As an employee owned company trying to help nonprofits, we have no love for the money hungry private equity industry. As famed open source software developer Kohsuke Kawaguchi notes, this is outright corruption.
If you are not familiar with the story, ICANN is the organization that has been responsible for administering how domain names like “MyNonProfit.org”, are assigned. It was created as a nonprofit organization in 1998, and has been historically funded by the US Department of Commerce. In 2016, an agreement was signed that removed ICANN from government oversight.
In June, 2019, ICANN removed the price caps to .org domains. The community public comment period was met with widespread recommendations against this. The move set up the sale of control over .org domain pricing to a private equity company. This was made even more frustrating to nonprofits because it was all done by ICANN insiders who essentially used the organization to set themselves up.
The reality is there is not too much which can be done – .org prices will likely rise. There are various petitions, but the frustration of private equity big money control will continue for all of us.