Internet Pioneers Fight For Control of .Org Registry By Forming a Nonprofit Alternative (nytimes.com)
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Reuters reports that a group of "prominent internet pioneers" now has a plan to block the $1.1 billion sale of the .org internet domain registry to Ethos Capital.
The group has created their own nonprofit cooperative to offer an alternative: "There needs to be a place on the internet that represents the public interest, where educational sites, humanitarian sites, and organizations like Wikipedia can provide a broader public benefit," said Katherine Maher, the CEO of Wikipedia parent Wikimedia Foundation, who signed on to be a director of the new nonprofit.
The crowd-sourced research tool Wikipedia is the most visited of the 10 million .org sites registered worldwide...
Hundreds of nonprofits have already objected to the transaction, worried that Ethos will raise registration and renewal prices, cut back on infrastructure and security spending, or make deals to sell sensitive data or allow censorship or surveillance... "What offended me about the Ethos Capital deal and the way it unfolded is that it seems to have completely betrayed this concept of stewardship," said Andrew McLaughlin, who oversaw the transfer of internet governance from the U.S. Commerce Department to ICANN, completed in 2016.
Maher and others said the idea of the new cooperative is not to offer a competing financial bid for .org, which brings in roughly $100 million in revenue from domain sales. Instead, they hope that the unusual new entity, formally a California Consumer Cooperative Corporation, can manage the domain for security and stability and make sure it does not become a tool for censorship. The advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which previously organized a protest over the .org sale that drew in organizations including the YMCA of the United States, Greenpeace, and Consumer Reports, is also supporting the cooperative.
"It's highly inappropriate for it to be turned over to a commercial venture at all, much less one that's going to need to recover $1 billion," said EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn.
The group has created their own nonprofit cooperative to offer an alternative: "There needs to be a place on the internet that represents the public interest, where educational sites, humanitarian sites, and organizations like Wikipedia can provide a broader public benefit," said Katherine Maher, the CEO of Wikipedia parent Wikimedia Foundation, who signed on to be a director of the new nonprofit.
The crowd-sourced research tool Wikipedia is the most visited of the 10 million .org sites registered worldwide...
Hundreds of nonprofits have already objected to the transaction, worried that Ethos will raise registration and renewal prices, cut back on infrastructure and security spending, or make deals to sell sensitive data or allow censorship or surveillance... "What offended me about the Ethos Capital deal and the way it unfolded is that it seems to have completely betrayed this concept of stewardship," said Andrew McLaughlin, who oversaw the transfer of internet governance from the U.S. Commerce Department to ICANN, completed in 2016.
Maher and others said the idea of the new cooperative is not to offer a competing financial bid for .org, which brings in roughly $100 million in revenue from domain sales. Instead, they hope that the unusual new entity, formally a California Consumer Cooperative Corporation, can manage the domain for security and stability and make sure it does not become a tool for censorship. The advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which previously organized a protest over the .org sale that drew in organizations including the YMCA of the United States, Greenpeace, and Consumer Reports, is also supporting the cooperative.
"It's highly inappropriate for it to be turned over to a commercial venture at all, much less one that's going to need to recover $1 billion," said EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn.
ORG domain is part of the peoples common! (Score:5, Insightful)
In this digital world, there has to be some place that belongs to the people.
In fact the first web presence hemp.org had was a gopher site at Oregon State University., The Hemp Club
ORG domain is part of the peoples common!
Your site is down (Score:3)
Your site is down. Interesting name you have. Let me know if you need help fixing your server.
Re: (Score:1)
Too tired. Attacks have increased. (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
So you're saying when it's old, it's hard to get it up?
Re: (Score:2)
I find it shocking that your handle is "SysEngineer" but when you make a website it requires regular maintenance... even after 25 years of running it.
Let me venture a guess... you've got systemdphobia? And logging in triggers you?
Re: (Score:2)
org domain is part of "the people's common" so you can have private ownership of a piece of it? shouldn't HEMP.ORG be part of the people's common?
Hate to be cynical (Score:3)
But I can think of 1.1 billion reasons this will almost certainly not happen.
Oh, who am I kidding... I love to be cynical, because experience has taught be it's most often the correct way to interpret things.
People deciding forget/get changed too often. (Score:5, Insightful)
They were not given the .org as a financial asset to sell. because they want to sell it, it should just be taken away from them. Pretty simple really. It is not some startup that created something of their own in that way.
Also they are stupid as F as an organization to just sell it out, even for a billion dollars. Not stupid as individuals who can profit from it through the organization mind you, but the organization is acting in a stupid way as if it was a private business that deemed that this is a good time to cash out. It would be stupid to cash out even as a private business though. This really leads to thinking that they have some plan to extract the money (that is not theirs) out from the organization.
Forget it (Score:2)
Why? (Score:2)
This is the same shit as internet neutrality, everyone wants it, except one or two greedy fucks, and so it gets revoked. So much for a democracy. Clearly the person or company with the biggest bribe wins. I find it amazing that America runs around punishing other countries for corruption and bribes etc. when in their own country they have the exact same thin
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Time for the US Commerce Department to create our own registry service! LOL
This is what happens when you let the Europeans share ownership; the exact opposite of what they claimed their reasons for wanting it were!
This is a pure bullshit smoothie (Score:2)
Eliminate gTLDs (Score:2)
We need to eliminate the generic TLDs. Go to a system of country codes only. Most gTLDs are pointless anyway. There's no effective difference between .com, .org, and .net anymore. Old-school TLDs like .gov and .mil are parochial, referring only to the United States government and military. Newer TLDs like .biz and .info are just a cash grab to convince owners of addresses in .com that they really need to register in yet another domain or the bad guys will do nefarious things with the names.
So sod it a