[Governance] Joint Statement from NTEN and EFF on Rejection of Sale of .ORG

[Daniel Pimienta]

> About all one can say is that there exist some small number of actual
> public benefit organizations probably amounting to fewer than 1% of
> registrations, probably far fewer, who have chosen .ORG for their
> branding.

If this is meant to say that probably far more than 99% of .org domains 
are related to for profit entities this is a fake stats only created to 
sustain an argument which falls down when the data is checked. One 
wishes some source were provided to sustain the data or at least some 
methods to reach that results one could evaluate.

The facts are :

- The number of .org domains remains stable since 2003 between 10 and 11 
millions and no surge has been shown when the restriction to non-profit 
has been released in august 2019 (source 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.org).

- If anybody knows about some study surveying the percentage of for 
profit within those 11 millions domain it would be nice to share.

Meanwhile :

- There are many sites analyzing the pros and cons for businesses 
(specially small) to decide between .com or .org and they generally 
shows no special incentive for .org (except maybe to forward a 
mybusiness.org towards mybusiness.com) and at the contrary warns about 
the harmful confusion for good business. Check 
https://www.google.com/search?q=.org+vs+.com

- One could play with search engine using the site:.org option and 
browse fast the results: if really only 1% would be non profit it would 
show clearly in the displayed results. To make it still more clear one 
can use keywords prone to business such as business, sale, buy and 
discovers that less than 10% correspond to for profit. Check 
https://www.google.com/search?q=buy+site:.org and so on. One could use 
still more specific searches with keywords such as bank or restaurant 
within .org and less than 20% of the results correspond to for profit 
for "restaurant" and maybe less than 40% for banks (which seems to have 
adopted more massively the trick of forwarding from .org to .com main 
site). Check  https://www.google.com/search?q=bank+site:.org

- As a by-product of those experiments, the rich diversity of the 
ecosystem of the non for profit realm in the Internet appears : 
international, national and local organizations, associations, free 
software providers, education entities, users group,... which advocates 
naturally  to preserve this important (and historical) ecosystem of the 
Internet.