainly don't think converting the DNS to a publicly run entity by some particular government is anything close to a good idea.

Or if that's really your thing, stick to ccTLDs which for the most part are run by arms length agencies of national governments and subject to far stricter rules than gtlds.

[agwa]

> Registrars not Registries are the real place to try and protect Registrants

This makes zero sense. There is robust competition among registrars and since it's easy to change registrars, registrars have a disincentive to screw over registrants. In contrast, registries have registrants completely over the barrel because you can't change registry without giving up your domain name. So registries are absolutely the place where registrants need to be protected.

[jariel]

"Whether people like it or not the operation of the DNS, including .org, is a commercial endeavor."

? It most definitely does not have to be.

There's basically no reason it at all has to be commercial, it's one of the things that makes more sense to socialize, because it's not about value creation, it's public property and rent-seeking. Handing over a non-value creating cash-cow to private equity is not 'good capitalism'.