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An Anonymous Coward writes:

After the sale, Ethos Capital, having paid $1.135 billion for .ORG to ISOC, will have to recoup that investment on a scale that’s expected of a private equity firm. This week, Ethos revealed for the first time that some $360 million of the purchase price will be financed with a loan. The payments on that loan will have to come out of Ethos’s profits, so they will probably need to raise more money per year than ISOC currently does. While Ethos could try to simply increase the number of its “customers” for .ORGs, PIR has tried this in the past, and the demand for the domains has remained largely flat. This is no surprise; the nonprofit sector just doesn’t grow at exponential rates.

That brings us to the myriad reasons nonprofits have criticized the deal: every other way that Ethos might increase profits is bad news for .ORG users. And these tactics aren’t farfetched: every one of them is already delivering profits in other sectors, often while harming domain registrants and their visitors.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/icann-needs-ask-more-questions-about-sale-org [eff.org]

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