In today's Slate Money podcast they interview Margret Sullivan on her new book about destruction of US local newspapers.
She has an interesting factoid - those local governments with local newspapers have significantly and demonstrably lower costs of borrowing than those without - the conjecture being that over the years councils have been unable to get away with blatant corruption for fear of public humiliation- that the "watchdog" role of newspapers is not nice journalist ethics but actually measurable in tax dollars
ICANN is part of the Internet's local government and we need to find new ways to keep watchdogs alive.
Random info - a factoid originally meant "a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it is not actually true", when it was coined a few decades ago.
Decimated comes from the Roman military punishment "Decimation" where for some military unit being punished, 10% of their ranks were to executed by their colleagues.
The most literal meaning of decimated is "to reduce by 10%" but the common meaning is from the complete and total destruction of morale and resistance that results from being forced to kill your colleagues.
Weird that wiki doesn’t mention that it’s just the -oid suffix for “like” the same way we can call a non-square box a cuboid. The rest seems suspect eg anyone could’ve coined it.
Well, almost anyone. If the Progenitors had been startup devs we'd probably be approximately spherical meeple in a webgl tarski's world with "facty" and "fucky" truth values.
The amazing thing is the ICANN tried to frame the decision to shelve the .org sale as a decision that they initiated, when it was only after numerous organizations like the EFF and even the California Attorney General steppes in that they did anything.
A less creative interpretation would be that ICANN was asked to approve the purchase because the .org contract required it. ICANN called for feedback on whether it should approve, and many in response made their position very clear like the EFF, which lead to the rejection of the request.
That was just the cover (and a blatantly thin one at that); the real beneficiary would be the purchaser, which was buying what could easily be turned into a highly lucrative business for peanuts.
I guess I never really understood how. Are TLDs really worth that much income? Why would somebody choose .org instead of .com or their local TLD? Would they have tried to monetize by undercutting .com?
.org is among the cheap TLDs and widely used. If you want to make money from it, you jack up the prices and now many long-term established organisations using an .org domain now have to pay you more or have to give up their domain and find a new one, with all the follow up costs and consequences. People just now looking for a domain are fine, the ones committed to a name have an issue.
Interesting fact: The three largest investors in Ethos Capital are the investment vehicles of three families of billionaires: the Romneys, the Perots and the Johnsons.
It reminds me of a thought why you can’t bring democracy into a country by invading it - because democracy doesn’t exist in a vacuum and therefore voting is done not only during elections, but also with you wallet and ability to switch jobs easily.
A little off topic but what boggles my mind is seemingly everybody supports "equal pay for equal work" but nobody seems to support the idea that all salary/bonus/non-monetary compensation for everyone within a company should be freely accessible to everyone including contractors and seasonal workers within the company. This is so obvious to me as a first step in actual pay equity. How can we have pay equity without transparency?
I believe it's the "equal work" bit that makes that a problem. I think I work harder than some of my coworkers and should therefore make more. Who decides what equal work is?
Not to be daft, but I can't imagine a single reason this is better for you career or labor organization-wise. If anything, it strikes me like that old quote:
Benjamin Franklin said: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Not knowing the wages of those around you makes collective organization and bartering harder which is bad for workers in aggregate.
I agree but because I don't think those at the top would ever let the transparency be complete. Unless the company was started that way and managed to keep it while growing. Which experience seems to show is hard or unlikely.
An alternative to the total transparency you call for might be that an auditor examines everyone’s compensation, and provides statistics for each job role. Lots of employees prefer not to have their exact compensation revealed. Sometimes you may work well with someone (a lawyer, say) and think him a good team player, until you realize he is making tons more than you and envy becomes a factor. Your attitude might go from positive to negative. Would salary transparency be good in that case?
> Sometimes you may work well with someone (a lawyer, say) and think him a good team player, until you realize he is making tons more than you and envy becomes a factor. Your attitude might go from positive to negative. Would salary transparency be good in that case?
It isn't me against the other lawyer. It is me AND the other lawyer against the company. Remember, the company has full vision into everyone's compensation.
I remember this one joke about a survey of drivers where over 80% (? I forget the exact number. It is a joke iirc.) of drivers rated themselves at least at "over average" or better. Similarly, I suspect a lot of employees think they are "smart negotiators". Nothing can be farther from the truth.
I had a coworker who made about USD 80k a year and he was very opposed to raising the minimum wage in New York.
He was open about why he opposed it. He thought his wages will not increase as minimum wage increased and that the increase in minimum wage will cause his rent to go up.
You may hate him but at least he is honest.
