What will it take to stop the sale?
The most incredible thing about the dot org sale is no longer the billion dollar price tag. It’s not surprise fait accompli announcement. It’s not the involvement of republican mega-donors. It’s that the proponents have continued to advocate for it in the midst of the worst crisis the world has faced since the second world war.
The biggest crisis in almost a hundred years. One that will reverberate for generations. My own children will forever remember a world in which they were only allowed to play with friends on the other side of a fence. A world where there was no school, and their parents struggled to educate them while juggling videoconferences and worrying about our own parents.
The lockdowns may be with us for a few years, but the lessons, and the worry, will last a lifetime. And we are the lucky ones. In many countries the lack of functioning health care and government infrastructure is only just beginning to cause illness, death and insecurity.
We are now in a world where every major nonprofit event, the mainstay of funding and engagement for many, has been cancelled. Where nonprofits in health and human services are stretched to the limit. Learning how to provide care and support while changing they way they work entirely.
Where nonprofits and journalists in developing countries, and in many wealthy ones, coming under huge pressure to tow the government line, to give up privacy, and to hide facts.
Some months ago Ethos Capital, PIR and Internet Society started KeyPointsAboutDotOrg to share their views on the .org sale. Visiting the website today, I was amazed to find a world in which the pandemic simply had not happened. Not a single announcement.
The sale soldiers boldly on. Even at the Public Interest Registry itself, there is no announcement regarding the pandemic. While PIR has been active on Twitter highlighting the work of other nonprofits, we see no initiatives that the registry, itself a billion dollar endeavour by valuation, being announced.
There is no better example of the stark difference between shareholders and stakeholders. In the world of shareholders, everything is always fine. Good news is the only news. Stakeholders, no matter your corporate structure, must be secondary. This is the nature of fiduciary duty. There’s just no way around it, and it’s why nonprofits exist.
Fiduciary duty is the real reason Ethos won’t re-open the registry agreement, which they could do at any time. It’s the reason they won’t take control of their own timeline and manage it in the interest of stakeholders, with open consultation on the future of .org. It’s the reason they haven’t acknowledged the Access Now call for the sale to be halted while their own constituency adapts to the pandemic.
If you had asked me last November what it would take to stop the sale, I might have jokingly responded with I don’t know, maybe a global pandemic. To which the response might have been yeah right. Maybe that’s what it would take. But in Ethos’ world, sadly not even that is enough.
