A private equity firm is poised to buy the entire .org domain for $1.1 billion.used classified intelligence to sell millions in stock while telling the public everything is fine.

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.

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, 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.

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

 

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

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