Meanwhile, the Internet's .org registry is sold to a private equity firm for $1.135 billion

[dalton99a]

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-12-12/dot-org-sale-outrage-internet-society-ethos-capital

The internet’s .org registry is snatched up by a private equity firm, provoking outrage
By Michael Hiltzik
Dec. 12, 2019

... Many in the nonprofit world were startled by the announcement on Nov. 13 that the .org registry had been sold to a private equity firm, Ethos Capital. The seller was the Internet Society, a nonprofit that plays an important role in creating and maintaining internet engineering standards, but has been mostly the guardian of the .org domain. The price, as was revealed more than two weeks later, was a stunning $1.135 billion.

Ethos didn’t even exist until earlier this year, and currently appears to have only two employees, including Erik Brooks, its founder.

Brooks listed his investment principles for me as “intellectual honesty, humility and respect and believing that prosperity can be built together.” But a week after the sale announcement, it emerged that the financial backers of Ethos included several firms with more conventional investment approaches, including funds associated with the families of H. Ross Perot, Mitt Romney and the Johnsons, owners of Fidelity Investments.

At stake are internet addresses ending in ".org” used by some 10 million organizations. The .org designation, or domain, is one of the oldest on the internet, along with .com (for commercial businesses), .edu (educational institutions), .gov (government agencies) and a handful of others.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, tweeted that “it would be a travesty” if the .org domain were no longer operated in the public interest. Also weighing in was Esther Dyson, the founding chairwoman of ICANN, who tweeted that she was “appalled” at what she called “the great .ORG heist.”

“The .org registry is a point of control on the internet,” says Mitch Stoltz, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has launched a campaign protesting the deal. “A private equity firm has an incentive to sell censorship as a service.”

[underpants]

1. Interesting

Thanks

[Turbineguy]

2. They'll loot the internet.

They'll figure out a way.