And today we see the domain points directly to their for-profit company which they may not have paid a "fair" price. I'm sure it wasn't so clearly planned, but it certainly seems like a conflict of interest.
These types of domains can go for 6+ figures which seems like a drop in the bucket for Facebook.
EDIT: I was mistaken. As several pointed out - The initiative is not a non profit at all. The domain is more of an opportunistic move.
I'm still not sure how happy I would be if my company was acquired with the promise of "making my research search engine free to all" only to be shutdown down and used to help Facebook PR problems and market cap 4 years later.
I’m not sure 7 or 8 figures really matter to a company the size of Facebook.
I worked in a medium sized municipality in Denmark, and when your budget is 9 billion Danish KR, well let’s just say that you treat expenses differently in enterprise, and we were still a small player compared to our bigger partners on the state level who could sign contracts larger than our entire budget without batting an eye.
(I’m not English, maybe batting an eye is the wrong expression, if so sorry!)
I’m not saying it wasn’t planned, but it may just be a “happy” coincidence.
Yes, I have been wondering what that even means. So many idioms and phrases don't make sense (ignoring the fact that some are historically outdated which is the cause of some of them not making sense)
Well, then "opening your eyes" would hurt even more, right? But we still say that, and everybody understands.
When we say "batting an eye", "opening an eye", etc it's clear that we're talking about eye lids since the alternative would be very painful and make no sense.
Colloquially, when we refer to "eyes", we're almost always referring to the facial structure through which the eyeball is visible and almost never the literal eyeball itself.
I mean, when you say somebody has attractive eyes, surely it's understood that you're not referring to the spherical ball of goo itself, but rather their facial structure.
Maybe you would, but most of the “free market” real world out there wouldn’t. Or if they did you can be sure it was a tax write off as a loss at least.
If CZI were a non-profit they would have lost that status with this transaction. Per the IRS: "activities should not serve the private interests, or private benefit, of any individual or organization more than insubstantially."
They may have exploited the generally held assumption of being a public benefit organization to gain an advantage in the sale of the domain. For example if the Gates Foundation approached me about one of my domains and it later ended up in the hands of Microsoft, I'd be quite upset.
Acquiring a major asset with a 501c3's funds and then selling it to a director or officer below market value is very clearly private inurement and absolutely should result in their "charity" getting its status revoked.
Have you presented any evidence whatsoever? None? Ahh. Very illuminating!
Let's be crystal clear here. While theoretical options exist for a charity to have its status revoked, in practice the IRS has not been able to use this authority except in the most narrow circumstances.
For example, a director of a hospital chain buys property for below market value, and the minutes say - "property worth $100M, to scam the IRS we will sell it for $1M". That's as clear cut as you can get it. The problem was - the blowback political and public impact in shutting down a major university, a hospital chain, the AARP, the NYSE, the animal shelter etc was just too high for the IRS to exercise this "death penalty" option. In theory the rule existed, but in practice it wasn't usable.
This is an issue generally with nonprofits, even when they do wrong, it can be very hard to go after them for political and other reasons. Steven Miller, acting commissioner of the entire IRS, lost his job pointing out that many tea party groups were political in nature.
As a result, the IRS came to a solution, called intermediate sanctions under Section 4958. This is actually a great solution. The insider who cheated the public is the one who has to pay in contrast to your demands that an entire nonprofit be shut down and thousands lose their jobs, and all the harm closing a hospital might cause.
They still claim they can revoke status and they can (maybe). But in practice even in blatent cases, this is rare / very unlikely because you punish the public relying on the charity, the employees etc, and revoking the status does nothing to get the $ back from the person who got the sweetheart deal.
You can read about it on the IRS's website if you care to:
Separately, plenty of nonprofits sell major assets to related for profits or even turn into for-profits. And as I said, if you hire some attorney's and are not complete idiots, the IRS generally does not act, even when things get pretty close to the line.
I'm noticing more and more of a sort of "reddit" style of comment on HN. Very strong held, demanding, providing no evidence or speaking pretty clearly without any profession or other background in a field. It's eye rolling frankly. If anything, insider deals have unfortunately been increasing pretty dramatically in the last 5 years because IRS enforcement staffing for things like exempt entities, especially after tea party issues, has fallen through the floor. So right now we have horrible abuses occurring (syndicated conservation easements come to mind as a total scam in my book).
Remember, the IRS is something like a year behind even getting to their tax exempt mail. Check the notice here for period after which they may not have even looked at anything.
I have a two letter .org but in 25 years of using it as my primary domain name not one financial offer for it has turned out to be in good faith / not spam.
You're right of course, I wasn't trying to weigh them against each other. The .sh is for a pet project. I just added it to the comment because I happened to have that data point available from around the same time.
