Actually, the whole point of choosing the cooperative form is to avoid doubt and risk in governance. We don’t have to make the choices you’re positing, because our rights are actually enshrined in law. Cooperatives are one of the oldest forms of collective enterprise, and there’s four hundred years of law governing them. The rights of cooperative members (every .ORG registrant, in the case of CCOR) are much more strongly guaranteed by law than are those of, for instance, shareholders of a corporation.

Every member of a cooperative gets an equal vote in all governance decisions, and it’s not possible for the board to change that, that’s guaranteed by law, not contract or charter or agreement or anything. It’s also not possible to create membership “classes” with different rights. Also, the rights of capital are subordinate. Creditors, for instance, get no say in what happens.

That’s governance. Finances are equally clearly defined, but instead of one-vote-per-member, they’re proportional. If the wholesale price of a .ORG domain remains $9.93/year, and the savings (which are the “profits” in a corporation like ISOC) are $4, those savings are guaranteed by law to be distributed back to the members proportionally with the amount of business they did. Someone with one .ORG domain will get $4 back at the end of the year, someone with ten .ORG domains will get back $40, et cetera.

We don’t have to debate these terms, because they’ve been inalienably guaranteed by law for the past four hundred years.

Which is why we picked a cooperative as the best form for self-representation.