Small correction: there is no requirement to give 6-month notice of price increases to registrants, only to registrars. It’s up to registrar to pass that information along to registrants or not, at its discretion.

It’s understandable that you’d want to increase the prices to cover the cost of scaling, but letting a corporation so far removed from all of the individual owners of .org domains price a domain however it sees fit with little recourse from the .org domain owners is a recipe for disaster. If that corporation continues to grow it’s costs with all these extra programs and hiring, there’s no cost ceiling and it’s inevitable that domain prices will climb, pushing out so many legitimate people. And considering this shift is contrary to what anyone who owns a .org domain wants (https://savedotorg.org/), I have very little trust for Ethos Capital.

This is why efforts like https://handshake.org/ are so worthwhile. Non-scarce technical entities as important as .org should be kept as far away from private investment money as possible. They’re a service to the people, not a product to capitalize on.

Dear Richard,

I am a .org registrant. I was proud of the fact that part of the money I was spending went to ISOC for the very projects you have described.
This is now gone.

My .org domain name is not just a domain name, is the digital identity that makes me part of the .org community. The fact that there are also commercial members in this community is irrelevant because the image that we project is that of not for profit, and to have the house hosting us being itself not for profit was a reassuring affirmation of this identity.
This is now gone.

When I applied for the PIR Board I was proud to become part of a wider community of which ISOC was the steward, that was working together with the registry, registrants and users for the benefit of the internet worldwide.
This is now gone.

Since I have started becoming involved in the Internet I had a strong belief that it was possible to act after discussion with the stakeholders and that the community could be involved before making strategic decisions.
This is now gone.

When the I* community started operating I believed that ISOC could be the core organization that was leading by example, putting ideals before and above money.
This is now gone.

You know that, in particular in the last couple of years, there have been disagreements between our two Boards - or at least parts thereof - but they have been solved with the spirit of collaboration that two travellers who share the same journey always have. Not even in my worst nightmares I would have thought that we were getting to the point that we would have taken different paths.

Be happy and prosper with the financial stability you have achieved, but be aware that you have paid a price - an immaterial one, but a very important one.

Roberto

I’ve posted a response to this here:

The .ORG Sale Is a Radical Departure That Puts the Internet at Risk

Your entire argument hinges on we trust Ethos Capital and their meaningless plans with no track record. They will seek a meaningless certification (B Corp). They plan to keep price increases around 10% per year. Plans never changed before, like ISOC didn’t plan to sell PIR? What makes Ethos a worthy successor? It’s half year existence and non existent track record?

The logic of it will take 10 years for price increases to actually hit registrants of .ORG is absurd. It’s paying an interest free loan for the right not to be charged more later. Not to mention it’s taking away funds from today when many non profits operate on shoe string budgets. Furthermore, the idea that it is a disincentive is laughable at best. They get possibly more money up front as people lock-in ten years, while the majority will surely not notice and be charged higher rates for years to come.

When was the last time PIR made less money Y/Y? It’s a money printing monopoly, was that not enough for you? You had to sell to a capital firm of ICANN insiders who will exploit it. PIR hasn’t raised prices in three years, and it’s become more profitable. Ethos is already saying they will be raising prices 10% per year, or that’s their plan. Does that sound like a good steward of .ORG?

Let’s call your argument what it really is, selfish interest in putting your own organization above everyone else’s. You value Internet Society’s work more than every other non profit that exists or might exist in the future. You think you deserve even more money to do your work and are OK that it’s at the expense of everyone else, because - look at the good stuff we do! You justify it by saying even at 10% for 10 years, $26 isn’t much. It’s still more money being taken away from everyone else at the scale of over 10 million times per year. It’s the office space stealing a penny on every traction and hoping nobody notices. Except you’re comfortable doing it at a larger scale and taking it away from the non profit space.

You say that 10% per year after ten years works out to a “quite affordable” $26 - not counting registrar fees.  But you are falling into the compound interest trap - over short time periods, it seems not so bad.  But the years accumulate quickly.  That “affordable” $26 becomes about $175 - per year (plus registrar fees) - after 30 years.

I assist multiple non-profit organizations.  Many of them are getting by only by the thinnest of margins.

That 10% compound interest on their Internet identity will hurt; it will be money that will be sucked out of millions of non profits into a for-profit hedge fund.

.org predates ICANN and PIR.  There are non-profits in .org that have invested decades into building their domain name presence.  This sale places that all at risk.

Moreover, it has been estimated that the actual cost of provision of the .org registry service is under (and by some estimates far under) $1 per name per year.  And those costs are not going up by 10% per year, in fact many of those costs have gone down substantially over the years.

That means that the “quite affordable” $26 (after ten years) is really nearly all profit for the registry - profit taken out of captive customers.

And does anyone think that Ethos Capital (or its financial backers) are not planning to quickly recoup that $Billion+ it spent?

As for “B Corporation” - It’s a bunch of goody-two-shoes feel-good statements that are not binding.  Sounds a lot like “Tethics” on the HBO’s Silicon Valley TV series - empty platitudes that can be safely ignored and easily evaded.

An interesting twist on this is that all of the registrants in .org, if they wished, could establish a new .org registry, outside of ICANN and convince root server operators - perhaps with a cash inducement - to drop the NS and DNSSEC pointers to ICANN’s .org and pick up the forked .org instead.  Such a registry could be ultra inexpensive if it were to abandon all of the ICANN mandated overhead, such as ten year maximum registrations and per-year rents, and use something like a permanent, never expiring, registration for a one time fee plus small fees for operational things like updating NS records.