ICANN hits pause on the sale of .ORG to Republican billionaires' private equity fund

Here's what's happened: first, ICANN (the legendarily opaque US corporation that runs the internet's Domain Name System) approved a change in pricing for .ORG domains, run by the nonprofit Internet Society (ISOC) through its Public Interest Registry (PIR), allowing the registry to raise prices. The change was done entirely by staff, without board approval.

Next, several of the people involved in that decision migrate from ICANN to ISOC or to a brand-new private equity fund called Ethos Capital, whose major investors are three families of Republican billionaires: the Romneys, the Perots and the Johnsons.

Ethos then buys the Public Interest Registry from ISOC for a little over a billion dollars -- about a billion dollars less than it's likely worth -- and makes a nonbinding pledge to limit its price increases to 10%, compounded annually (!!) and starts a PR campaign to argue that this is very reasonable (however, none of the defenders of this practice are willing to refinance their mortgages on these "reasonable" terms, nor to offer bonds for sale at that rate). They buy the top Google Adwords for search terms related to the sale, and hire one of the most expensive PR firms in the business to run interference for them.

But despite this charm offensive, the opposition continues to mount. EFF and a bunch of other nonprofits point out that selling .ORG to private equity looters will put these shadowy power-brokers in a position to censor some of the world's leading human rights and nonprofit organizations by taking away their domain names (domain names have become a central nexus of censorship efforts). Read the rest