SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — Nonprofits anxiously await the fate of the dot-org domain, on the brink of being sold to the shadowy private equity firm Ethos Capital.
It’s a move they fear will stifle independent voices on the internet, as private ownership of dot-org could leave the domain vulnerable to economic extortion by authoritarian governments and rapacious corporations.
"This is really a question about whether we can trust a private entity to be responsible for any entity fundamentally in service of the public interest,” said Access Now strategist Carolyn Tackett said on a press call Thursday. “Are we willing to hand over control to the dot-org domain, the foundation of online civic space, to another private company?”
Access Now is a nonprofit that advocates for privacy, security, and free expression on the internet.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is meeting Thursday to discuss the sale, and has until Monday to make a decision about whether Ethos should be allowed go forward with its bid to buy dot-org for $1.1 billion from its current steward, the Internet Society.
ICANN doesn’t have the authority to prevent the sale, but by voting to reject it the organization would destroy the value of the deal, said Cara Gagliano, attorney with the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The Public Interest Registry, a nonprofit formed by the Internet Society (ISOC), has been managing the dot-org domain since 2002. If the deal goes through, the registry will be owned by Ethos.
“ISOC doesn’t have to continue its stewardship of dot-org if it doesn’t want to, but it should allow ICANN to find a new steward on merit, not sell it to the highest bidder,” Gagliano said. “It’s not something they own; it was something they were entrusted with. It’s not just a piece of real estate.”
The foremost concern for opponents of the sale is the risk of censorship once dot-org is sold to a profit-driven company with the power to suspend domains, effectively wiping out a nonprofit or nongovernmental organization’s website, said Mitch Stoltz, a senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Registries generally use their power to suspend domain names responsibly, he said.
“But because it’s such a powerful tool there’s always a temptation to regulate the content of websites," Stoltz said. "There are powerful industries, corporations or governments that may want to pay a registry to do that, to regulate the content of the internet, or just browbeat them into doing it."
Pharmaceutical companies are just one example, putting pressure on registries to suspend the domain names of competitors.
The nonprofit Public Interest Registry has so far resisted attempts to regulate speech, Stoltz said. But he fears that Ethos Capital, a company that will have $360 million in debt to discharge from the $1.1 billion deal, will be uniquely vulnerable to pressure from corporate interests and totalitarian regimes.
"That would give them an incentive to engage in censorship for profit," Stoltz said. "And dot-org is a target-rich environment for censorship because it is thousands of nonprofits and NGOs that speak truth to power.”
It’s a threat Human Rights Watch executive director Ken Roth put in blunt terms.
“I fear that when you hand dot-org to a private equity firm, this is going to be a huge target for the Chinese censors,” he said.
Roth said for the past year, Human Rights Watch has been tracking Chinese efforts to impose censorship overseas. He said the regime routinely uses economic force to silence critics, pointing to its suspension of business ties last year with the NBA over a tweet by Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey expressing support for dissidents in Hong Kong.
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