Non-profit .org domain has been sold, price caps taken away

In a very surprising move, the Internet Society (ISOC) has announced it has sold the rights to the .org registry to Ethos Capital, for an unknown amount of money. The deal for the .org domain will be complete in Q1 2020, a few months from now.

There are over 10 million websites using the .org suffix, something that has become synonymous with non-profit organizations. The changes to this with ISOC selling it was an instant WTF moment around the world, with no warning signs or rumors before it happened -- it just happened. The Public Interest Registry (PIR) confirmed it will drop the non-profit status from the .org domain (something it has had since 2003).

It gets worse -- with ICANN (they oversee ALL of the domains on the internet, including the .org domains) have agreed to remove price caps for .org domain names. Until now, these were cheap and very important for non-profit organizations -- from non-profit, to lots-of-profit in 2020 and beyond, it seems.

Ethos Capital said in a statement that it plans to "live within the spirit of historic practice when it comes to pricing, which means, potentially, annual price increases of up to 10 percent on average". This means it should be around $1 per year, but we should expect large increases in prices in the near future.

It wasn't only .org that saw the price caps removed -- .info and .biz have had them removed this year, too.