The eligibility myth
.org is open. Anyone can register one — a company, an individual, a school, a family, a business registering it defensively. There is no non-profit test, no evidence to submit, and no geographic restriction, and there never has been. The belief that you must be a registered charity is the single most common misconception about the extension, and it stops people registering names they are perfectly entitled to.
The confusion has a source: Public Interest Registry, which operates .org, also runs .ngo and .ong, and those extensions do validate eligibility. If you want an extension that proves non-governmental status, that is where the validation lives. .org communicates intent by convention only.
When .org is the right choice, and when it is not
Choose .org when you want a reader to understand, before they read a word, that the thing on the other end is not primarily selling to them. Associations, standards bodies, community projects and foundations all get value from that assumption. It is a rare case of an extension carrying meaning without carrying a rule.
The same assumption is a liability if you are selling. A commercial storefront on .org spends its first impression correcting an expectation. If you are trading, take the .com or the .ch and register the .org alongside it defensively — which is the more common pattern anyway, since an organisation's detractors have historically enjoyed registering the extension it left free.
Who owns .org, and why it was fought over
Public Interest Registry is a Pennsylvania non-profit corporation, named as such in the .org registry agreement it signed with ICANN on 30 June 2019, and it describes itself as a 501(c)(3) whose board of directors is appointed by the Internet Society. That renewal removed the price caps the earlier .org agreements had carried, so there is now no contractual ceiling on what PIR may charge. What replaced the cap is procedural rather than numerical, and it is worth knowing if you are buying a name you expect to keep.
Under Section 2.10 of that agreement PIR must give registrars at least 180 days' written notice before any renewal price increase, and registrars may take renewals at the pre-increase price for one to ten years at their discretion. A long warning and a ten-year lock-in are the protection that replaced the cap, which is a reasonable trade if you use it. The governance question underneath all of this was tested in public: PIR filed a notice of indirect change of control on 14 November 2019 ahead of a proposed transfer from the Internet Society to the private equity firm Ethos Capital, and ICANN's board withheld consent on 30 April 2020. Commitments offered during that process belonged to a deal that never closed and are not in force; the notice period and the renewal right are, and the agreement itself runs for ten years from its effective date.
