Michael Hiltzik: The internet's .org registry is snatched up by a private equity firm, provoking uproar

The old dream of an internet run in the public interest has long dissipated under pressure from huge corporations seeking to profit from what has become a worldwide information utility.

But one corner of the web seemed to maintain its character as a preserve for public service - the dot-org domain, which since its creation has been reserved for nonprofit organizations and has become something of a badge of honor of noncommercial activity.

That's why many in the nonprofit world were startled by the announcement on Nov. 13 that the .org registry had been sold to a private equity firm, Ethos Capital. The seller was the Internet Society, a nonprofit that plays an important role in creating and maintaining internet engineering standards, but has been mostly the guardian of the .org domain. The price, as was revealed more than two weeks later, was a stunning $1.135 billion.

In the original announcement, Internet Society Chief Executive Andrew Sullivan called the sale "an important and exciting development" and described Ethos as