Filed under: Aasw,chain-gang,fly-by-wire,Not so popular,unfinished draft
A sidebar, while listening to public arguments in favor of the .org heist by those who would profit from it
1. Primary markers of cancer in organisms:
- [Cell] growth and division without signals enouraging this
- Continuous growth and division despite all contrary signals
- Subversion or avoidance of programmed cell death, sugh as unlimited division
- Promotion of local blood vessel construction [infrastructure for faster growth]
- Invasion of other [tissues], formation of metastases[26]
The progression from normal cells, to cells that can form a detectable mass, to outright cancer, is called malignant progression.
2. 90% margins
Industries with 90% or higher profit margins (often: marginal profit margins, where there was some up-front cost doubling as barrier to entry and hand-waving excuse for continuous rent increases) are all deeply inefficient and non-competitive. That should be what you (or any economist) would suspect, yet people continue to say things like “I’m not actually against the 95 percent profit margins or even caps if the market for broadband were competitive. Unfortunately…”
The rise of these industries eat collective surplus and productivity, and funnel the fruits of new technology into the hands of organizations that think this sort of resource allocation is healthy. This gives them ample resources to expand their work, into new markets and topics, and to train new industries to adopt their techniques. 90% margins become 99%, until all available shared resources are captured by this network. In other words: cancer.
Here is the head of ISOC, convincing himself and others that a well-meaning private equity firm will not unreasonably raise rates for use of their namespace monopoly. “Given registries must announce price increases for renewal 6 months in advance, and domains can be registered at current prices for up to 10 years, any operator seeking to increase prices dramatically would certainly lose customers without producing any increased revenue.”
This is not so. Renewal rates are quite price-inelastic (it costs > 100x the annual registration cost to change one’s domain on all sites and materials, and breaks existing links). Incentivizing people to hurry up and register for 10 years at once would produce a surge of revenue, not a decline. New domains can have prices raised with no warning, which would simply raise new domain rates for TLDs across the industry: likely bringing in more revenue as well as support from other registries (.org / .net /.com are among the few TLDs that can unilaterally affect industry rates)