The Org That Doles Out .Org Websites Just Sold Itself To a For-Profit Company (theverge.com)
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Today, the Public Interest Registry (PIR), which maintains the .org top-level domain, announced that it will be acquired by Ethos Capital, a private equity firm. From a report: This move will make PIR, previously a non-profit domain registry, officially part of a for-profit company -- which certainly seems at odds with what .org might represent to some. Originally, ".org" was an alternative to the ".com" that was earmarked for commercial entities, which lent itself to non-profit use. That's not all: On June 30th, ICANN, the non-profit that oversees all domain names on the internet, agreed to remove price caps on rates for .org domain names -- which were previously pretty cheap. Seems like something a for-profit company might want. Removing price caps wasn't exactly a popular idea when it was first proposed on March 18th. According to Review Signal, only six of the more than 3,000 public comments on the proposal were in favor of the change.
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FU Ethos Capital!
as a dot org owner (Score:3)
Damn it! Is there anything to stop them raising prices to the roof to maximize their profits? Do they even make money on already sold domain names?
Re:as a dot org owner (Score:4, Informative)
I pay $4 more per year for every .org than I do for each .com .
Why the hell aren't .org's $4/yr? We know smaller TLD's are net-profitable with even lower fees. PIR is empirically a total fail for the non-profit space.
Maybe they have beautiful offices, monster salaries, and golden benefit programs, like the Red Cross and other sketchy nonprofits? One could read their latest fiscal filing, but a bit of a shake-up is already more valuable and efficiency will likely become more important.
Re:as a dot org owner (Score:4, Funny)
Re:as a dot org owner (Score:4, Interesting)
I renewed my .org up through 2028 the day before they lifted the price caps, fearing something like this.
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I renewed my .org up through 2028 the day before they lifted the price caps, fearing something like this.
I renewed mine through 2029 five minutes ago.
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irony (Score:5, Insightful)
What a great irony.
Shame on Jon Nevett, Judy Song-Marshall, Paul Diaz, Brian Cimbolic, Laurie Tarpey, Anand Vora, Mary Cornwell, Joe Abley
For profit .orgs (Score:3)
I seems like there are few profit sites that have .org address. There is that old nerdy news site [slashdot.org], but maybe it was grandfathered in.
Re:For profit .orgs (Score:5, Informative)
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Or the the other way around [slashdot.com].
Fuck ICANNT (Score:3, Interesting)
This shitstorm has been a long time coming. We saw the writing on the wall when NTIA had its oversight of ICANN cancelled in 2015 [wikipedia.org]. The House voted to extend but the Senate killed the bill and left ICANN to the private sector where "free market" magic fixes all problems (guess which party controlled the Senate?).
Now we're fucked. Custom TLDs auctioned to the highest bidder. Unlimited registration charges for domains. ICANN has finally turned their sweet sweet domain monopoly from mountains of cash i
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Profit doesn't matter much (Score:3)
A company's for-profit status doesn't mean much.
Despite lots of myths about it, there is actually no requirement for a for-profit company to maximize profits, or seek revenue, or maximize shareholder value. Corporations are beholden only to their charters, which usually grant the executives a lot of freedom to handle the company however they like.
It's entirely possible that Ethos will run the .org registry in a charitable manner. Even if they're aiming for profit in the long run, operating public services gives companies some unique brand marketing and public goodwill. A few seconds of looking at their website and press releases has lots of words about "socially responsible" and "ethics", but I'm not ambitious enough to look further.
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You are looking at the wrong website. These guys are just the typical investment guys. The guy behind this has purchased several of the domain name holding companies, including Donuts, whose founder just happens to be the CEO of PIR. Welcome to the world of business in America.
This is why I don't understand (Score:2)
how anyone could be an anarcho-capitalist.
Psychopathy. (Score:3)
Plus masturbating to the feeling of having power and wealth.
Psychopaths like that, can put their profits over literally ALL the things.
Like that Exxon boss, that did an equivalent to the holocaust, and eradicated half the gulf coast's life, and then, in the big press speech, was not sorry that he did it, but merely that he was CAUGHT doing it.
