As someone who hasn't read much on this, why is selling the .org registry to a for profit company bad? My understanding is that .com and others are held by for profit companies. What other issues were there?
As in previous discussions on this, some people seem to have some strange utopian misconceptions about .ORG.
Likewise whoever wrote this false statement on Wikipedia: "The domain [sic] was originally intended for non-profit entities, but this restriction was removed in August 2019."
In fact registration under .ORG has been unrestricted for most of its existence, even before it was taken over by PIR around 20 years ago.
The complaints about potential price rises are also totally bizarre when .ORG has been for years one of the most overpriced and price hiked extensions, significantly more expensive than .COM, and popular country code TLDs like .uk, .nl, .de.
.org has been the defacto home of non profits on the internet for decades. PIR being awarded the contract was in no small way because of their non profit nature. Pretending otherwise is being intentionally misleading.
.ORG has been more expensive than .COM lately because of price increases and the fact ICANN uncapped them was a major concern. Which is what sparked this whole saga, and opportunity for an uncapped monopoly which would disproportionately affect non profit users of the internet.
Please don't throw out accusations of being "intentionally misleading" just because you don't accept or understand 100% factual information that's been posted.
Fact: .ORG - like virtually every other extension - has been the home of anyone who wants to register it for decades (two), even prior to the establishment of PIR in 2003.
It was specifically intended for non-profits a generation ago, for a relatively brief 10-15 year period, during most of which relatively few people were online, relatively few websites existed and relatively few .ORGs were registered.
For the past 20 years, a period when millions of .ORGs have been registered, there has been nothing special about .ORG other than its grossly inflating price, which has been continuously jacked up for more than a decade.
Any non-profit genuinely concerned about watching the pennies would have shifted to a different extension years ago, but is it supposed to be a comfort for .ORG owners who don't want to give up a name (like myself), that the people screwing us over call themselves "not-for-profit"?
Who cares who's doing it, other than the people suddenly complaining because a for profit company might become involved in a money printing exercise.
Because it’s not just any TLD. It’s one of the very few special ones that has a very clearly defined origination and governance (well it did for the first decade or so at least).
Capitalism + the underpinnings of the Internet don’t exactly play well together (hence the need for clearly defined net neutrality codified by law). And arbitrarily raising prices on already existing domains registered by people and non-profits who bought in when there were rules in place about such prices is actually wrong.
Several board members and executives and ex-executives (we know some, but not all, because of the opaque corporate structure of the PE firm, and the _redacting_ of board minutes of ICANN) were behind the plan, and the equity firm, i.e. "We run ICANN as a non-profit, often elected to board positions. We've hatched a plan where we are going to take it private, run by a few of us, and make money from it. We can do this because we control the voting."
