{"id":4295,"date":"2019-11-29T22:22:25","date_gmt":"2019-11-30T02:22:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/?p=4295"},"modified":"2023-06-30T22:25:54","modified_gmt":"2023-07-01T02:25:54","slug":"cancer-as-dogma-five-unrestricted-growth-hacks-sure-to-bloat-your-host-dns-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2019\/11\/29\/cancer-as-dogma-five-unrestricted-growth-hacks-sure-to-bloat-your-host-dns-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Cancer as dogma \/ five unrestricted growth hacks sure to bloat your host (DNS Edition)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><small><em>A sidebar, while listening to public arguments in favor of <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2019\/11\/23\/a-tale-of-icann-and-regulatory-capture-the-dot-org-heist\/\">the .org heist<\/a>\u00a0by those who would profit from it<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n<h2>1. Primary markers of cancer in organisms:<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><a title=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cell_growth\">[Cell] growth and division<\/a>\u00a0without signals enouraging this<\/li>\n<li>Continuous growth and division despite all contrary signals<\/li>\n<li>Subversion or avoidance of\u00a0<a title=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Apoptosis\">programmed cell death<\/a>, sugh as <a title=\"Biological immortality\" href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Biological_immortality\">unlimited division<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Promotion of local\u00a0<a title=\"Angiogenesis\" href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Angiogenesis\">blood vessel construction<\/a>\u00a0[infrastructure for faster growth]<\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Invasion (cancer)\" href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Invasion_(cancer)\">Invasion<\/a>\u00a0of other [tissues], formation of\u00a0<a title=\"Metastasis\" href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Metastasis\">metastases<\/a><sup id=\"cite_ref-Han2000_26-1\" class=\"reference\"><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cancer#cite_note-Han2000-26\">[26]<\/a><\/sup><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The progression from normal cells, to cells that can form a detectable mass, to outright cancer, is called\u00a0<strong>malignant progression<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<h2>2. 90% margins<\/h2>\n<p>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.\u00a0 That should be what you (or any economist) would suspect, yet people continue to say things like &#8220;<em>I\u2019m not actually against the 95 percent profit margins or even caps if the market for broadband were competitive. <a href=\"https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2013\/02\/20\/say-it-with-me-now-data-caps-are-about-profits-not-recovering-fixed-costs\/\">Unfortunately<\/a>&#8230;<\/em>&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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. &#8220;<em>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 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.keypointsabout.org\/blog\/a-message-from-internet-society-ceo-andrew-sullivan-regarding-saveorg-petition\">would certainly<\/a> lose customers without producing any increased revenue.<\/em>&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This is not so.\u00a0 Renewal rates are quite price-inelastic (it costs &gt; 100x the annual registration cost to change one&#8217;s domain on all sites and materials, and breaks existing links).\u00a0 Incentivizing people to hurry up and register for 10 years at once would produce a surge of revenue, not a decline.\u00a0 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)<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>It is <em>conceivable<\/em> that Sullivan believes it to be true, but there is no reason to think so. These dynamics are well modeled and historical examples are common.\u00a0 So the prospect of outsized margins also clearly inspires falseness and disingenuous engagement, leading to tremendous wasted time all around, in the hopes of 1 time out of 10 getting an unparalleled payout<\/p>\n<h2>3. Past parallels<\/h2>\n<div dir=\"auto\">This feels like a close-to-home example of how accepting locally unregulated growth leads to metastasis, malignancy, and deformity or death of civil bodies and biomes &#8212; without any individual cell being &#8216;bad&#8217;, indeed without most of the participating cells having consciousness or ethos at all.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\"><\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">We have allowed this for decades in communications and technology, and it has spread from text messaging, to broadband and cable provision, to namespaces themselves.\u00a0 Where simple businesses start generating 90% margins, and vascularizing their own financial, political, and legal infrastructure, we should recognize that normal balance has broken down, and start evaluating their morbidity to society.\u00a0 But instead we tend to say things like &#8220;<em>I would be fine with 90% or even 99% margins if this were done ethically. Unfortunately&#8230;<\/em>&#8221; when in fact no malignant growth is healthy; even locally the supercharged growth is only healthy for short periods and limited subsets of the locale, and this is visible on taking even the smallest step back to gain perspective.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\"><\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\"><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A sidebar, while listening to public arguments in favor of the .org heist\u00a0by those who would profit from it 1. Primary markers of cancer in organisms: [Cell] growth and division\u00a0without signals enouraging this Continuous growth and division despite all contrary signals Subversion or avoidance of\u00a0programmed cell death, sugh as unlimited division Promotion of local\u00a0blood vessel [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[78827,210,216,218,78851],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aasw","category-chain-gang","category-fly-by-wire","category-not-so-popular","category-unfinished-draft"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-17h","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4295"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4614,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4295\/revisions\/4614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}