> The value of domains at these prices are like startups. They are bought, not sold and based entirely on if a company with money wants it badly enough.
Except for used cars, real estate, bonds and stocks... every other asset is "bought and not sold" these days.
Sellers of an asset which is not in the list above don't even have a platform to tell the world that they are selling that particular thing.
Since his wife is involved it still seems like corrupt self-dealing. What kind of public corporation owns a "Wife-Founder Initiative"? Are these monarchies?
You can't just do favors for family with the corporate treasury because you own some large part of the shares or even because you have voting control. Minority shareholders have rights. It isn't his piggybank.
Do you think a corporate treasury could be used to directly throw a CEO's daughter a wedding celebration?
"The duty of loyalty requires control persons to look to the interests of the company and its other owners and not to their personal interests. In general, they cannot use their positions of trust, confidence and inside knowledge to further their own private interests or approve an action that will provide them with a personal benefit (such as continued employment) that does not primarily benefit the company or its other owners."
Yes you can. If you own the shares, you can give them to someone, or to an LLC. That is what happened here.
You may be confusing spending corporate money on an initiative with the stock used to setup CZI (which was Zuckerberg's to do with as he wished).
BTW - in CA which is a community property state, this type of thing is not uncommon - all sorts of trusts, business etc take donated shares (sometimes unsold for tax reasons).
In terms of facebook - worth noting that Zuckerberg controls the voting power.
This came up when facebook "overpaid" for instragram by giving a small company of 13 employees $1B, which was unheard of at the time.
This was a major corporate governance scandal in some circles because the board wasn't consulted. So I read plenty of notes like yours! Outrage!
"CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the company’s largest acquisition ever without consulting his board of directors, according to an account in today’s Wall Street Journal."
I mention this because you would be amazed at what even companies without voting control in one person's hands will let an executive do if the executive claims it will advance the interests of the company.
Own race cars or teams, lease jets, start a research institute. All allowed in most cases even in other companies (and yes, spouses are often in the mix).
Anyways, there will be another case soon on this - Tesla shareholders (some) are suing claiming Elons plans / purchase of solar and doing the solar energy business was self dealing (Solar City was basically bust, but Elon wanted to move fast, knew and trusted many of the solar city folks, so bought them instead of some chinese company that might have been better on paper). I think the case is weak, but we will see.
The disclosure here that matters potentially is a warning to purchasers of Facebook shares:
"As a stockholder, even a controlling stockholder, Mr. Zuckerberg is entitled to vote his shares, and shares over which he has voting control as a result of voting agreements, in his own interests, which may not always be in the interests of our stockholders generally"
This metaverse thing is going to be another bet not everyone would go along with, and independent investors ALREADY voted Zuckerberg off as board chair - which made no difference as he could ignore their wishes.
Ok, the way I read it, CZI was a subsidiary. Still, they have to sell the name at fair market value if they are wholly separate companies, letting Google get a bid, etc. if they want to stay above board.
In the CZI case no - CZI can operate in the self interest of its members as an LLC if it is not a charity. Note that there is also the CZI Foundation (folks can get all this confused easily).
For private foundations self dealing with disqualified people (directors / officers etc) is prohibited - even if the transaction is "fair". This is because it can be hard to say what is fair.
But for public charities you can have self dealing transactions if they are "fair". This is where the problem is. By the time you have attorney's / appraisers etc involved - and you are paying all of them, there often is not someone in a position to challenge the results who cares about the transactions. And the IRS (which folks keep refering to here) is way WAY behind and this is bottom of their list stuff as they don't get much money from this (vs billions they could get elsewhere).
This is not the case in all states. The IRS is way behind, but places like California have very active charitable oversight. In California you can go to the AG's office, tell them of the deal. They then have 2 years to complain or you can ask them to approve the deal in advance. If you DON'T request approval or give notice the AG's office has 10 years to sue you if they think the deal was unfair.
I worked on meta.org for a year starting in 2017 soon after it was acquired by CZI. There was no sign that I saw that the domain was ever destined for Facebook.
Uninteresting as it may be, I take the reason for the shut down at face value. From what I saw, meta.org never did as well as was expected, and other competitive services were doing better, notably Semantic Scholar.
To be sure, the exact timing probably had something to do with FB’s announcement, and the shared ownership of the two organizations probably helped the domain sale go smoothly.
I really dislike their appropriation of the word meta, metaverse etc. Can we please have a public campaign to rename it to something like metaface or metabook or metaplasteradsinyoface ? It's a disgrace really. Especially they way that their keynotes failed to mention any of the hundreds of projects before them.
