There has been an update on the future of the .ORG gTLD. As previously reported, the Internet Society (ISOC) struck a deal to sell Public Interest Registry (PIR), its domain managing registry, to Ethos Capital Investors, which automatically means that PIR will lose its status of a non-profit organization and become a business. The overwhelming majority of experts agree that the sale will result in a price hike for registration operations in the domain zone, which may affect many registrants because .ORG is primarily aimed at non-profits, including charities, who may not be able to afford any additional budget costs.
The value of the deal was recently disclosed. As expected, it carries a hefty price tag: Ethos Capital Investors will have to pay $1.13 billion for PIR. This sum raised more concerns among the public: obviously, the buyer will have to offset its expenses, and what other way to do this than increase domain fees? Internet Society CEO Andrew Sullivan released a statement in which he stressed that Ethos Capital Investors representatives had assured ISOC when closing the deal that the company was committed to keeping .ORG accessible and reasonably priced – that is, as a rule, its annual price increase must not exceed 10 percent. The current price of an .ORG domain name is approximately $10 per year, which means that a $1 rise will hardly be a serious burden for most registrants.
Sullivan also noted that opponents of the deal are mistaken to assume that .ORG was initially targeting non-profit organizations. He pointed out that in the earliest documents, dated 1994, the domain was described as “the miscellaneous TLD for organizations that didn't fit anywhere else” (unlike businesses for which .COM was originally created). However, according to Domain Incite, this is only partly true. Andrew Sullivan cited the Request for Comments (RFC) 1591, an internet standard written by Jon Postel, one of the main developers of most network protocols and standards describing the domain system management. Later, .ORG was repeatedly described as a domain specifically for non-profits both in the ICANN documents and those of the registries that managed the domain before PIR.
