What to do about .ORG

Milton Mueller [1]

On November 13, the Internet Society announced that the .ORG domain registry will be sold to a for-profit private equity firm. Much of the community that pays attention to ICANN is in an uproar about it. There is now a movement to “Save .ORG;” there are claims that the sale was corrupt or unethical; there is loose talk about major price increases, wailings about “soulless capital” taking over the Internet, and a lot of interesting speculation about the role of former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadi in the sale.

Most of the basic facts about the sale have been reported elsewhere. A good summary from Samuel Klein is here. Not so clear is what should be done about it. We are still debating the appropriate response by ICANN, the Internet Society, and the noncommercial domain registrants for whom .ORG was supposed to be their special place. In this article, we outline what we think is the problem and the appropriate responses to it. IGP believes that there is cause for concern, but civil society groups are in danger of losing credibility with poorly thought out or ineffectual responses.

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continua qui: https://www.internetgovernance.org/2019/11/25/what-to-do-about-org/


[1] Milton Mueller is a founder of IGP an internationally prominent scholar specializing in the political economy of information and communication. He is the author of Will the Internet Fragment? (Polity, 2017), Networks and States: The global politics of Internet governance (MIT Press, 2010) and Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace (MIT Press, 2002)