Sure, as soon as you raise enough money to combat their war chest, you can do whatever you want. Otherwise, your dislike bounces off of their teflon-like suit coated with "I don't care about you".
In this case, money is power and big tech has all the money. The field is tilted in their favor in an even more extreme manner than David v Goliath. No mere mortal could even afford to fight them via litigation. Fighting them legislatively is also Sisyphean as they can afford much better lobbyists.
but honestly you re describing a system that would be self-annihilating if one has no legal recourse from money. I don't think that's the case or else america would be a bad place for business
The rest of the world doesnt depend on US courts. Apple has lost trademark battles before.
> As part of this transition, the technology powering Meta will remain available to the community; we will support access to the Meta application and associated services, including the Digests and API, through March 31, 2022.
So, summing it up, Facebook has just been renamed to Meta, but until March 31, 2022 it will coexist with Meta[.org], which is led by Zuckerberg's wife, who has coincidentally decided to shut her project down a few days Meta was announced.
It seems they're effectively giving it to Meta.com for free, by shuttering the similarly named site. The reasoning makes sense, but it's too convenient. I'm sure they got advice from lawyers though. They have plenty.
Eventually meta.org will probably be sold to meta.com, but the price will be lower because it isn't in use.
I love how that is the default assumption when international companies often just screw the law outright and then try to obstruct both court decisions and their enforcement for decades.
So everyonene OK with saying sunsetting instead of shutting down now?.
Even though its clearly a corporate-speak?. Are we gonna be so easily manipulated?
This is the standard talk for any part of any program being shutdown (including internally among small engineering teams). Part of the difference is a "shutdown" can be a rough cut-off so people relying on the services don't have much help in the matter, sunsetting is a longer time period that allows you to transition out of using any services.
It being an actual programming term is a minus, nobody but computer needs knows what it means - trading one jargon for another jargon, just the one that you like.
I don't think it's corporate-speak. To my understanding the use of "sunset" as a verb comes from law where contracts and laws sometimes have "sunset clauses" ensuring they become defunct at a certain defined point in the future.
From there, "to sunset" something seems a fairly logical next step.
I'm wondering how Apple reacts as the owners of Metaio, who were one of the first companies and brands in the AR space starting in 2003 (aquired by Apple in 2015): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaio
Having the domain is one thing, having the rights to use the brand name another if it's the same niche (which is certainly the case here). Or do rights to the brand name expire once companies get aquired?
If they still hold the rights they could try to block their future main competitor in the AR space..
Heh. Ask Apple Records about that. Apple Inc, which publicly admits to being named after the record company, violated their agreement not to get into the music business, twice.
> In 1986, Apple Computer added MIDI and audio-recording capabilities to its computers, which included putting the advanced Ensoniq 5503 DOC sound chip from famous synthesizer maker Ensoniq into the Apple IIGS computer. In 1989, this led Apple Corps to sue again, claiming violation of the 1981 settlement agreement.[2] The outcome of this litigation effectively ended all forays at the time by Apple Computer into the multimedia field in parallel with the Amiga, and any future advanced built-in musical hardware in the Macintosh line.
This is ludicrous! Whatever harm the british Apple Corp had through a computer with a sound chip, this doesn't compare to the hinderance of the Mac.
Second:
> In 1991, another settlement involving payment of around $26.5 million to Apple Corps was reached.[4] This time, an Apple Computer employee named Jim Reekes had included a sampled system sound called Chimes to the Macintosh operating system
I don't agree that putting a system sound in System 7 is "going into the music business".
Interestingly, when Apple got into the music business they won:
> On 8 May 2006 the court ruled in favour of Apple Computer,[8] with Justice Edward Mann holding that "no breach of the trademark agreement [had] been demonstrated".[9][10]
Anyway, after that Apple Inc finally was able to buy Apple Corp out for allegedly $500 Million.
Whatever you think about trademark conflict, it did cost Apple Inc heavily.
Regularly check on meta, saw the announcement, and figured they'd change the name so they can transfer the .org and .ai names to the main company. Didn't expect them to just shutdown the team altogether. With their May/June updates (where they started to track and index beyond just papers) I thought they were actually onto something.
I've no doubt that this is all above-board and legal, but it's an insult to the intelligence of their readers to assert that this is for any reason other than Facebook's name change to Meta.
Meta (a great name) was a very promising startup a few years back in scholarly publishing. It had successfully analyzed millions of articles to help with discovery of research. It's a shame it is being shuttered but there are a lot of tools out there now doing similar things and in many cases much much more:
What a confusing article. Zuckerberg is the name I associate with Facebook. Meta is the rebranded name for the company.
Meta.org is a thing that was supposed to "...give researchers, patient communities, science societies, and research organizations more ways to discover the research they need." Being involved in research I have never once heard of this thing.
