Day February 25, 2020

Dissecting the ISOC/PIR/Ethos Transaction

[Benjamin Leff] Significant concern and confusion has been generated by the relatively recent announcement by the Internet Society ("ISOC") that it will "sell" its subsidiary, Public Interest Registries ("PIR"), to the private equity firm Ethos Capital for more than 1.1 billion dollars. Among other things, PIR operates the .ORG domain registry, which generates tens of millions of dollars of revenue every year. ISOC is a nonprofit charity under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, as is PIR.