[kictanet] Inside the Billion-Dollar Battle Over .Org

[Mwendwa Kivuva]

By New York Times.


Two months ago, Ethos Capital, a private equity firm, announced that it
planned to buy the rights to a tract of internet real estate for more than
$1 billion.

But it wasn’t just any piece of digital property. It was dot-org, the cyber
neighborhood that is home to big nonprofits and nongovernmental
organizations like the United Nations (un.org <https://www.un.org/>) and
NPR (npr.org <https://www.npr.org/>), and to little ones like neighborhood
clubs.

The deal was met with a fierce backlash. Critics argued that a less
commercial corner of the internet should not be controlled by a
profit-driven private equity firm, as a matter of both principle and
practice. Online petitions <https://savedotorg.org/> and letters of concern
came from hundreds of organizations, thousands of individuals and four
Democrats
<https://www.keypointsabout.org/blog/the-internet-society-pir-and-ethos-respond-to-congressional-letter>
in
Congress, including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Rarely has the acronym-strewn realm of internet addresses — so-called
domain names — stirred such passion.


Read on
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/technology/dot-org-private-equity-battle.html


Mwendwa Kivuva,




Now, a group of respected internet pioneers and nonprofit leaders is
offering an alternative to Ethos Capital’s bid: a nonprofit cooperative
corporation. The incorporation papers for the new entity, the Cooperative
Corporation of .ORG Registrants, were filed this week in California.

The goal of the group is not only to persuade the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees internet domain names, to stop
the sale. It is also to persuade ICANN to hand it the management of dot-org
instead.

“This is a better alternative,” said Esther Dyson, who served as the first
chair of ICANN, from 1998 to 2000, and is one of seven directors of the new
cooperative. “If you’re owned by private equity, your incentive is to make
a profit. Our incentive is to serve and protect nonprofits and the
public.”
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