| We don't need to guess on this one. One of ISOC members who helped seal this greasy deal wrote a whole thinkpiece last year justifying it: http://www.circleid.com/posts/20191127_why_i_voted_to_sell_o... The short version is that guaranteed annual recurring revenue is great, but a billion dollars all at once is a lot of money, and could be used for all kinds of things. Not in the article: because it would be Ethos who'd later raise prices on .org (had the plan gone through), the ISOC would have some deniability of not having been the direct infractor. It'd be a win/win: Ethos would still profit despite the high price tag, and ISOC would get a huge windfall while keeping its hands only a little grimy (not dirty, but not clean). And if the piece's reasoning seemed sound to you, I'd call attention in particular to these sentences: > Ethos has said that their plan is to "live within the spirit of historic practice," that is, to manage prices roughly as PIR would have under the stewardship of the Internet Society. If they impose the maximum 10% price increase plan for ten years, the price will be around $26 per year — still quite affordable. Compare them to what the EFF wrote, and you'll see that notably absent from Richard's article is how the 10% increase cap is only active for the first eight years (not even 10 as stated). After that, Ethos was free to raise prices as much as they liked. Somehow, Richard mistakenly forgot to include this rather important detail. |
For that matter, how much does running a TLD registry with a few million domains actually cost? To me, the whole domain name registration business reeks of rent-seeking and of the exploitation of monopolies, but I'm don't know enough about it yet to confirm these suspicions.