Foundation Capital

We tried this at Daltic and I know Standard Treasury (YC) tried this as well.

Buying a small bank with a healthy federal charter is definitely the way to go over trying to start a new charter (FDIC hasn't given out a new charter in years and even if they do, de novo status is very cumbersome). The real challenge is getting around the Bank Holding Company Act with respect to raising capital. Basically, if any entity has a significant stake in a US bank (5-10% can trigger this) they are subject to BHCA which includes scrutiny from federal regulators (Plural!) over your books and a legal duty to bail the bank out. Our idea around this, consulting with a top financial attorney and consulting firm, was to get a consortium of wealthy individuals who would not exceed the limits individually and wouldn't be "acting in concert" with each other (which also triggers BHCA).

But even after this, any major shift in the bank's operations, including a re-architecture of technology is subject to regulatory oversight, similar to de novo status. Also, not to mention background checks from not only the FBI but also the CIA. Replacing management (which you probably want to do) is also a major change in bank operations. You also need a CEO who the regulators approve, and has previous CEO-level experience at another charter. We also had someone like this lined up.

We got pretty far in this process, but decided to put our efforts elsewhere. Seems ST did as well. Curious if you've found the same…

> ...and child safety advocates who promote DNS-based filtering solutions.

DoH doesn't prevent filtering. Sure, it doesn't respect OS or Network-enforced settings, but that's kind of the whole point of its existence.

> ...DNS for centralised network management.

DoT (and DNSCrypt?) would arguably be the better alternatives in these cases.

So, use-cases are absolutely being addressed in DNS' case at the very least.

> I really wonder if the IETF's contribution is political: DoH on it's own is highly so...

I think DoH and ESNI are exactly the kind of response expected from a tech firm like Mozilla: Fight for its users and invest in the right technology that helps keep the Internet global despite the many efforts to dismantle it, not just by governments but by big tech in equal measure. In fact it is big tech that sells "cyber security" solutions to these governments in the first place: A trillion dollar market opportunity [0].

Look no further than ITU to see how anti-user, pro-corporate, pro-government politically-influenced technology standards can be [1]. Things might take a steep dive given Google's [2] and Facebook's [3] recent inroads in the Communications industry. This pro-user political engagement from Mozilla et al is more than welcome, in my opinion.

[0] https://foundationcapital.com/cybersecurity-the-next-trillion-dollar-market/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23416269

[2] https://www.opennetworking.org/

[3] https://telecominfraproject.com/