Who Should Control the Internet's .Org Addresses?

The organization managing .org addresses is Public Interest Registry (PIR). It’s one of several so-called top-level registrars managing the internet’s address book on behalf of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Now, PIR could be sold to a for-profit company that’s attracted protesters and the attention of California’s attorney general. Since its creation in 2002, PIR has been part of a nonprofit called The Internet Society. In Nov, the Internet Society announced plans to sell PIR to a newly formed private equity firm called Ethos Capital for $1.1 billion.".Org is the closest thing we have to a public interest setup for domain names on the internet," says University of Miami law professor Michael Froomkin, a frequent ICANN critic. Like many others, he worries that Ethos will put profit ahead of a mission to support nonprofits on the internet.

It's not clear what grounds ICANN could use to block the sale. Milton Mueller, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy who worked on the ICANN group that approved the original contract for PIR to manage the .org top-level domain, says that PIR’s contract with ICANN never specified that the .org domain had to be managed by a nonprofit. But he says that, as a requirement of its approval of the sale, ICANN could potentially put new provisions into the contract that would make PIR more accountable to the nonprofit community.