.Org: Sold to the highest bidder
A symbol of “the old dream of an internet run in the public interest” has been sold, said Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times. The private equity firm Ethos Capital has agreed to pay the Internet Society $1.135 billion for the .org domain registry, which supposedly exists for nonprofit organizations. The Internet Society is a nonprofit that plays a big role in managing and safeguarding internet standards and has been controlling the .org registry since 2002. It says it will use the proceeds of this sale as an endowment to fund its other internet work. Some 10 million organizations—such as the Red Cross, the Girl Scouts, and United Way—use a .org domain as “a badge of honor of noncommercial activity” and their intent to do good. The fear nonprofits have now is that Ethos Capital “will jack up” the $10 annual fee or, worse, sell the right to censor their sites to third parties. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, called the sale “a travesty.”
Such indignation is misplaced, said Sam Wineburg and Nadav Ziv in The New York Times. Contrary to popular belief, organizations and companies can get a .org domain without showing that they have an altruistic or nonprofit mission; all that’s required is that they “fill out an online form and provide payment.” In fact, many groups use the suffix as a marketing tool to promote a “false association with credibility” and disguise an agenda that is “backed by corporate and political interests.” Craigslist, one of the world’s largest advertising sites, is a .org. Many hate groups use .org for their websites. The suffix “symbolizes neither quality nor trustworthiness.”
Still, there’s a big backlash against this sale, said Richard Waters in FT.com. Nonprofit advocacy groups are “up in arms” and are calling on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees internet addresses, to block it. There’s still time to “save the .org and all it symbolizes,” said Marc Rotenberg in TheHill.com. When I helped the Internet Society take over the registry in 2002, “we believed there should be a space of the internet to promote noncommercial use.” Since then, Facebook and Google have only hastened the internet’s transformation into a virtual mall. Saving .org “may be the last opportunity to preserve the internet that many of us still believe in.”