UK Edition
Rise in price of .org websites could damage trust in charities
A rise in cost of the .org domain could damage faith in charities, the Charities Aid Foundation has warned.
A price cap on the domain, which is used worldwide by millions of non-profit and charitable organisations, has been lifted by its US operators, leading to concerns that it could become too expensive for charities.
Rhodri Davies, head of policy at the CAF, which provides fundraising help and services to UK charities, and has a .org domain, said a price rise could cause charities to move to other domains like .ngo, causing confusion.
"One of the benefits at the moment is you have at least at least one very well known and globally recognised domain name, that indicates to people that what they're looking at is likely to be a charity or a social purpose organisation.
"If in the future, the pricing changes, and suddenly organisations have all sorts of different domain names, it's going to be much harder for the public to know what it is they're looking at. And that will get confusing and will probably have a negative impact on on people's trust," he said.
Many major British charities, including Prostate Cancer UK, Child Bereavement UK, Cancer Research UK and Water Aid use the domain for their websites.
But there is also concern that smaller organisations could be affected by the end of the cap, because they are more vulnerable even to minor price changes.
A consultation by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which closed earlier this year, attracted more than 3,000 responses in support of keeping the cap, with just a handful supportive of removing it, but the change went ahead anyway.
In response to the consultation, Dorset-based charity Word Forest, which plants forests and establishes schools in Kenya, pleaded with the organisation not to remove the cap.
Simon West, the charity's managing director, wrote: "This could impose a significant extra cost on organisations which need every penny they can get to use for good purposes."
Mr Davies added that many British charities had been caught unawares by the change, and that it could be damaging to levels of trust, which are already falling.
A report by the organisation earlier this year found that the number of people who donated to charities declined between 2016 and 2018, as did the proportion who believed charities to be trustworthy, which fell from 51 per cent to 48 per cent.
The decline is thought to be linked in some areas to concerns about governance and fundraising, as well as a broader decline in trust in institutions.
The Public Interest Registry, which operates .org, has insisted it has no plans to raise prices, which are currently set at $8.25 (£6.59) and can rise by no more than 10 per cent each year.
This restricts what it can charge to the companies through which organisations register their website address, such as Namecheap. There is typically a markup introduced by these companies but it has historically been kept relatively low due to competition between them.
Organisations can renew their ownership for up to ten years at a time, and until now had been protected from the cost of their sites rising steeply in between renewals.
Announcing the updated agreement last week, the PIR said: "We would like to underscore that Public Interest Registry is a mission driven non-profit registry and currently has no specific plans for any price changes for .ORG.
"Should there be a need for a sensible price increase at some point in the future, we will provide advanced notice to the public."
Websites using a .org.uk domain operate under different rules and are not affected by the change.