Jesus fucking Christ. Imagine you're responsible for THAT much death? I'd off myself, and then still have a bad conscience for getting off so easily, if I had done tha
In tomorrow's news: Google acquires ICANN (Score:2)
How can a non-profit sell itself? (Score:3)
who gets the sales money? (Score:3)
When a non-profit gets sold, who gets the money?
I suppose a non-profit still has an owner, unlike a charity which is more "community" owned. But should an owner be allowed to start a "non-profit", use that status to grow the business, and then sell the business an "make bank"?
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It all depends on the state. This is Virginia. If you have a good enough lawyer you can do anything in Virginia.
Re:who gets the sales money? (Score:5, Informative)
When you form a non-profit, you have to spell out how any assets would be distributed if it is liquidated. Naturally, distributing to the owners isn't one of the options for a valid 501c(3). You have to spell out other charities (or types of charities) that would receive the funds.
Another ICANN machination (Score:5, Informative)
This is just another ICANN scheme. The former CEO of ICANN is now one of the guys behind the Ethos Capital purchase and the former ICANN guys are with this new Ethos Capital group. The PIR guys are also involved with Ethos. Unbelievable what ICANN still gets away with.
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Not the first time (Score:2)
People seem to forget that .org was originally administered by netsol, a for-profit, before ICANN even existed. $100/yr registrar fees were the norm, then. Whatever people are complaining about now, it's rather unlikely that things will ever go back to this level. There's enough registrar competition plus the whole liberalization of gTLDs these days - you no longer need to choose between just 3 options, depending on what kind of company you are.
Yeah, and Germany was once eradicating Jews... (Score:1)
What's your point? That that makes it OK if they now start eradicating the Jews just a little bit? ;)
Re:Not the first time (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason for a company to purchase the .org registry is to avoid competition. You can't charge $100/year for gTLDs these days because new registrants have choice. The solution? Buy .org, which has tens of millions of mostly very old well-established domains. The owners of all those websites don't want to lose their branding and site traffic by trying to migrate an established site to a new domain name -- especially if those owners are non-profit organizations which move slowly or small operators who can't afford a marketing campaign to establish the new brand/URL.
This is the perfect opportunity to raise prices by 500% or more, accept a perhaps 40% max drop in customer count (still leaving you with millions of customers), and rake in huge profits for at least a few years.
Ethos Capital (Score:2)
It says a lot that a company uses these words as a name.
Just like with online nicknames ... (Score:3)
The name is what they want to be ... or rather, look like to others, ... precisely because they are the opposite.
The only exception are super-anonymous accounts, where the name represents their secret. O:-)
good rules of thumb (Score:3)
Today, the Public Interest Registry (PIR), which maintains the .org top-level domain, announced that it will be acquired by Ethos Capital, a private equity firm.
Anything with 'Capital' in the name is probably a bit of a scam or rent seeker with little or no actual value added. Along the same lines anything described as 'private equity' is usually like locusts that eat value then move on leaving little behind. That the two often go together is no surprise.
MIGHT represent to SOME? Are you fuckin serious? (Score:2)
The whole and entire and ONLY point of .org was that it was for non-profit organizations.
That was and is the entire premise, for fuck's sake!
And YOU contributed to an attempt to murder that concept, by deliberately trying to shift the discussion to "might" and "some", as if there was some other pre-existing "view"?
Well I'm not sorry, but: Fuck off!
As far as the above is concerned, this was a straight-up illegal move. Breach of contract at the very least. Breach of internationat treaty, at worst.
Which means
Re:MIGHT represent to SOME? Are you fuckin serious (Score:4, Informative)
You realize you just posted that on a website which has been profiting from .org for over 20 years? I agree that .org ought to have been reserved for non-profit uses, but the cat is not only out of the bag but has lived a full life and died of old age by now.
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The whole and entire and ONLY point of .org was that it was for non-profit organizations.
Look up at your browsers URL bar. Notice that you're on slashdot.org and realize that .org has been meaningless for decades. Sorry if you weren't paying attention, but that's on you.
Also there are plenty of non-profit organizations that are bigger money sucking scams than any corporation could hope to be. There's one that has been reported to spend a paltry three cents of every dollar they take in [tampabay.com] on their stated mission and there are plenty of others that are terrible when it comes to getting donations