Who controls the .org registry matters to all non-profits

Howard Lake | 9 August 2002 | News

The organisation that wins the right to control the .org registry at the end of this year will have tremendous power over non-profits on the Internet.

Yet, according to Michael Gilbert of SocialEcology.org, “almost no non-profits are paying the least bit of attention.” Gilbert has written a plea to non-profits to take an interest and make their voice heard. His article “The Power of Names: Why the .org Registry Matters” appears on his Nonprofit Online News Web site.

He analyses the 11 bids being made to manage the .org registry. Four he sees as straight for-profit proposals, and argues that they should not be awarded control because they are for-profit. He is sceptical of four bids “that look to me like for-profit ventures, hiding behind a nonprofit shell or partnership.” For example, of the DotOrg Foundation he says: “it reads to me as though its primary purpose is to help the aggressive Kintera Corporation sell more services to nonprofits.”

He concludes that “there are four bids that are worth considering”. He will shortly be publishing his own submission to ICANN, and asks non-profits to respond and take action on it.

His article ends with the conclusion that “I strongly believe that whoever is chosen to control the domain names of nonprofit organizations will need to be a genuine public trust. Most of these bids are not. They are land grabs.”

Read The Power of Names: Why the .org Registry Matters by Michael C. Gilbert.

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.