And extracting money from nonprofits, while an easy point to communicate, is just the tip of the iceberg - there's a horrible conflict of interest between the
adoption of .org and the
mission of .org now.
As I've written before, what happens if a large country says "we will block .org domains, or .org DNS resolutions, if you don't suspend an activist organization's domain globally?" Beforehand, the Internet Society could say "we don't believe that precedent is in the interest of the global community overall, and your threat is empty to us."
But now, there's both a profit motive AND an obligation to shareholders to take down the domain GLOBALLY, as the value of the company would decrease if .org domains were blocked to a large market. And, while I'm not a lawyer, I believe this decision would be permitted by the new 2019 rules. This gives censors tremendous leverage to spread censorship and chilling effects around the globe. DMCA takedowns will seem like child's play.
In the face of losing a large market opportunity, if even Google, with all its market power and all its public scrutiny, is willing to build things like Dragonfly, how can we take Ethos at its word?
I'm all for the role of private equity in helping companies to grow - while there are certainly firms that operate in bad faith, the PE industry overall doesn't deserve the bad rap it gets in the media. Of all the things that the private market can do to drive innovation, the existence of PE is critical. (Not every company should IPO or be gobbled up by a strategic.)
But IMO this sale should absolutely be disallowed from a humanitarian and international security perspective. The incentives are just too badly aligned.