I'd eventually like all compensation information for everyone to be public but I understand that is a tough sell. I think if you support pay equity, you must support transparency within the organization.
> Lots of employees prefer not to have their exact compensation revealed.
In fact, I am pretty confident (no proof though) that many for-profit companies as well as non-profits (including Research Foundation of the City University of New York) share this information with third parties such as Equifax or Intuit (makers of TurboTax).
All this information is already out there. We are just one more data breach away from having this information leaked.
It is a fallacy to believe that public information about a non corporal entity would help establish fairness. All corporations operate under the act of blame and judgement to increase profits, or they simply cease to be.
I mean that if your employer is for example, a monopoly in a relatively stable-yet-poor-country, the rational vote is to always vote for the preservation of your existence (ie the preservation of your job rather than de-monopolisation of the market) and thus it’s really hard to transform the country even if the voting is inherently fair.
Are there any examples of people voting strategically and getting what they want? Because the way I see it - strategic voting is almost always a populist vote and thus is rarely rational.
This one involved strategic executive shuffling, secretive organization policy changes, shell companies, and over a billion dollars initial investment. They were probably right in the middle of it. Especially considering the thing they were buying for $1B is likely actually worth $2B+.
The crazy thing is that this is probably all within the confines of the law.
Unfortunately, a three tiered government means the law is written by congress, not by the people who see the injustice of the law and want to fix it =(
I'm sorry but a blog post about "a screenshot of an email" doesn't do it for me.
Can you do better?
(I can't even see the screenshot because I don't enable JS so it's just a blurry thumbnail image. Oh how I wish people didn't use JS to serve static content!)
It means he was bribed (the new job) to help with a transaction (sell .org), but to not raise suspicion the bribe delivery was scheduled for a later date.
They used to say about a well known Irish politician that he always took the bribe but never did what he was bribed to do. But people kept bribing him anyway.
Nassim Taleb talks about this revolving door between government and business.
After a powerful regulator leaves government, they can often get high paying jobs in the industry they just regulated as a reward for good behavior and to interpret the complicated regulations.
This is widely practiced in politics (globally) in my country former presidents build non-profits (or "institutes") to receive these bribes in the form of donations.
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
If it looks like corruption... it probably is.
This guy should be in jail, for attempted fraud and breach of fiduciary duty... Just because he didn't succeed, it doesn't mean he didn't commit a crime.
Yeah, I don't think the situation is too complicated. Fadi Chehadé used his position as ICANN's CEO to try to complete a transaction that would enrich himself and make the public poorer. Now he's counting on the public to ignore that he tried to do this, or at least not prosecute him for it, and he's probably right. I wouldn't be surprised if Fadi to was invited to the White House as a special adviser on the internet, or something like that.
It bothers me quite a lot that the present and the future of the DNS a d so much of the internet infrastructure (effectively e global public service) is in the hands of the United States of America.
That’s just enough years to build the necessary network of people who would trust you to follow you with this idea and to make a fake excuse of not having enough power to affect ICANN’s decision making.
Wouldn’t be surprised as well if the guy hadn’t even given it a second thought since that makes you sleep better.
It looks like corruption, it probably is corruption, and I bet you my bottom dollar nothing ever comes of it.
To send someone down for something like this you basically need a note written in the defendant’s own blood saying “I am deliberately and knowingly carrying out corrupt deeds which are prohibited by the law”, and even that would probably be seen as weak evidence. Hell, a videotape of them discussing how to be corrupt, how they will profit from it, how to launder the money would not be enough. It hasn’t been in prior cases of this type, where they’ve got as far as someone looking at them.
There’s practically no recourse for this kind of crime. It’s a wonder to me that more people don’t embezzle and defraud, given that the chances of facing any consequences seem to be practically zero.
I cast my mind back to working for a large brokerage in 2005, and them hiding nearly $500m in losses through accounting fraud for years on end, and eventually rinsing investors for a few $bn. EVERYBODY knew about it - pretty much down to the mail room guys. The entire upper echelon of the company were in on the scam. The CEO went to jail because he threatened to squeal on the guys at the SEC who had turned a blind eye (the things people will do for a nice meal out and season tickets) until a whistleblower ruined the party.
As far as I can tell the only time people face prosecution for fraud and what have you is when they are small, unconnected people. You know, life in jail for $20 out of the register, summary execution for standing funny. Well, either that or connected people who lost their protection or failed to give the right politician a bribe.
Steal a public utility? Welcome to government, my friend.
> Hell, a videotape of them discussing how to be corrupt, how they will profit from it, how to launder the money would not be enough. It hasn’t been in prior cases of this type, where they’ve got as far as someone looking at them.
