I don't expect anything good to come out of this for the current IRC users. Hopefully they aren't going to play the embrace-extend-extinguish game in the long run to steal the name for their own proprietary protocol.
London Trust Media have pretty public and open positions on Net Neutrality, user privacy, and open source software.
They are a major donor to various open source projects, and are the primary sponsor of the FSF's LibrePlanet conference (to name one that I happen to be aware of).