{"id":4704,"date":"2019-11-26T14:56:44","date_gmt":"2019-11-26T14:56:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/?p=4704"},"modified":"2019-11-26T14:56:44","modified_gmt":"2019-11-26T14:56:44","slug":"civil-society-groups-protest-the-sale-of-org-to-a-private-equity-fund-and-a-collection-of-republican-billionaires","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/26\/civil-society-groups-protest-the-sale-of-org-to-a-private-equity-fund-and-a-collection-of-republican-billionaires\/","title":{"rendered":"Civil society groups protest the sale of .ORG to a private equity fund and a collection of Republican billionaires"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/boingboing.net\/2019\/11\/22\/save-dot-org.html\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/dot-org-starburst-1.png.jpeg?w=625&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Earlier this month, management of the .org top-level domain <a href=\"https:\/\/boingboing.net\/2019\/11\/14\/private-equity-company-acquire.html\">underwent a radical shift<\/a>: first, ICANN dropped price-caps on .org domains, and then the Internet Societ (ISOC) flogged the registry off to Ethos Capital, a private equity fund, and a consortium of <a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/@jacobmalthouse\/whos-going-to-run-org-in-a-word-the-gop-8809ef6f9679\">three families of Republican billionaires<\/a>: the Perots, the Romneys, and the Johnsons.<\/p>\n<p>This doesn&#8217;t just mean that nonprofits &#8212; for whom the .org top-level domain was created &#8212; will pay higher prices to maintain their domains, and it doesn&#8217;t just mean that private equity funds &#8212; rather than a transparent, nonprofit NGO &#8212; will <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eff.org\/deeplinks\/2019\/11\/nonprofit-community-stands-together-protect-org\">be able to censor what gets posted to .org domains<\/a>, by kicking out any domain that it doesn&#8217;t like (remember when everyone was cheering because Nazi websites were being stripped of their domain names by registrars? This cuts both ways: if registrars have the power and duty to respond to speech they object to by taking away organizations&#8217; domains, then that duty and power also applies to billionaires and private equity-appointed administrators).<\/p>\n<p>A massive coalition of nonprofits and civil society organizations <a href=\"https:\/\/savedotorg.org\/\">has signed an open letter to ISOC president Andrew Sullivan<\/a>. Everyone from the Girl Scouts and the YMCA to EFF and Creative Commons (and many others) have signed it, and <a href=\"https:\/\/savedotorg.org\/\">so can you<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Source: <em><a href=\"https:\/\/boingboing.net\/2019\/11\/22\/save-dot-org.html\">Civil society groups protest the sale of .ORG to a private equity fund and a collection of Republican billionaires<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this month, management of the .org top-level domain underwent a radical shift: first, ICANN dropped price-caps on .org domains, and then the Internet Societ (ISOC) flogged the registry off to Ethos Capital, a private equity fund, and a consortium of three families of Republican billionaires: the Perots, the Romneys, and the Johnsons. This doesn&#8217;t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-1dS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4704"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4706,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4704\/revisions\/4706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}