Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

I really wish you would say outright what you're referring to, because to me right now your comment comes off as a bit of cryptic snark. Perhaps there were some comments along the lines you mean earlier, but scanning through the top 6 or 7 comments now, none of them appear to display the kind of arrogance you are implying.

That sort of arrogance is absolutely out of control in the tech industry and it's bizarre because I've never seen it at the remotely same level anywhere else.

Whenever I catch myself doing this, I try to reframe my concerns from statements (e.g. "the wording here doesn't exclude XYZ scenario...") into questions (e.g. "does anybody know if XYZ is possible with this wording?").

Then what happens is I realize I can go answer that question myself by doing some research, and either I discover my original concern is unwarranted OR I can now state "well they said this but if you look here it's actually XYZ in fact!", which is much more interesting.

As someone who works at Ecosia, thank you for this. I’m used to people being skeptical about Ecosia’s business model. But this is something else.

It’s an online board. You share your thoughts and challenge them against others responses, and learn more as a result. Is there a minimum requirement of corporate structure expertise required to comment?

Skepticism should be the default stance when consuming press releases.

In fact it’s better to be arrogant than to be “neutral” (agnostic) towards a press release.

Yeah, there is just too much here - i started down the path of trying to explain some of the legal issues and problems, and how people often think and deal with them (with pointers to some of the more interesting attempts, etc), since as you say, this is a thing that's been thought about, by many people, many times, but i feel like i'd end up writing 50 comments and so gave up.

It's not that we think we're the only one who thought about some implication, it's that that implication seems important and nobody has explicitly mentioned it yet, and maybe other people who have also though about this implication are trying to hide it because it's inconvenient.

I'm not sure how much that's creating outsized income for the founder...

There are between 98 (2022 annual report number) and 120 (ZoomInfo) and 133 (LinkedIn number). German filings are notoriously opaque vs Europe or UK.

So that's 637k EUR / 120 employees (although the payroll number jumps around between 450 and ~640 - weird, but who knows, # of employees shifting around or some paid quarterly or on commission?).

That's around 5,300 EUR / month per employee, or 64k / year. Germans notoriously don't work on the cheap - so unlikely that everyone else is working below market to line the CEO's pockets.

That said - they are still a profit seeking enterprise (another commenter noted that they aren't gGMBH - but also they set up a Feeder fund in January - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1999332/000199933224...)

Which presumably CAN be profit seeking.

So yeah - it doesn't invalidate their mission - if you're into that - but it's not 100% of what it says on the tin.

Also - monthly financial statements may be a German thing (sorry, I actually quite like Germany and Germans - just German company law is quite cumbersome) - but annual statements would give a clearer and more transparent picture.

I'm proud to say that I have worked for Ecosia, though ages ago. Christian, the CEO, is really one of the kindest and most honest people I have worked with. Also 100% committed to the cause, he walks the walk.

Yes I'm just some rando from the Internet, and things might have changed since I've left, but I have my faith in that guy.

No, but it aligns with the interests of the consumers better if you're actually targeting consumers (for the recurring revenue) rather than burning cash to get as many users as you can lock in, and then selling to someone who will milk them when they have no option.

FWIW: They have provisions in their bylaws (which can only be changed with the assent of their public interest asset-locked shareholder) that restrict salaries to a level that's commonplace in the industry specifically in Germany. In Germany, software engineers and managers tend to make a lot less than they do in the U.S., certainly not an amount of money that's a meaningful tradeoff for giving up rights to dividends and other distributions.

The CEO of Ecosia makes less than EUR 100k per year.

At least that was the case when I interviewed there for an interim CPO role.

I don't have any special information here, but I wanted to mention that's it's just as exhausting when people approach every single interaction assuming the worst possible intentions as the reverse. It's OK to not be cynical once in a while.

Depending on where in the world you are, paying yourself a high wage results in much higher taxes than paying profits in the form of dividends. These taxes may benefit society at large, which may well be in line with their goals.

Yes avoiding another Mozilla situation should be a high priority for anyone interested in this area in future.

"I really hope that we'll get a legal precedent for this actually being possible and durable in at least some countries, because that was the promise of OpenAI at some point as well."

Lawyer here - it is basically impossible to do what they (and others) want.

There are few (if any?) countries, where either provision would survive bankruptcy, for example.

They could always choose to dissolve rather than restructure, but if they did choose to restructure, i'm not aware of a country where the restrictions here would be enforced on the successor.

On top of this, in most (all?) countries, agreements not to file for bankruptcy are not enforceable ;)

So that's one mechanism.

In most countries, however, these provisions would be "easily" removable through shareholder + officer vote.

Some companies go pretty far down the path of trying to use trusts as shareholders and requirements on trustees and such to try to ensure such a thing never occurs.

You can also do hilarious (to me) things like create enough shareholders (let's say 7 billion), make shares non-transferrable, etc, so that even though theoretically it requires a vote, such a vote is practically impossible.

I also had a friend who explored whether you could legally require the place of voting to be like "the surface of the sun" or something that ensures voting can't occur, but unfortunately, you usually can't.

Companies really aren't meant for this kind of thing - not that there is something better, but what tehy are trying to do is pretty fundamentally opposed to how countries want companies to operate.

If it's really a big enough deal, the "correct" answer is to create a new corporate form, much like we created LLC's, etc (LLC's are less than 100 years old, so it's not impossible)

As I understand it registering as a Public Benefit Corporation assists with this and creates an explicit obligation for the directors to stick with the stated purpose in the constitution.

