[governance] PIR Case/or the .org sell

[John Levine]

In article <bfbe4cf2-b543-e170-fe52-d3b07f3b1022 at digitaldissidents.org> you write:
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>
>On 11/28/19 4:22 PM, James Gannon wrote:
>> Without commenting on the details just want to call out that we had a statement from ISOC BoT members yesterday that
>less than 1% of .org registrations sit with not for profits, food for thought in these dicsussions on impact.
>
>Even if this were true (source?), this should be offset against the size of the not-for-profit vs for-profit .org
>websites in terms of visitors (think wikipedia.org, mozilla.org, etc).

We extrapolated from some older numbers.  I'm pretty sure there are
far more parked names than active non-profits in .ORG.  That's one of
the reasons we made a deal with a buyer who is committed to running
.ORG the way it's run now -- to stay healthy it needs to stay attractive
to all of the people who use it, not just the NGOs.  For comparison,
the .NGO and .ONG domains which require registrants to show that they
are non-profits only have about 3,000 names.

This is also why I'm baffled by claims that the buyer will increase
the price by some absurd factor.  If they did, the non-core
registrants would leave and the registry would collapse.  That's
obvious to anyone familiar with the domain business so of course they
won't do that.  I don't understand why it's not obvious to everyone
else.

With respect to complaints that increasing the price from $10 to $12
would be a hardship, I'm trying to find a non-profit (or anyone) who
is paying for a domain and has any operations at all, yet is so
strapped that $12/yr rather than $10 would be a crisis.  That's not
even the price of a cup of bad coffee.  For the $10 or $12 they're
getting a registry with a skilled staff keeping it working reliably
and also maintaining its quality.

R's,
John