A group of activists want to prevent the sale of the .org internet domain to investment company Ethos. According to them, sales worth 1 billion euros are bad for the millions of non-profit organizations that use the .org domain.
The activists have set up a cooperative themselves and hope that this organization will get control of .org. They call the internet organization ICANN, which oversees the .org domain, for the sale to stop Ethos.
With the management of the top-level domain, Ethos can collect an annual fee for the use of .org. Companies and organizations pay on average around 10 to 20 euros per year for the domain. The activists fear that the costs will rise if a profit-making company takes control.
Katherine Mather, the director of the Wikimedia Foundation, is the chairman of the cooperative who wants to stop the sale. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is the most popular website in the world that uses the .org domain.
According to Mather, the sale to Ethos is not in the public interest. “There must be a place on the internet that represents the public interest, where educational sites, humanitarian sites and organizations such as Wikipedia can offer a wider social benefit,” she says.
ICANN has until the end of January to allow the sale to go ahead or to stop it, but can also demand more time to ask additional questions.
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