(forw) Re: [skeptic] Private Equity Firm Wants to Buy Group of .orgs ?

Of possible interest.

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <[email protected]> -----

Date: Tue, 24 Dec 2019 19:43:59 -0800
From: Rick Moen <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [skeptic] Private Equity Firm Wants to Buy Group of .orgs ?

Quoting [email protected] ([email protected]):

> WTF?
> https://savedotorg.org/
> I'm not trying to push a petition, I am just gobsmacked that an equity
> firm would try this at all.  Is it legal?

I shouldn't speculate.  Or, to put it another way, that'd be for a judge
to say.

There's a whole lot of people who remember more of the relevant history
than I, and are less likely to recount it dead-wrong or omit vital
details.  With that being said, in _vague_ terms, the understanding that
the '.org' top-level domain be administered by public-interest groups
for public benefit is somewhere between a tradition and a handshake
deal.

Backing up further, if you look into who's in charge of top-level
domains (TLDs) comprising the global DNS, and by what right, you find
a confusing mess of impromptu actions, vast exceeding of actual
authority, and chutzpah.  So, part of that history:  Way back when ('70s), 
ARPA (a US military research group) encouraged a computer scientist at
Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in my town of Menlo Park, CA, Doug
Englebart, to help coordinate operation of ARPANET.  Englebart called
his setup for so doing the Network Information Center (NIC).  As the
ARPANET evolved into the Internet, and DNS got invented in the early
'80s, the NIC fell into supervising the new-founded TLDs, too.

(More formally speaking, 'the NIC' in question was named 'Defense Data
Network Network Information Center (DDN-NIC)'.  But everyone called it
'the NIC'.)

Development of technical standards on the ARPANET/Internet often
depended on who had the money to lavish on work, and administrative
standards, more so.  Therefore, in 1990 when US Defense Dept.'s Defense
Information Systems Agency (DISA) pledged money to make the work of DNS
administration go better, everyone said 'Far out', and DISA got to nudge
who got put in charge.  They set up a small outsider corporation to 
receive the government grant money under contract (Government Systems,
Inc. aka GSI), which in turn subcontracted the work to small private
firm Network Solutions, Inc. ('NetSol'), which moved the NIC
infrastructure from Menlo Park, CA to Chantilly, VA in the DC suburbs.

DISA realised the (baby) Internet was becoming much less of a DoD affair
and wanted to bow out, so National Science Foundation stepped in as the
US gov't sugar daddy for Internet administration.  NSF put together
(1993) a consortium called Internet Network Information Center, much
better known as the InterNIC, to replace 'the NIC'.  Three companies 
including NetSol operated it, until the NSF contract term expired in
1998.

(Over the 1990s, NetSol gradually phased out the phrase 'the InterNIC', 
in part because its functions got modularised and parted out rather 
than run by one organisation.  There is no longer in 2019 a specific
organisation you can point to and call 'the InterNIC'.  The closest
thing through around 2003ish was VeriSign Global Registry Services,
which ran a kind-of InterNIC after devouring NetSol in 2000, but 
backing out of 99% of its functions three years later.  More about that
far below.)

In 1998, with NSF no longer wanting to be in charge, a call went out for
some non-profit corporation to get set up to do a number of things
including administer the global DNS.  A California non-profit called
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) sprang up
like a mushroom after spring rain to fill that hole, and new gov't
sugar-daddy Department of Commerce signed a contract delegating domain
management work to ICANN.


If you worked through the above timeline of shoestring operations and
small-time bureaucracy, you'll notice not the _slightest_ sign of
anyone having a mandate.  Like, when did the people of the world put
Dept. of Commerce in charge?  Or DISA?  Or ARPA?  Nobody did.  
They had a bit of grant money to hand out, some other folk with 
medium-sized, well-connected computers cashed the cheques, and things
mostly worked.

About two years (IIRC) of ICANN thinking it had the right to rule the
global Internet, just because US Commerce Dept. was throwing some
contract money at them, some acquaintances of mine who run the Tonga NIC
('ToNIC') in San Francisco for the Kingdom of Tonga received a
form-letter invoice from ICANN.  It said that since ToNIC operates the
.to. country-code TLD, ICANN was now sending ToNIC this invoice for 
what ICANN considered ToNIC's annual share of subsidy for ICANN's
budget.  ToNIC was amazed but unswayed by the chutzpah -- being aware
that Tonga had .to by right as a sovereign nation, not by the grace of
ICANN.  After checking with necessary contacts in Nukuʻalofa, Tonga to 
ensure that the government would back them up, they sent back a reply
letter, to the effect that Kingdom of Tonga is not in the habit of
making payment for services neither requested nor delivered, on invoices
received from parties it doesn't do business with.  And that was that.

So, chutzpah rather than mandate is a running theme in this long story,
and that was just a piquant example.


Getting around to .org, it was first established near the dawn of the
DNS system.  DNS author Paul Mockapetris thought seven TLDs would 
be enough to run the Internet forever:

.org:  for non-profits
.gov:  for government departments / agencies (Which government?  USA,
       of course.  Are there any others?  ;->  )
.edu:  Educational institutions
.mil:  Military
.net:  Organisations involved in networking technologies, such as ISPs
       and infrastructure companies
.com:  Commercial interests
.us:   A USA-based 'locality namespace', mostly for state/local 
       governments, e.g., California towns could in theory get domains 
       like menlopark.ca.us .

(Aside:  Certainly by 1990, widespread awareness arose that Mockapetris
and others had blundered in their embarrassing USA focus.  If this
had been better planned rather than just madly improvised, arguably
_everything_ in the USA would have been under '.us'.  As hundreds of 
other countries (such as Kingdom of Tonga with .to) started operating
two-letter country-code domain TLDs (ccTLDs) modeled vaguely after .us, 
the three-letter ones were retroactively dubbed 'generic TLDs' (gTLDs)
and spoken of as if they were a shared international resource (ignoring
the fact that .gov and .mil are _not_).

Administration over .org (of the chutzpah-grounded variety) was passed
like a sack of potatoes from the NIC to the InterNIC to VeriSign to
ICANN.  In 2002, ICANN got lazy and said they'd like to hand .org off to
someone, and invited proposals.  A proposal from Internet Society
('ISOC') in league with domain registry Afilis won the selection
process, and ISOC created a subsidiary organisation called Public
Interest Registry (PIR) to do the actual work.  (I assume PIR got 
a cut of the ongoing US government grants largesse.)  

This year (in fact, last month), ISOC decided to dump PIR by selling it
off -- again, through the power of chuzpah.   Private equity firm agreed
to pay US $1.135 billion for the subsidiary.  Why?  Because they intend
to rent-seek by gradually jacking up .org prices after the deal closes
in 2020, and run it rapaciously as an explicitly for-profit venture.

Is this legal?  {shrug}  Hell, nobody has any rights other than right of
conquest and the fruits of ballsy effrontery in this area, anyway.
Disputations will doubtless occur based on the premise that
someone-or-other at some point in the past promised-pinky-swear to run
.org as a public trust.  And depending on lawyering, that may or may not
be influential.

Of course, if you find that your TLD authority is rapacious scum, you
can always move to a different TLD.  I'm lastingly fond of .to, and 
note that 'departed.to' is so far unclaimed.

----- End forwarded message -----

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