There are concerns this will affect the price of the domains and that the private equity company will want to maximize the value of its acquisition and the ongoing cost of registrations.

The seller, The Internet Society said...

Today’s news has tremendous benefits for both the Internet Society and PIR. The transaction will help the Internet Society to secure its future through more stable, diversified and sustainable financial resources than it has at present, allowing the organization to plan for the long term and advance its vision of an Internet for everyone on an even broader scale. It will also enable PIR to continue expanding its mission and important work under new ownership — including its goal of keeping .ORG accessible and reasonably priced — while further strengthening and deepening its commitment to the .ORG Community.

i fear that reasonably priced will have a different meaning to Ethos Capital and .org domain holders!

The problem is that a lot of do-gooder/NGO domain names in .ORG are effectively locked in due to the size and spread of their organisations. It would be a lot more costly for them to rebrand with a new domain name than it would be for a small business.

I was finishing a book on domain names and for one of the chapters, I calculated the approximate age of registrations in the COM/NET/ORG by year. Approximately 25% of .ORG domain names are reregistrations with 75% showing no deletion indications. That's a remarkably solid set of registrations.

There's a lot of disquiet about this transaction and ICANN are getting it in the neck about the removal of the price cap and the way that this deal went down.

Regards...jmcc

Just as a reminder, here's the earlier discussion ICANN May Allow .Org Domain Renewal Prices to go Sky High [webmasterworld.com]

Hello-

This is utopia , but I think that, for all extensions, once you "own" (lease) a domain name, the renewal price should remain the same, until you transfer the ownership, new prices should be applied to newly registered domains only.

Well, you can lock in 10 years at current prices.

I have one .org I don't really want to change over, so I extended it to the max. I have it until 2029 - if the prices go sky high in 2-3 years, I have 6-7 left to figure out a transition

I have another that is just for fun and for various I prefer the .org, but it's not something I would spend money on. Since the .com was available, I grabbed that. I had thought of transitioning anyway.

So as jmccormac said, some big orgs really can't change easily - ACLU, Sierra Club. But they also can afford a couple hundred dollars per year without blinking. The people like me who bought some .orgs for fun, we can just switch. Nobody's livelihood is staked on these.

I think the problem arises for the in-between. Small organizations who often lack the technical expertise to manage their own website. So they are faced with hiring someone to come in and manage the domain transition or paying the higher fees. If the fees go to high, they will rip the bandage off and get the pain over with. If the fees are just right, though, they'll grumble and grouse and pay it.

John - it sounds like you're studying this a lot. I imagine that PIR and the like watch renewals and drops like crazy when they make a price increase. Any insights there? Heard any stories?

Death throes of a destructive neoliberalism that has conquered all and severely eroded/degraded the fabric of equitable society (liberte, egalite, fraternite). Its demise is not yet in sight, but it is not too far. The cauldron is boiling - excess will precipitate its collapse. When it comes, it will be with a bang.

.

John - it sounds like you're studying this a lot. I imagine that PIR and the like watch renewals and drops like crazy when they make a price increase. Any insights there? Heard any stories?

When PIR made Jay Daley the interim president and CEO, it got one of the most clueful people in the whole business leading it. He really knows his stuff and understands the Big Data side of the business. The decision to stop the volume discounting was the right one because it has a highly damaging effect on a TLD. It gives some TLDs a temporary boost but the discounted domain names do not renew at the same rate as the normal registrations. This varies by TLD but the .ORG has a very good reputation so renewal rates and the first year renewals tend to be better than COM or NET. They are not at ccTLD level where it is common to see 70% or more first year renewal rates but for a large gTLD, .ORG is the leader. PIR also published some of the renewal data in its previous quarterly reports. (Did these calculations for renewals and reregistrations for all gTLDs based on zone files back to 2000.) The 2018 .ORG report is here: [thenew.org...] and it gives the Y1% as 54%. Most of the other registries just provide a blended renewal rate which combines the renewal rates for all years as a single percentage.

As a gTLD, the top three countries by country of registrar in ORG are US (66.25%), Germany (8.42%) and Canada (6.29%). Going on those percentages, the dynamics in the the gTLD would be US dominated and this is generally a good thing as the US market is a mature and stable one. The other top three countries are also stable markets.

The market where the discounting happens is important as this will often decide the major trends in renewals for discounted registrations. Hitting the Chinese market for discounted registration will take on the characteristics of that highly volatile market. Hitting a mature market with good renewals and good web usage will generally result in a higher percentage of renewals. But there are some discount chaser registrars that build their businesses on discounting offers that can be problematic if they gain a major share in a gTLD's discounted registrations. Done well, discounting can work. Done badly and it results in another Famous Four Media operation where the registrations become completely dependent on new discounted registrations to cover the deletions from previously discounted registrations that were due to renew at full fee. I think that the .NYC registry gave a presentation at one of the ICANN meetings about it and it discovered that there was a kind of sweet spot for the discounting level. Below that level, the renewal rate wasn't as good. (From the August 2019 web usage survey, .NYC looks more like an early stage ccTLD in terms of development.)

The one thing that seems to be worrying a lot of people is that the new owner will try to sweat the assets with increases. I'm not sure that will happen in the short term. The reason for this is that the .ORG is an unusual gTLD in that a lot of the non-US registrants actively using it have alternatives with their local ccTLD. This gTLD -> ccTLD shift has happened outside the US market and .ORG is a third choice TLD in mose of these markets. The ccTLD is generally the first choice and it is followed by .COM for the bulk of new registrations. The .NET has lost a lot of market share and has plateaued. The .ORG doesn't have to dramatically raise registrations/renewal prices like Uniregistry did with its gTLDs (though that was actually the first sign of Uniregistry acting like a registry operator). The Internet Commerce Association is definitely putting the boot in over this and ICANN is going to get it in the neck from registrants and non-commercial users. The new owners, if the deal goes through, will have to walk a tightrope on this.

Regards...jmcc

Thanks! Very interesting.

>>a lot of the non-US registrants actively using it have alternatives with their local ccTLD

I think most US-based .orgs have the .com - the two cases I mentioned were sort of special. One where, through my own stupidity, I did not grab the .com when I could have and the other where I didn't really care and preferred the .org. But I checked some well-known orgs and in every case the .com redirected to the .org.

Also, I'm surprised how much variation there is in .org pricing - it seems to vary more from registrar to registrar than .com pricing does

... i've only 2 important .org domains ... and i've just maxed out the registrations to 10 years on each - just in case!

i should think there are others who have done the same, so Ethos Capital will have had an immediate boost to the coffers!

... thank-you jmccormac too, that was a very informed and interesting post (as always on the subject of domains)

It seems a good number of organisations have complained to ICANN, and it said it was "in the process of analysing the specifics" of the sale by PIR

[bbc.co.uk...]

roger montti's explainer of the interlocking relationships is the best i've read so far:
ICANN Requests Answers About Sale of Dot Org Registry [searchenginejournal.com]

It has already sparked some interest from US politicians in the Democratic primaries. But the real problems lie ahead for ICANN. The optics on this deal makes the decision to hive off the oversight of domain names and IP addresses to ICANN look politically stupid in that may have left ICANN, and the DNS open to a kind or greedy regulatory capture. (There's also the problem of ICANN ignoring the USG Antitrust comments about the new gTLDs. Politicians do not like being made to look stupid even if the reality is more complex.

Regards...jmcc