I was busy assembling our weekly domain sales report Wednesday (Nov. 13, 2019) when news about the Internet Society selling the Public Interest Registry (administrator of the popular .org domain extension) to private equity firm Ethos Capital was released. Since putting the sales column to bed last night I've been reading the widespread commentary across the web about this transaction. It is an especially big deal because .org, with its importance to the non profit community, has become a widely revered TLD that no one wants to see tarnished or become inordinately expensive. 

That being the case, seeing PIR go to a very much for profit private equity company (at an undisclosed price), so soon after ICANN had removed all price caps on .org domains,  has understandably set off alarms bells - and especially loud ones because of the involvement of former ICANN executives with the Ethos management team. As a result, there is already a very high volume of articles and reader commentary on this topic that is worth the time to seek out and review.

The most in-depth coverage I've seen so far, making it an excellent starting point, are a

trio of articles that Andrew Allemann has put out at DomainNameWire. The first story I saw when the news broke was his. He followed up with a piece - The interesting connection between the .Org deal and ICANN - that has drawn an especially vocal response from readers. Completing the trifecta was a good background article on The economics of .org domain names - all within the space of 24 hours - great job Andrew! 

Also, always worth reading when anything related to ICANN comes up is Kevin Murphy at DomainIncite.com and he was in top form as usual with Selling off PIR, did ISOC just throw .org registrants under a bus? There are many more worthwhile examples (most listed with links at news aggregator Domaining.com) but those guys will help you cut to chase and see how this landmark deal is being viewed.