*democracy.com* Domain to Go On Sale, Who Will Be the New Owner?
The Guardian, Oct. 16. 2019. Excerpts/Ed. What is democracy worth? Later this month a broadly philosophical question will be put to a material test. On 25 October at 5pm, the web domain democracy.com goes up for auction. The site is currently administered by veteran social activist Talmage Cooley. The advertised price, according to Heritage Auctions, is $300,000 or higher.
The sale is being run as a sealed-bid auction, in which each potential buyer is blind to what others have offered. It’s a gamble, like democracy itself, and it’s possible that there will be no buyers at all. “This is an aspirational piece of real estate that represents one of the core values on the planet, and it’s worth what somebody thinks they can do to leverage that name,” Cooley told the Guardian.
Domain names are not what they used to be and values have fallen since domain suffixes were expanded beyond dot com and dot org. But .com domains attached to prestige words are still going for big sums. In June, Voice.com sold for $30m..
Cooley is stakeholder but not the owner of the site, whom he declined to name. He established it in 2013 as an altruistic, for-profit business to democratize access to political communication and counter the role of money in politics. “The idea was to make it easy for anyone who wants to run for office to start a political or civic group" ..
Cooley said he was “broken-hearted” when the decision came to put the business up for sale. He estimates it would cost $2m to recode the site into a subscription-based model – a change, he says, the site’s users indicate they’d accept. Over the past months he’s been doing the calculations. There are 2,500 billionaires on the planet, 20,000 people worth $400m or more. “We just need to find one that is passionate enough about democracy to say, ‘Hey, I bought a $10m house in the South of France, for $10m I could certainly buy democracy.com.’ ”
“I think the buyer is a high net worth individual or organization in a country where issues of democracy are important and active,” Cooley said, noting that the site registered traffic form India when news of the auction was first publicized. “Maybe somebody who wants to do good and have some status to go along with it.”
Cooley has tried reaching out to the obvious candidates...More...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/17/who-will-be-the-new-owner-of-democracycom-domain-to-go-on-sale
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy
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