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NEW YORK (AP) – After widespread opposition, the organization that oversees Internet domain names has voted against the sale of $ 1.1 billion of the dot-org online registry to an investment firm.
The board of the Los Angeles-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers voted Thursday night not to allow the sale to Ethos Capital of the website suffix that is widely used by community and non-profit organizations.
Activists, politicians, and hundreds of organizations protested that the costs of nonprofits would rise and freedom of expression would be at risk if a for-profit company were to take over dot-org, one of the original domains created in the mid-1990s. the 1980s .
Vetoing the sale is “reasonable and correct,” ICANN President Maarten Botterman said in a blog post.
Botterman noted the “fundamental public interest nature” of the organization currently overseeing dot-org. That would have been transferred to one “compelled to serve the interests of its corporate stakeholders” if the sale had been made, he said.
He also expressed concern about what the debt involved in the transaction would mean for those dot-org users, which include the public radio station NPR, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the humanitarian medical group Doctors Without Borders.
Ethos Capital and the Internet Society, the nonprofit organization founded by many of the first Internet engineers and scientists currently managing the registry, said the concerns were misplaced. Ethos had offered concessions that included price increases.
The investment firm said in a statement that the decision “will stifle innovation and discourage future investment in the domain industry” and that it is evaluating its options. The Internet Society said it is disappointed “that ICANN has acted as a regulatory body that it should never have been.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which had campaigned against the sale, said ICANN’s decision was a “surprising victory for non-profit organizations and NGOs around the world working in the public interest.”
