[governance] Proposed statement on .ORG sale

[Bill Woodcock]

> On Dec 9, 2019, at 12:55 AM, Ayden Férdeline <ayden at ferdeline.com> wrote:
> 
>> By the way, do you have any .org registrations?
> 
> With respect, what is the relevance of that question? I have no financial interest here. I have nothing to lose (directly) from the sale of PIR to Ethos Capital, and I have nothing to gain.
> 
> Indirectly, of course, I have much to lose as a non-commercial user of the Domain Name System from the Domain Name System being more commercialized. As we all do.


Agreed.  I think we need to not lose sight of the fact that there are two classes harmed by the outcome of this transaction:

1) .ORG registrants, whose interests are being involuntarily converted to a private benefit, without compensation, and with future expense in both money and down-time, and

2) The entire Internet community, inasmuch as everyone else is also dependent upon the uptime and financial stability of nonprofits like Wikipedia, Mozilla, the Red Cross, etc.

In an Internet that’s normally governed in a multistakeholder fashion, both of these constituencies would be well-represented.  In a unilateral privatization of a public good, there is no multistakeholder voice representing the nonprofit and Internet constituencies.

Most of us are in the first class, and all of us are in the second class.  There is no one here who is not a stakeholder, there is no one here who will not suffer harm from the outcome, and there are only a handful of individuals (mostly not present on this list) who will profit from it.

                                -Bill

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