According to Wikipedia: "The benefit corporation legislation ensures that a director is required to consider other public benefits in addition to profit, preventing shareholders from using a drop in stock value as evidence for dismissal or a lawsuit against the corporation." ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation

Anyone have experience with Benefit corporations and more specifically what legal remedies are available if a corporation once setup as a benefit corporation fails to adhere to it's enhanced responsibilities. Or its directors for that matter.

OpenAI is legally bound to its non-profit goals, but the problem is that any law requires enforcement. If OpenAI acts against that public interest, is the Delaware attorney general really going to know and be able to prosecute the case?

I think what's arguably more important than theoretical legal rights is actually having stewards that care about the public benefit rather than leaving someone who would really love to funnel everything to his pocketbook if he could in charge and trusting him to respect the law.

Because ad revenue can be used for the non-profit? Ecosia's whole thing is that when you use it, you indirectly help plant trees - "the search engine that plants trees".

As someone who has attempted to escape from tech industry employment, the high status and salary are very alluring. If you leave your 6 figure tech job to live in a van by the river and plant trees you're a burnout loser with no money. If you start a search engine that gives money to people to plant trees you're a green entrepreneur with a health salary who can always pivot back to helping energy-guzzling Google AI identify targets for drones to bomb.

ad revenue goes to planting trees. What's confusing?

They're also now partnering with Qwant to build their own independent search engine index!

yea, I could't figure out what's the idea either.

You pay for search and email? What services do you use? May I ask you why, if you're wanting to go into it?

Not OP, but just checking in as a another happy Kagi + Fastmail user here!

apparently you can - see this thread.

It sounds like a gGmbH, but the Imprint (https://www.ecosia.org/imprint) still says Ecosia GmbH (-> For-Profit).

https://purpose-economy.org/en/companies/ gives an impression if you click through to the company descriptions, they tend to explain what is meant. Otherwise the term seems to be understood in English, there is a wikipedia article that seems correct to me. Or was that one missing the information you seek?

They just use Bing and Google Search https://ecosia.helpscoutdocs.com/article/579-search-results-...

I've been using it as my primary search engine for a couple of months. It's not great as a search engine. I find their locality of search to not be well-supported (e.g. the search "food near me" works good in google and not great in ecosia).

Ecosia doesn't emphasize recent events, news, or posts in search results as much as I'm used to --- but I haven't decided if this is good or bad.

It's not so bad that I've changed. But I do sometimes use a better search engine when I want better results.

Yes, I haven't used Qwant though. I'd say it's pretty equal to DuckDuckGo, maybe a little better after they started mixing in Google results. Generally speaking I do think that the Bing powered search engines does much better than Google, but Ecosia had a few specific searches where it's would fail me, that's gone now.

I just checked Ecosia, seems to be less censored at a very quick glance, at least in comparison to DDG and Google.

i have ecosia set as my default and use google or something if i really need it, but that rarely ever happens. its not the best search engine in the world or anything but it does the job perfectly fine and does some good in the world, so i'm happy to use it.

I think there is a lot of truth in this, but presented in a way that misses some nuance.

It's true that if your goal is to regenerate native forest, which it generally[+] should be where that's an option, then it's indeed true that you want to allow existing forest to regenerate as naturally as possible. The problem in these cases is either land use (land is used for forestry / agriculture / etc. so there's nowhere for new trees to grow) or over-grazing (either by livestock such as sheep or by high populations of wild herbivores such as deer). In those cases you need to solve the underlying problems rather than just counting the number of saplings in the ground (in a heavily browsed area planting may have the advantage that you tend to put in tree guards. Ideally one could instead install appropriate fencing around the entire area to reduce herbivore numbers below the problematic levels).

However you aren't always in that scenario. For example if you're in a landscape with few seed sources then natural regeneration might take an implausibly long time. An extreme example of that would be "regreen the desert" type projects where you need to bootstrap the conditions for tree growth by putting in a lot of trees in a short space of time, although those have a high failure rate. You might also be worried that natural regeneration is too slow in the face of changing climatic conditions, and want to plant trees right for the anticipated climate 100 years hence (although that itself is likely to be controversial).

And of course frequently in the real world tree-planting projects have goals totally unrelated to climate change e.g. just forestry, and as such one shouldn't expect those things to be especially good for the climate, or at all good for biodiversity.

Anyway, I like the idea of companies dedicating part of their revenue to tackling severe global problems like climate change. But I tend to agree that Ecosia's continued focus on tree planting as their headline activity makes them look a bit naive to the audience that is likely to be most receptive to changing products specifically for environmental reasons. Hopefully some of the other project types they're moving into look better in the details than just tree planting.

[+] But not always of course. Converting peat bog to woodland, for example, is going to reduce its effectiveness as a carbon store, and likely reduce biodiversity as well.

As a forest land owner, trees absolutely need planting. Then they need to be protected from humans and deer and invasive species and disease.

Many trees fail to grow. Most people would be astounded at how many trees don't make it.

I am pretty sure "planting trees" is just an oversimplification and goes beyond just planting if they are actually "helping trees".

Yeah, I've got similar worries since there has been plenty of greenwashing that has happened with planting trees. I'd be sad but also not surprised if some of those trees being planted are sitka spruce wood plantations or so.

This is my main problem with Ecosia as well. I don't believe planting trees is really a good option to help the climate and I have zero trust in tracking progress of those projects in a lot of countries. I would much rather them e.g. investing in solar or sponsoring open source projects.