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Electronic Frontier Foundation

EFF Reveals Behind-the-Scenes Account of the Fight to Save .ORG (eff.org) 46

Posted by EditorDavid from the problem-domains dept.
As part of its "Year in Review" series, the EFF shares their dramatic behind-the-scenes details about 2020's fight over the future of .org domains. It begins when the Internet Society (ISOC) announced plans to sell the Public Interest Registry — which manages the .org top-level domain (TLD) — to private equity firm Ethos Capital.

"If you come at the nonprofit sector, you'd best not miss." EFF and other leaders in the NGO community sprung to action, writing a letter to ISOC urging it to stop the sale. What follows was possibly the most dramatic show of solidarity from the nonprofit sector of all time. And we won.

Prior to the announcement, EFF had spent six months voicing our concerns to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) about the 2019 .ORG Registry Agreement, which gave the owner of .ORG new powers to censor nonprofits' websites (the agreement also lifted a longstanding price cap on .ORG registrations and renewals)... Throughout that six-month process of navigating ICANN's labyrinthine decision-making structure, none of us knew that ISOC would soon be selling PIR. With .ORG in the hands of a private equity firm, those fears of censorship and price gouging became a lot more tangible for nonprofits and NGOs. The power to take advantage of .ORG users was being handed to a for-profit company whose primary obligation was to make money for its investors....

More NGOs began to take notice of the .ORG sale and the danger it posed to nonprofits' freedom of expression online. Over 500 organizations and 18,000 individuals had signed our letter by the end of 2019, including big-name organizations like Greenpeace, Consumer Reports, Oxfam, and the YMCA of the USA. At the same time, questions began to emerge (PDF) about whether Ethos Capital could possibly make a profit without some drastic changes in policy for .ORG. By the beginning of 2020, the financial picture had become a lot clearer: Ethos Capital was paying $1.135 billion for .ORG, nearly a third of which was financed by a loan. No matter how well-meaning Ethos was, the pressure to sell "censorship as a service" would align with Ethos' obligation to produce returns for its investors...

Six members of Congress wrote a letter to ICANN in January urging it to scrutinize the sale more carefully. A few days later, EFF, nonprofit advocacy group NTEN, and digital rights groups Fight for the Future and Demand Progress participated in a rally outside of the ICANN headquarters in Los Angeles. Our message was simple: stop the sale and create protections for nonprofits. Before the protest, ICANN staff reached out to the organizers offering to meet with us in person, but on the day of the protest, ICANN canceled on us. That same week, Amnesty International, Access Now, the Sierra Club, and other global NGOs held a press conference at the World Economic Forum to tell world leaders that selling .ORG threatens civil society. All of the noise caught the attention of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who wrote to ICANN (PDF) asking it for key information about its review of the sale...
Click through to read the conclusion...
The EFF continues:

It's almost poetic that the debate over .ORG reached a climax just as COVID-19 was becoming a worldwide crisis. Emergencies like this one are when the world most relies on nonprofits and NGOs; therefore, they're also pressure tests for the sector. The crisis demonstrated that the NGO community doesn't need fancy "products and services" from a domain registry: it needs simple, reliable, boring service. Those same members of Congress who'd scrutinized the .ORG sale wrote a more pointed letter to ICANN in March (PDF), plainly noting that there was no way that Ethos Capital could make a profit on its investment without making major changes at the expense of .ORG users. Finally, in April, the ICANN board rejected the transfer of ownership of .ORG...

While .ORG is safe for now, the bigger trend of registries becoming chokepoints for free speech online is as big a problem as ever...

The story of the attempted .ORG sale is really the story of the power and resilience of the nonprofit sector. Every time Ethos and PIR tried to quell the backlash with empty promises, the sector responded even more loudly, gaining the voices of government officials, members of Congress, two UN Special Rapporteurs, and U.S. state charities regulators... If you were one of the 27,183 people who signed our open letter, or if you work for or support one of the 871 organizations that participated, then you were a part of this victory.
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EFF Reveals Behind-the-Scenes Account of the Fight to Save .ORG More

EFF Reveals Behind-the-Scenes Account of the Fight to Save .ORG

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  • Domain names being centralized and controlled are so problematic, I'm not sure the internet is better for having them.

    • Are you proposing that they be decentralized and uncontrolled? Let anyone have a website under any TLD with no criteria to validate that, providng they can pay?

      • I'm thinking that most of the time, or a lot of the time, we don't use domain names anyway. We use search engines, or something like autocomplete. These two things could work just as well with raw IP addresses as they do with domain names.