Can you provide any example to back up this claim?
Yeah, that’s why it works. Even the auditor doesn’t necessarily realise they’ve been bought. You’re just going to choose to not look at this particular odd set of loans because you don’t want to create a problem for Philip, he’s such a gentleman, and you’re sure there’s nothing untowards there. Plus your son in law works for one of the group companies, so there’s that.
Most corruption doesn’t happen due to money changing hands, but due to misplaced personal loyalty, and reality being less seemingly plausible than fiction.
What would happen if browsers just decided to make their own name service? Does icann have some sort of protection on domain names? Given that we already use Google or cloudflare DNS, why not just make a competing nameservice and throw icann to the curb?
Browsers are just small part of the Internet , we already use lot of internet outside the browser in the form of apps , email etc .
Some people know and can use chose their DNS , many have to rely whatever dns their ISP or corporate IT provides . Very hard to move all that to common new standard
Browsers esp chrome/safari as it is modify the URL way more than I am comfortable with .
As bad as ICANN is I really don’t want Apple and google dictating how dns should run
What if people used a de facto whitelist of IP addresses locally mapped to names in, for example, /etc/hosts? This is how the internet worked in its earliest days, after all. I'm not saying this is a good idea, but it's interesting because it also serves the interest of Google and Facebook, so they might promote the technique. Since people will only be able to see content from a small portion of the internet (the part they have in their local file), and would give content hosted by the big players a huge advantage. It would also have the interesting effect of making "raw IP" addresses more visible, and special, easily remembered IPv4 addresses more valuable!
You lose so much without DNS where each site/service controls their own domain.
Consider modern hosting: Load balancers, CDNs, etc all configured and deployed on-demand, with the IPs changing as frequently as the provider likes.
Sure, Amazon lets you get static IPs.. but now I want to re-point traffic at another region because this region is failing, or down for maintenance... sorry, no, can't do that.
Anyone doing even moderate amount of hosting/whitelabelling doesn't have anywhere the IPs they need.
It's silly to talk about this as if we'd throw out dns entirely...
To address the original concern, all we'd have to do is throw out the ICANN root and replace it with a root controlled by a new NOTICANN organization. People were already talking about this when the .org debacle was still playing out.
It might even be healthy for the internet to do this every so often as a warning to those who would dare to try something like this again. They serve at our pleasure.
We're all just agreeing to use their root for convenience. As soon as it stops being convenient, we can literally just decide to give it to someone else.
What a lousy bribe! I’m sure some money changed hands as a signing bonus or something but if I’m running a scam I don’t want to have to pretend to be an executive afterwards!
The point is their victimlessness is contingent on the failure to go through.
Had it gone through, it would most certainly not be victimless. Furthermore, try getting off of a speeding ticket by telling the Judge it's a victimless crime because you didn't crash into anything this time.
I'm sure it will put them is a state of mirth and good spirits.
After following KnuJoN nothing would surprise me with ICANN unless it was good. It needs to die and everything it has touched moved somewhere else that cannot be manipulated like it is now and out of reach of the US.
If you read the article, it states that his name was not on the Ethos site, and it only inadvertently leaked into the public discourse because of some whois data. The news in this article is that Ethos has now formally updated its website to acknowledge him as co-CEO.
a guy tries to kill you and your family. the policr stop him. i guess we let him go free, since you don't see a problem. this just applirs to you though. cool?
The head of the US National Parks Service decides to sell off Yellowstone(1) to a property development company. Massive outrage ensues, and the guy quits to become CEO of that same Property Development Company.
While those two things in and of themselves might not be unlawful, it certainly sounds awful fishy. It might be worth investigating if there was some kind of breach of the law.
(1) I know NPS doesn't own Yellowstone. It's an analogy, roll with it.
Who said there was a problem? We had certain priors on corruption and contested the .org sale on the grounds that these guys were corrupt. We pushed for the California AG to investigate ICANN and they did on the grounds that these guys were corrupt. Turns out they were corrupt.
This is just the loop being closed. Our posterior probability of corruption rises only a very little bit because most people observing and participating kinda expected this.
She has an interesting factoid - those local governments with local newspapers have significantly and demonstrably lower costs of borrowing than those without - the conjecture being that over the years councils have been unable to get away with blatant corruption for fear of public humiliation- that the "watchdog" role of newspapers is not nice journalist ethics but actually measurable in tax dollars
ICANN is part of the Internet's local government and we need to find new ways to keep watchdogs alive.
[#] https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/slate-money/id87652388...