Humour evaporates when it has to be explained so I apologise to anyone not on the spectrum. The web was provided for free, and subsequent attempts to commercialise it or monetise it are so unjust that they should be resisted by all possible methods.
It's one of those Internet things. A bit like the decision by some to not capitalise the 'I'. But capitalising various bits of the 'net has always been a thing. RFCs might be public domain, but there can be patents behind them. One of the early 'great debates' was around that subject, which then spawned the whole open source movement to try and formalise public domain code. And of course the great SCO v IBM/Novell battle around *nix. It's one of those interesting policy debates, ie Universities provided a lot of the early toolset, eg BSD being Berkley's Unix and spawned a number of different licences. Which has been an interesting use of copyright, ie to permit free distribution rather than restrict it.
But another bit of history was the decision to take .org from Verisign, or further back, Network Solutions who were paid by DISA/NSF to run the registry. And customers were charged $100/domain. Then came 'de-regulation', and handing responsibility to ICANN and a big reduction in domain name registration charges, helping spawn the registrar business.. And then Verisign bought NetSol, upset plenty of people, .org taken away and put out to a tender that I helped bid on for a losing client.. And part of that reason was the idea that .org should be non-profit.
But such is the wild world of the 'net. Bits have been commercial pretty much since inception, and no doubt the mob behind the Ethos bid looked at how well Verisign did and wanted a slice of that pie. But the way it's happened stinks to high heaven.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
