How To Get A Org Domain

The Shaky Future of .org Domains

The sale of the nonprofit domains to a private equity firm threatens the integrity of the open internet. ICANN should investigate.

Jan. 27, 2020

Credit... Illustration by Selman Design; Photograph by Richard Newstead/Getty Images

Josephine Wolff

Dr. Wolff is an assistant professor at Tufts University and a contributing opinion writer.

Online commerce and for-profit activity have largely shaped the internet over the past 25 years, but a few important corners of the internet have remained staunchly nonprofit, retaining some of the internet's early charm and resistance to commercial interests. One of those corners is the .org top-level domain, the go-to domain for nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations looking to establish an affordable and reputable online presence.

Domain names for websites, like nytimes.com or un.org or tufts.edu, are the key real estate of the internet. Without a domain, it is next to impossible to have an online presence; there are now more than 350 million domain names registered worldwide. Those domain names are sold to customers by registrars (like GoDaddy) which partner with registries (like Verisign, which manages the .com top-level domain or all the domain names ending in .com). Domain names are big business — there's a lot of money at stake when divvying them up among all the registrars and registries.

At the top of the domain name hierarchy sits the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a nonprofit that designates which registries control which top-level domains and helps resolve disputes around domain ownership. ICANN has a unique governance structure: It is run by a board of directors that incorporates feedback from different advisory committees composed of government officials, industry representatives and civil society members. It is a model that ICANN refers to as "multistakeholder" governance based on the premise "that all users of the internet deserve a say in how it is run."

Since 2002, domains ending in .org have been purchased through an agency called the Public Interest Registry, which is owned by the Internet Society, a well-regarded nonprofit working to expand access to the internet across the world. But, in November, the Internet Society announced it was planning to sell the Public Interest Registry — along with control of all the .org domains — for $1.1 billion to a recently formed private equity company called Ethos Capital with close ties to former leaders of the internet governance community.

The proposed sale has sparked outrage from many people at prominent internet nonprofits, including the Wikimedia Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and rightly so. One worry is that Ethos, in an attempt to make the .org top-level domain as profitable as possible, will rapidly raise prices for its customers. For years, a 2013 contract capped the cost of an .org domain at $8.25 with an allowed increase of no more than 10 percent a year — a restriction that kept .org domains affordable. Today, a .org domain costs $9.93 a year.

But in June 2019, ICANN approved a new contract with the Public Interest Registry eliminating the price cap, even though thousands of people voiced opposition to that decision during a period of public comment. Ethos has said it will continue to raise prices for .org domains by no more than 10 percent per year, but it's not clear how those promises will be enforced, or by whom, and the timing of the sale — following immediately on the elimination of the price cap — has contributed to some of the skepticism surrounding the deal.

Another fear is that Ethos will cave to pressure from foreign governments about which organizations should and should not be allowed to own .org domains. Currently, .org is an open domain so anyone is allowed to register a .org domain, and there are more than 10 million of them registered worldwide. But the Public Internet Registry has the authority to suspend domain names for illegal activity, and one of the concerns raised in a public letter opposing the sale is the potential for governments to target NGOs by accusing them of illegal activity and pressuring the Public Internet Registry to take down their domains. Just last month, for instance, the Chinese government sanctioned five United States-headquartered NGOs for their involvement in the protests in Hong Kong; all five of those NGOs have .org domains.

There are other reasons to be worried about the sale. The circumstances of the deal between Ethos and the Internet Society seem at odds with the multistakeholder model of cooperative, transparent governance that the internet community has worked so hard to develop. Beyond just threatening the integrity of the .org top-level domain, the sale of the Public Interest Registry without any further community involvement or oversight from ICANN threatens the integrity of that governance model and the public's trust that the organizations responsible for running the internet have their best interests at heart.

ICANN has the ability to block the deal, as well as to question the involved parties about how they would manage the .org domain and protect customers, but in a statement to The Financial Times, ICANN said it "does not have authority over the proposed acquisition," a claim that is patently false. ICANN itself, in a blog post last month, acknowledged that "PIR must obtain ICANN's prior approval before any transaction that would result in a change of control of the registry operator" and pledged to take "its responsibility in evaluating this proposed transaction very seriously." But while ICANN says it has asked PIR for more information about the sale, it has told the public very little about those inquiries or the ensuing responses, and it has not solicited any public comments on the transaction.

ICANN's reasoning seems to be that since the sale does not threaten the security, reliability or stability of the .org domain, it is not its place to intervene. But ICANN regularly makes decisions about domain ownership that are unrelated to issues of security and stability — just last year, for instance, it granted Amazon ownership of the .amazon top-level domain over the objections of several South American countries. That decision resolved a seven-year-long dispute, dating to 2011 when ICANN decided to open up more top-level domains beyond the standard ones like .com, .org and .gov. ICANN received nearly 2,000 applications in 2012 for new top-level domains like .google, .love, .microsoft and .wine, and for each application the applicant had to pay ICANN $185,000, in addition to ongoing fees for maintaining the domains.

This brought a massive influx of cash for ICANN that helped fund its subsequent international expansion and the process of severing its final ties with the United States government in 2016. The point of severing those ties was to engender greater international trust in ICANN and, by extension, the system of global internet governance that it oversees. But instead, ICANN seems at risk of being captured by commercial interests — a risk that first became apparent with the lucrative 2012 expansion of the top-level domains that benefited no one besides ICANN. Odds are that seven years later you've still never interacted with a website ending in one of those domains and, if you have, it was probably only a means of delivering spam or malware to your computer.

Today, ICANN is in a very delicate position because it derives its authority not from a contract with the United States but instead from its ability to balance the interests of all its various stakeholders from government officials to civil society groups and for-profit companies and maintaining credibility with the worldwide community. It's easy to see why it is not eager to jump into the fray and interfere with, or even question, the Ethos deal for fear of drawing criticism. But the real risk to ICANN is in failing to protect the remaining corners of the internet preserved for public good and letting its for-profit stakeholders become the dominant voice in its decision-making processes. Just as ICANN's former relationship with the United States government proved problematic for it in trying to sustain a credible role in global governance activities, so will a too-close relationship with the for-profit sector at the expense of individual internet users.

ICANN should publicly investigate this sale so that all of its stakeholders can see exactly which safeguards will be put in place to protect .org customers. And if those safeguards are not sufficient or enforceable, if they meet with widespread disapproval and dissatisfaction from .org customers and registrars, then ICANN should make good on its promise to provide consensus-based multistakeholder governance and, if necessary, block the deal from going through. ICANN cannot and should not be hiding from controversial domain disputes. It is the only entity with authority over these decisions, and its willingness to exercise that power will ultimately be good not just for the internet and internet users but also for ICANN itself.