By New York Times. Two months ago, Ethos Capital, a private equity firm, announced that it planned to buy the rights to a tract of internet real estate for more than $1 billion. But it wasn’t just any piece of digital property. It was dot-org, the cyber neighborhood that is home to big nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations like the United Nations (un.org <https://www.un.org/>) and NPR (npr.org <https://www.npr.org/>), and to little ones like neighborhood clubs. The deal was met with a fierce backlash. Critics argued that a less commercial corner of the internet should not be controlled by a profit-driven private equity firm, as a matter of both principle and practice. Online petitions <https://savedotorg.org/> and letters of concern came from hundreds of organizations, thousands of individuals and four Democrats <https://www.keypointsabout.org/blog/the-internet-society-pir-and-ethos-respond-to-congressional-letter> in Congress, including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Rarely has the acronym-strewn realm of internet addresses — so-called domain names — stirred such passion. Read on https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/technology/dot-org-private-equity-battle.... Mwendwa Kivuva, Now, a group of respected internet pioneers and nonprofit leaders is offering an alternative to Ethos Capital’s bid: a nonprofit cooperative corporation. The incorporation papers for the new entity, the Cooperative Corporation of .ORG Registrants, were filed this week in California. The goal of the group is not only to persuade the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees internet domain names, to stop the sale. It is also to persuade ICANN to hand it the management of dot-org instead. “This is a better alternative,” said Esther Dyson, who served as the first chair of ICANN, from 1998 to 2000, and is one of seven directors of the new cooperative. “If you’re owned by private equity, your incentive is to make a profit. Our incentive is to serve and protect nonprofits and the public.” ______________________