[saxonww]

Yes, ICANN planned to sell the Public Interest Registry, responsible for .org, to a private equity group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethos_Capital

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fadi_Chehad%C3%A9

Note that the co-founder of Ethos was the former CEO of ICANN. The PIR sale was stopped but it looks like Ethos still ended up with the company actually contracted to operate the .org registry and the .org DNS provider. That whole sequence was and is outrageous.