What connection does this have to the rebranding of Facebook? It's the elephant in the room that this article lacks the common sense or courage to address.
I would assume, if meta.com points to Facebook's corporate site, they will likely want to redirect meta.org to meta.com. They currently redirect facebook.org to facebook.com.
we made a tool to help researchers, but now the husband of the founder likes the name so we are shutting down so he can use it to avoid the negative publicity associated with his companies current name.
Presumably the owner of the Instagram handle was not interested in selling it. I suppose Zuckerberg could have seized it but that's a heck of a way to get your rebranding effort going.
Because it doesn't really matter. Its not like you can't use the word Apple anymore. You can even use it in your company name if you aren't making computer goods/services.
It is interesting on the first page of meta.org there is title "Covid-19: Trump's "distraction" by the 2020 election led to thousands of deaths, says pandemic response adviser."
Is that really a science?
And does it mean beginning of the war between Truth.Social and Meta (Facebook)?
Meta.org was effectively a database index of scholarly authors, citations and topics, as opposed to full text search. A more modern effort along these same lines would be Scholia https://scholia.toolforge.org/ based on the openly-available Wikidata knowledge graph.
I disagree. Alphabet has no clear connection to their current or future business plans. They don't even own alphabet.com. Meta on the other hand is the best possible metaverse name and was announced alongside a $10/billion year VR budget. It was a smart rebrand as Instagram and WhatsApp have just as many users as FB and Oculus (now Meta) may soon too.
Meta is more open ended than search.com. It could just as easily be a bar or art gallery as a $100 trillion dollar virtual empire. You are right that a great name can only take you so far, ultimately you have to have a competitive product.
Fortunately for Meta they already have a market leading VR product and a $10 billion annual budget to maintain that lead. As someone who has spent several thousand hours studying names and recently bought FB stock, I am delighted with the change.
>It could just as easily be a bar or art gallery as a $100 trillion dollar virtual empire.
"Meta" the bar or art gallery actually makes far more sense than "Meta" the tech company. Search would be a great name for a bar too. Generic industry terms make far more immediate sense when used outside the industry.
Meta just feels like a company in 1999 naming itself "Internet."
But, it doesn't matter because Facebook has the resources to make any bad idea stick.
>We did this by mapping biomedical knowledge to help researchers learn a new area or keep up-to-date in a field through precise and flexible feed design, personalized ranking, and surfacing the broadest array of research outputs.
This is it. Moneymaking in 21 century.
Surveillance capitalism in its finest.
Manufacturing consent with "science" and "there is no other option" narrative.
The next logical step after "collecting" users data and "normalizing" biometrical surveillance is Genetic Capitalism. 23andme is one of this "outlets" of future like Gattaka.
Uh meta is (was) just a version of Google Scholar with an emphasis on biomedical publications and better tools for scientists and clinicians to keep track of it all. Not sure that warrants your conspiratorial rant?
Conspiratorial rant? Please.
It is question of when, not how.
Last time I checked, tracking and surveillance are normalized. People like to participate in "technology experiments". After Snowden what is changed in general? Nothing special. You have listening devices like Alexa & Echo, one web browser - Chrome, Ring, and people love it. So it is very logical, moving forward genetic tech to create a new "market" and people to love it.:)
I empathize with your concern, so it may help to understand how modern science works: scientists like these tools and a key (and required) part or their job is to work with them.
Bibliometrics spans multiple scientific fields of research , eg, philosophy of science, and an important practical area that emerged are tools like Google scholar that are one of the key tools to how scientists work today.
A scientist might skim 50+ papers for the background needed into every 1 paper they the write (and many more abstracts), so STEM researchers spend a LOT of time in tools like Google Scholar. Likewise, part of the job of a scientist is to disseminate their results to other scientists, so part of the writing process is to carefully adhere to bibliography conventions explicitly so tools like these can help make your work more accessible.
People cringe at the crypto guys but what they're doing is nothing compared to what [ Hitler/Pol Pot/Joseph Stalin/Idi Amin/Muammar Gaddafi/Saddam Hussein/Ivan the Terrible ] did.
And today we see the domain points directly to their for-profit company which they may not have paid a "fair" price. I'm sure it wasn't so clearly planned, but it certainly seems like a conflict of interest.
These types of domains can go for 6+ figures which seems like a drop in the bucket for Facebook.
EDIT: I was mistaken. As several pointed out - The initiative is not a non profit at all. The domain is more of an opportunistic move.
I'm still not sure how happy I would be if my company was acquired with the promise of "making my research search engine free to all" only to be shutdown down and used to help Facebook PR problems and market cap 4 years later.