[governance] Response to personal attacks Re: PIR Case/or the .org sell

[Bill Woodcock]

> On Nov 29, 2019, at 4:45 PM, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:
> I felt personally attacked and hurt by that posting.

Why?  Do you, in retrospect, feel that you _were_ trying to have a conversation in good faith?

> ...which is supposed to be a "civil society" community, which
> certainly implies in particular that it should not be an environment
> where "business” people...

Just so we get this straight, you’re saying that public-benefit, not-for-profit NGOs should be barred from participation in “civil society” because…  what?  Who exactly is legitimately civil society by your lights?  Only people who agree with you?  Anyway, this is a no-true-Scotsman.

Does appealing to third parties to exclude someone who disagrees with you from conversation, without addressing their thoughts, strike you as conversation in good faith?

> ...allowed to dominate the discourse and its informal rules...

I’m one of an exceedingly small handful of people representing the unfortunately minority view that there are multiple sides to this issue.  How does that constitute “domination of the discourse?”  Might I not need to be of the predominant view to dominate the discourse?

> The Charter of this community explicitly forbids personal attacks
> (like e.g. "You’re going overboard in your effort to create FUD." and "You don’t appear to be
> trying to have a conversation in good faith.")

Both are commentary on _what you said_, not _who you are_.  Personal attacks, ad-hominem attacks, are attacks against a person, not commentary about ideas.  I don’t know or care who you are, I’m only interested in what you think, and whether it can be used to inform and refine what I think.  I’m trying to draw you into reasoned discourse about ideas. You’re trying to exclude me from conversation.

I don’t have any burning need to defend ISOC, and am not intending to do so; our lawyers have had to send their lawyers too many nastygrams over their misbehavior over the years for me to have any interest in representing them as _good_; however it disturbs me greatly to see people latching on to one tiny aspect of a large and complex situation and in doing so march toward preclusion of the best path to reform that ISOC has had in a long, long time, without bothering to discuss the complexities of the situation.

A “personal attack” looks like posting a link to someone’s biography and demanding that they be silenced because of who they are.  A reasoned discourse looks like an exchange of views on the topic under discussion.

> In regard to substance, I now think that what Bill wrote in his
> postings in this thread is largely correct.

Perhaps next time you could reflect on the substance before, or instead of, attacking.

> For me, being both part of communities of people who
> strongly believe in the importance of non-profit-oriented organizing,
> who got betrayed, and being also a member of ISOC, which did the
> betraying, the issue is quite personal and emotional for me in more
> ways than one.

I have, myself, been outraged by ISOC betrayals at various points in the past, but in the interest of my own sanity, I get over it and get back to work.  On the other hand, seeing an opportunity for ISOC to disencumber itself of some of the major causes of its problems gives me hope.  I’d rather not see that opportunity squandered on account of not-invented-hereism.

> I will certainly accept as a possible source for an
> assumption the intuition of someone who has a lot of experience dealing
> with the particular topic area (such as in this case the intuition of
> someone who credibly claims "thirty five years of experience dealing
> with domain names"). That doesn't imply that I would necessarily agree
> to also base my thinking on the same assumptions (in fact I see nothing
> wrong in basing my assumptions on an intuition shaped by observing that
> very many individuals and communities of people have been royally
> screwed in unexpected ways, in very many different contexts, and
> typically with no reasonably available effective recourse whatsoever,
> by trust and promises getting carelessly broken on the basis of
> profit-oriented business thinking

Yes, and I agree with that. However, rapacious capitalism operates within the constraints of the context of the possible. Every rapacious capitalist does not simply price everything at a ridiculous price which precludes it from selling; doing so yields no sales, and no revenue. Instead, they try to guess (or ascertain through experimentation) the price which will yield the maximum net revenue. In the case of PIR and .org, minimizing expenses has been one path… Maximizing gross revenue is the other side of that coin. Maximum revenue is the maximum product of quantity and unit price. An absurd unit price will reduce the size of the potential market to just the intersection of those who can afford the price and those who desire the product.  And, in the case of domain names, those who desire, specifically, an available domain name. The market has pretty well established that the retail price that maximizes revenue is in the neighborhood of USD 10 / year.  At that price, essentially nobody is dissuaded from buying a domain name, and therefore the second-level namespace gets fairly thoroughly utilized. Hypothetically, a first-year 10% increase (to USD 11) would have little impact on gross revenue (less than 10% decrease in number of sales). A second-year 10% increase (to USD 12) would have a bit more impact, perhaps lessening the gross revenue. By the time you get to USD 16, after five years of maximal increases, quite a few potential customers will be dissuaded, and will think “I may as well just register in .com instead, for $10, and pocket the $5 difference,” and the product of price and quantity would be considerably lower than at $10, or $11, or maybe $12.

The strategy that’s pursued by pharmaceutical speculators relies upon _inflexible demand_. That is, they’re “investing” in the rent-extraction rights of things for which the demand does _not_ change with price. In their case, because some people who go without will die. Therefore, everyone who’s capable of doing so pays whatever price is required of them, no matter how ridiculous. Nobody is going to die if they have to move off a .org domain name. And the people who have the most to lose, also have the most money to spend.

That’s why the rule precluding differential pricing is so important. It allows all of the .org registrants to stand together as a class, rather than each being offered the maximum individual price that they can stand. If that were to be allowed, ICRC.org would be priced at millions of dollars per year, while domain speculators would pay only a few cents.  I’m very much against that, as a matter of equitability.

> "anything that can go wrong will probably go wrong somewhere, somehow,
> and possibly massively, unless effective measures are taken to prevent
> the bad things from happening”

Sure, but that has to be balanced against the possibility of good outcomes as well.  Otherwise, no risks are every taken, and nothing is ever achieved.  My ENTIRE POINT is that the possibility of reforming ISOC seems to me to be a worthwhile one, and, under Andrew’s leadership, to have a significant chance of success.  That seems to me to be a risk worth taking, if the cost is a few dollars a year for ten million .org registrants.  If there were ways of funding actual core infrastructure and operations that way, rather than depending upon grants and donations, I’d be all over it, for instance.

> I did want to respond to that particular posting and in particular to its personal attacks against me.

If you can identify a personal attack against you, you’ll have my full apology.

                                -Bill

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