Privare equity firm to take over .org registry?

[Winehole23]

A newly formed private equity firm named Ethos Capital is bidding to take over the registry that handles the .org domain, which is reserved for nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations. Ethos would be able to raise prices without limit on website owners, and it could use its power to sell the browsing data of users of .orgs, which include practically every human rights organization in the world.

Since the announcement of the proposed purchase, .org owners, advocacy groups, and members of Congress have howled in protest of this injection of the profit motive into a rare unspoiled, public service–focused corner of the internet. https://prospect.org/api/amp/power/private-equity-corporate-takeover-org-domain-name/

[Winehole23]

Uncompetitive, government created monopolies:


The entire market for domain name registries is broken, a troubling combination of government-granted monopoly, disinterested (at best) regulators, and eager extractors of profit. Users pay a relatively trivial amount for the rights to website names, and don’t really notice the enormous amounts of excess profit taken from them and hundreds of millions of their colleagues, a few bucks at a time.

The entire market for domain name registries is broken, a troubling combination of government-granted monopoly, disinterested (at best) regulators, and eager extractors of profit.

Verisign controls the registries for .com and .net, two of the internet’s most popular. All it does is administer a database and collect small sums from website owners, but with computing power rising and practically no marginal cost to adding another website to the database, the entire enterprise is a license to print money. In the third quarter of 2019, Verisign showed operating income of $205.6 million on $308.4 million in revenues, a profitability margin of 66.67 percent. This makes Verisign one of the most profitable companies in the world.

Verisign’s competitors have consistently offered to provide the same service at a fraction of what Verisign charges, but the company has an exclusive contract to manage .com and .net with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit that oversees top-level domains. I wrote about Verisign for The Nation in 2018.

[DMC]

Fucking privares need to chill.