        • Re:domain names (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Saturday January 02, 2021 @03:24PM (#60888056) Journal
          You're thinking like a 'computer guy', as the mundanes would likely call you, instead of a 'mundane'. DNS was created to be human-friendly. You, I, and any number of computer-savvy people could handle using numeric addresses for everything, but even we would have to have a description right next to it telling us what website they are. Awkward at best. While not using DNS would actually make the Web more secure (can't hijack an IP address very easily) it would be a chaotic, confusing mess for the average, non-computer-savvy internet user. In my opinion.

          • DNS was created to be human-friendly.

            But it's not human friendly anyway.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Rhipf ( 525263 )

            If you really want to be geeky there is nothing stopping you from using the static IP for any site. I assume no one does this though since using the URL is a lot more convenient.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by green1 ( 322787 )

              A large number of sites don't support that anymore anyway. One server easily handles many sites now with the URL defining which site you wish to access.

          • DNS was created to be human-friendly.

            But the actual humans aren't the friends of DNS. They don't think much about it. They don't even know its existence.

            You, I, and any number of computer-savvy people could handle using numeric addresses for everything, but even we would have to have a description right next to it telling us what website they are.

            Yes, and the title of the page, as display in the search engine entry is already good enough for most people.

            it would be a chaotic, confusing mess for the average, non-computer-savvy internet user. In my opinion.

            You are assuming that average non-computer-savvy internet users pay any attention to the address bar. You're wrong.
            Most people can't even understand the difference between an URL bar and a Search bar.

            For most of the "average internet users", the modus operandi goes like:
            1. Click on "The

            • *shrug* whatever. I don't even really give a fuck, other than your comment demonstrating to me how much smarter I am than the average jackoff of the world. Guess I should thank you for that or something.
          • Well, actually numbers don't work as many smaller sites now are combined into a single IP running multiple domain names. The web server figures it out. So without the name you'd need x.x.x.x + some name to say which web site. I'd also argue with IPv6, numbers would be a nightmare to remember. I mean many on this site know 8.8.8.8 is google's DNS, but how many other sites do you know? 2 maybe 3?

        • I'm still trying to teach my wife to type "PBS news" into the youtube search instead of the google search, or to just click the link from the youtube subscription alert.

          The average user does not even come close to noticing the difference between a new search and a history autocomplete. Security Hell.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        Let anyone have a website under any TLD with no criteria to validate that

        Pretty much how .com operates now. And contrary to popular belief, the requirements to use an .org domain have always been pretty lax.

        • the requirements to use an .org domain have always been pretty lax.

          Yeah. There are no requirements.

          Or maybe I'm just special and they trust me?

        • Agreed, but I remember the old days of .com when you had to submit a paper form explaining why you deserved a domain name, You can have cheap or you can have well validated, not both. The old days they were not cheap.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by PPH ( 736903 )

            the old days of .com when you had to submit a paper form explaining why you deserved a domain name
            ...
            The old days they were not cheap.

            Those were some pretty old days. When they lifted the last restrictions on commercial use in the mid '90s, any justification for .com domain names must have vanished pretty quickly. A bunch of us were sitting around thinking how cool it would be to have our own name domains. Mine was available. It cost me $35.

            • Early 90's or maybe even 89. Don't remember, as I said old days. I googled and it might have been free when we did it. There was no web, it was only email/ftp then, and we used a modem that dialed out once an hour to download/upload email. I remember filling out the form to get us registered and thinking are they going to approve this.

      • DNS combines two functions that ought to be separated, a namespace and a level of indirection. Many things only need a level of indirection above IP addresses and should not be required to pay for a slice of the namespace.

        • DNS combines two functions that ought to be separated, a namespace and a level of indirection.

          I was involved in some discussion of this idea a couple of decades ago. I published an article in Communications of the ACM, wrote two Internet Drafts, and presented the idea at a "Future of the Internet" conference. Several other people had thought about the idea but as far as I know shared only in private communication.

          At least one of the founders of Internet had the same opinion when DNS was first deployed. But it was deployed under time pressure and two-part alternatives were not considered seriously.

          I

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Yeah, sure, it is as easy as fuck. All you have to do, is get web browsers et al to point to different domain name servers. All it is, is a fucking database with a list of names associated with a bunch of IP addresses, you can just type in the IP address.

