Or is this simply a representative organisation to protect the interests of domain holders?
Sorry if these are dumb questions.
Yes, the cooperative is of all .ORG registrants, and exists to protect our collective interests. There’s no way to have absolute unanimity among the better part of ten million individuals and organizations, but so far, we’ve heard from several tens of thousands of .ORG registrants, and only three (including ISOC and PIR) were in favor of having a non-competitive redelegation such as the proposed one from ISOC to Ethos.
So, CCOR has three objectives, one short term, one mid-term, one long-term:
In the short term, to stop this backdoor deal, which bypasses the established, multistakeholder, competitive process.
In the mid-term, to get ICANN to launch the multistakeholder-administered, transparent, open competition to select the next .ORG delegate.
In the long term, for the .ORG registrants ourselves to put forward the best possible proposal for operation of .ORG, in that competitive process. If the process is run fairly and we win, we control our own fate. If the process is run fairly and we lose, we still win, because it means that someone even better prepared to serve us than we are ourselves, will have won.
But this is a very mainstream proposal... it’s the established process for .ORG, and the outcome we’re looking for, self-governance, is exactly how .EDU works. Educause is the non-profit association of universities that runs .EDU by and for the educational community.
My personal hypothesis is that given an alternative recipient for the .org registry that's better in every respect except for the amount of money they're able to pour into the pockets of ICANN / Internet Society (ISOC), it'll be more difficult for these parties to pretend that the .org sale is about anything except graft.
As we've see from previously, morally flexible members of these organizations (e.g. Richard Barnes [1]) have claimed that the sale of .org to Ethos is really in the interest of the public good! As details continue to come to light, these arguments are going to get continually more difficult to make.
I'm not sure it's realistic the CCOR succeeds in gaining control of .org (although fingers crossed, it sounds like they'd be a far better than owner than ISOC or Ethos), but worst case, they'll force some additional transparency into the process.
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[1] http://www.circleid.com/posts/20191127_why_i_voted_to_sell_o...