[4] In November 2019, the Public Interest Registry (PIR) was to be sold by the Internet Society to shell company Ethos Capital for US$1.135 billion.

[6] However, this move was criticized by non-profits and various digital rights groups on concerns that Ethos Capital, a private equity firm, would raise fees or censor the domain.

Although organizations anywhere in the world may register subdomains, many countries, such as Australia (au), Canada (ca), Japan (jp), Argentina (ar), Bolivia (bo), Uruguay (uy), Turkey (tr), Somalia (so), Sierra Leone (sl), Russia (ru), Bangladesh (bd), India (in) and the United Kingdom (uk), have established a second-level domain with a similar purpose under their ccTLD.

[16] For German, Danish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, and Swedish IDNs this has been possible since 2005.

Since 2003, the Public Interest Registry (PIR) charged its accredited registrars a capped price of US$9.05 per year[19] for each domain name.

In April 2019, ICANN proposed an end to the price cap of .org domains[20] and effectively removed it in July in spite of having received 3,252 opposing comments and only six in favor.

01-05 was issued, the Committee, reconsidering the matter in December 2011, concluded that the possibility that the public will be misled by a for-profit law firm's use of ".org" in its website address is remote, as a reasonable person, desiring to verify whether an entity is non-profit, would not rely solely on the entity's website address.

Therefore, the mere use of ".org" by a for-profit law firm was declared not to be a violation of the Arizona Rules of Professional Conduct, and Opinion 01-05 was modified accordingly.