        You could create one inside your own computer, small fucking thing, would be super fast, just update, you data base, from your chosen external data base, a shared open source one perhaps.

        Open source DNS, where an established set of rules is applied for cr

    • Domain names being centralized and controlled are so problematic, I'm not sure the internet is better for having them.

      So are you running hoodwinkd yet?

      https://viewsourcecode.org/why... [viewsourcecode.org] (MEDICAL WARNING: FLASHING LIGHTS)

      That's if you can figure out that this is what it's for, of course. https://ruby-talk.ruby-lang.na... [narkive.com]

      The source isn't really that much more illuminating, unless read and considered in whole. https://github.com/robbyrussel... [github.com]

  • Would have been better if it went through (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Pinky's Brain ( 1158667 ) on Saturday January 02, 2021 @03:08PM (#60888028)

    Clearly the ICANN is corrupt top to bottom and nothing has gotten fixed, just some symptoms mitigated for a short time. Maybe if they had brazenly continued with the sham something fundamental would have changed.

    Also ISOC wasn't obeying it's bylaws and just trying to enrich the board, but that's par for the course ... I won't even bother calling that corruption. The clear underhanded quid pro quo going on at ICANN is far worse.

    • I'm shocked. Shocked, I say.
      An organization with little oversight and massive bureaucratic power has turned into a set of fiefdoms?
      Ok, not so shocked.

      • AFAICS any non profit with valuable assets without a wide membership base with absolute powers to kick the board out almost instantly corrupts.

    • ICANN is run by a law firm.

      That should tell you all you know. Almost all of the money raised by ICANN goes to that law firm. Legal services aren't bid. ICANN is a method to shakedown domain services and then laundering that money through legal "fees" to the owners of the firm.

  • Another example of capitalism gone bad (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Saturday January 02, 2021 @03:10PM (#60888030) Journal
    Think about it: what would it be like to live in a world where everything, without exception, can be twisted and corrupted by an overriding drive to make a profit, with no regard whatsoever for the consequences to individuals, society, our civilization, or even our entire species in general?
    Some might argue we're already there, but believe you me it can get much, much worse than it is right now.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by storkus ( 179708 )

      Think about it: what would it be like to live in a world where everything, without exception, can be twisted and corrupted by an overriding drive to make a profit, with no regard whatsoever for the consequences to individuals, society, our civilization, or even our entire species in general?

      https://memory-alpha.fandom.co... [fandom.com]

      Turn in your nerd / geek card & /. membership now, mundy.

  • Writing letters? Voicing their concerns? What a gripping tale of intrigue and suspense... I was at the edge of my seat!

    • I read the whole thing hoping that the "behind the scenes account" would tell me about the efforts of the California Attorney General's Office, which is who forced ICANN to right their course.

      California has a veto, because of the history, and California law regarding the transfer of non-profit property to for-profit entities. You can't get around those laws with a temporary contract that eventually stops enforcing the same rules. And under California law, the nonprofit it presumed to want to follow the law,

  • We Need An Accounting of how ICANN Got Corrupted (Score:5, Interesting)

    by crunchygranola ( 1954152 ) on Saturday January 02, 2021 @03:39PM (#60888106)

    When ICANN began to write bizarre new rules to allow .org censorship, it was already packaging the "product" for sale to a commercial entity. How did this particular vulture, err, "private equity", firm line up this deal? How early were they paying off ICANN members (in some form or another, including promises of future graft)? Has ICANN been corrupt for a long time, or is this a new-ish thing?

    • Has ICANN been corrupt for a long time, or is this a new-ish thing?

      It's been corrupt since Jon Postel died, and even before that, powerful entities were trying to take advantage of the DNS system.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      At least 20 years. Some of the original members resigned over that. It became blatant about the time they were given official authority by Congress. https://www.cnet.com/news/us-i... [cnet.com]
      Hmm...I guess that wasn't as long ago as I thought. But maybe my search missed the original incident. A slightly different search yields: (from https://icannwiki.org/ICANN [icannwiki.org] )
      On November 25, 1998, The U.S. Department of Commerce and ICANN entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU),[1] which officially recognized ICANN as

    • Here's a link to the current ICANN board members: https://www.icann.org/resource... [icann.org] Here's a link to past meeting minutes to see how everyone voted on issues: https://www.icann.org/resource... [icann.org]

  • No price caps on .org, eh? End of the world was nigh?

    Funny how I pay less for a .com from free-market competitors than I do for a .org.

    And nobody pretends .com is run as a nonprofit.

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