Don’t give your dot-org domain away to a private company

The Internet Society, a nonprofit to which the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) delegated the duty to host Public Interest Registry (PIR), announced a deal in Nov to sell PIR and its license to sell dot-org names for more than $1 billion. The buyer is Ethos Capital, a private-equity firm with investments in digital advertising, data brokering and other Internet services that has several former ICANN executives on its staff. If ICANN does not scuttle the deal, dot-org’s public-interest mission will inevitably be compromised by the buyer’s need to make a profit off its billion-dollar investment. The provision of dot-org domain names is a natural monopoly, regulated by ICANN, and it should not be sold into the hands of a profit-oriented owner.

We believe the ICANN Board of Directors will meet on Jan. 24 (though we can’t know for sure, since the board doesn't release such information anymore) to discuss whether to allow the deal. The dot-org community is entitled to a transparent process. This issue demands careful and deliberate consideration. We cannot afford, nor should we accept, a decision with such far-reaching implications to be made behind closed doors, void of any community input and without consideration of alternatives. I call on my successors at ICANN to honor the principles upon which the Internet and dot-org were founded and to commit to handling this matter in the open. This proposed transaction is murky, but nothing could be clearer than this principle: The future of a public-interest service — run by and serving nonprofits — is at stake.

[Esther Dyson served as the founding chair of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers from 1998 to 2000. She serves on the boards for a number of nonprofit organizations that use dot-org domain names and is executive founder of the nonprofit Wellville.]