Ethos Capital acquires .org for $1.135 billion.
The biggest shock to many people in the domain industry in 2019 was Ethos Capital acquiring the .org registry contract from Internet Society for $1.135 billion.
The deal was announced soon after ICANN removed price caps on .org domains, meaning that Ethos can charge whatever it wants when people register or renew a .org domain.
Non-profits, including some of Internet Society’s own chapters, are obviously upset about this. So are registrars and registrants.
The deal was put in motion by former ICANN Fadi Chehadé. He left ICANN and joined private equity company Abry Partners as an advisor. He advised the company on its acquisition of Donuts. On the Abry side, partner Erik Brooks worked on the Donuts deal and became a board member. Then Fadi advised Brooks on acquiring .org, which Brooks is running through Ethos.
That the former ICANN CEO is now profiting from the industry he oversaw (and some of the things he put in place) leaves a bad taste in many peoples’ mouths.
For its part, Ethos has said what it needs to say to get the deal done. It will maintain reasonable prices. It will work with the community on their concerns about censorship. It plans to hold this investment for a long time.
But, so far, none of this is contractual. Once ICANN gives the green light, Ethos can do whatever it wants. It can flip the registry in a year for more money. It can raise prices as high as it wants to.
ICANN has postponed its approval, but I expect this deal to ultimately go through.
It won’t be the end of the world as long as Ethos and subsequent owners keeps prices in check. If it doesn’t, the stability of the DNS will be impacted.
Bad news for .org. Something smells.
If you compare low cost, high volume cctlds with the gtlds, then it’s clear the only way to keep the prices in check is to create a system where there is no incentive to increase the prices.
Such as when the registrars (or universities, unions, internet providers, etc) can vote on the policies of the non-profit registry, but have no financial interest in the registry themselves besides the fees they have to pay for each domain.
ICANN works in a similar manner. The existing registries are stakeholders and thus have to pay very low fees (18 cents per domain or something).
But clients of the gtld registries aren’t stakeholders. There are no opposing interests, as they only have a parent company demanding they maximize their profits. So they charge registrars whatever they want.
Ethos is scum if it inflates the prices.
ICANN is owned by the Government of the United States of America since 1998
ICANN is a private INTERNET company.
ICANN is a business that moves every year since its foundation, hundreds of billions of US dollars
You have not yet realized that an ORG extension has had such a great impact, yesterday discovering that high-level economic Domainers demolish the name of capitalists use their own name servers with ORG and are involved in high-level domain registrars and ETHOS CAPITAL have to do with these domain registrars agreements through ICANN.
In 1999 Wipo and ICANN with personnel from the US Commercial Department had meetings to prepare the more than 500 new extensions, the work was to preserve the Trademarks and Intellectual Property of large companies with a COM extension.
Everything is an assembly of unsuspected dimensions.
Read the content of this link and know the truths of ICANN
https://www.cairn.info/revue-francaise-d-etudes-americaines-2012-4-page-29.htm#