Dear Friend,

Nonprofit groups like the Red Cross, Feed the Children, and United Way are
on the front lines of the coronavirus, working to keep people healthy,
fed, and housed.

But on April 20, the websites of critical nonprofits like those—and Demand
Progress—could go dark.

On that date, the .org domain is poised to be sold off to a private-equity
firm to the tune of $1.1 billion.^1 If the deal goes through, the firm
could charge whatever it wants to nonprofits using .org sites, and it
could mean censorship of every nonprofit in the world.

[ [link removed] ]We’re kicking up a grassroots firestorm to stop the sale of the .org
domain to a private-equity firm. Will you chip in?

Currently, a nonprofit entity called the Public Interest Registry controls
all .org addresses. But the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers is poised to sell that nonprofit to equity firm Ethos Capital for
a pretty penny.

Selling the .org domain to a profit-driven firm is bad, bad news for any
nonprofit that depends on the internet to reach people—which is especially
urgent in a time of mass quarantine.

Once Ethos Capital owns the .org domain, it could censor domains to
satisfy corporate conglomerates or authoritarian regimes, as other domains
have done in the past. It could fail to maintain the domain properly,
causing critical nonprofit websites to malfunction.^2

And it could charge nonprofits outrageous fees to renew their web
addresses. Case in point: Our domain name, [ [link removed] ]DemandProgress.org, costs
about $10 per year. If Ethos Capital raised that to $10,000 or $100,000,
we wouldn’t be able to operate.

Thanks to public pressure, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers delayed the sale by two months, moving it from mid February to
April 20. But in the midst of a global public-health crisis, there’s a
danger that the pending sale could be forgotten. We can’t let that happen.

[ [link removed] ]We have one month to stop the sale of the .org domain to a
private-equity firm. Will you chip in?

Thanks for standing with us.

Robert Cruickshank,
Demand Progress

[ [link removed] ]DONATE

 

Sources:
1. Wired, "Who Should Control the Internet's .Org Addresses?," [ [link removed] ]February
4, 2020
2. Electronic Frontier Foundation, "ICANN Needs To Ask More Questions
About the Sale of .ORG," [ [link removed] ]January 17, 2020
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