Who Should Control the Internet's .Org Addresses?

Posted February 5, 2020

External Article: WIRED

Milton Mueller, professor in the School of Public Policy, was referenced in the article "Who Should Control the Internet's .Org Address?" in WIRED on Feb. 4, 2020.

The article covers concerns that the .org address, which has traditionally been the domain of nonprofit groups, could become exorbitantly expensive after the Public Interest Registry (PIR), which controls the domain name, was sold to the private equity firm Ethos Capital. Mueller, an expert in internet governance who worked on the original deal for PIR to manage .org, provided background on potential implications of the deal with Ethos Capital.

Excerpt:

It's not clear what grounds ICANN could use to block the sale. Milton Mueller, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy who worked on the ICANN group that approved the original contract for PIR to manage the .org top-level domain, tells WIRED that PIR’s contract with ICANN never specified that the .org domain had to be managed by a nonprofit. But he says that, as a requirement of its approval of the sale, ICANN could potentially put new provisions into the contract that would make PIR more accountable to the nonprofit community.

Read the full article here.