Public Interest Registry (PIR) the operator of the .org extension is out with a list of reasons to register a .ngo/ong new gtld.

In May 2012, Public Interest Registry formally submitted its applications to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for the .ngo and .ong domain extensions as part of the organisation’s global Internet expansion initiative. Along with .ngo/.ong, Public Interest Registry also applied for the creation and management of four internationalized domain names (IDNs) recognized as “organisation,” “org” or “institution” in non-Latin-based scripts. The four applications include: one in Devenagari (Hindi script), .संगठन; one in Russian Cyrillic, .орг; and two in simplified Chinese, .机构 and .组织机构.

The four reasons that PIR lists are:

Validation

Establish Trust

Visibility

Global Reach

Honestly I thought .org already had these four qualities and that was the reason why over 10 million .org domains were registered. Of course there is not a strict policy on .org and there are commercial, for profit ventures running on a .org. The .org extension also has another characteristic of .com in that many of the top keywords are parked pages, names including: Hosting.org,Cloud.org, Videos.org,Games.org and Sex.org which was actually regged almost a year before Sex.com.

.NGO/ONG will be different than .org when it comes to who can register, from their FAQ:

NGO|.ONG will work exactly the same as .ORG does today, with one important exception: .ORG is an open domain where anyone can register – individuals, not-for-profits, corporations – to engage and promote communities. .NGO will be a closed top-level domain intended to serve only the non- governmental organization (NGO) community. It will be an exclusive domain extension for NGOs looking for immediate recognition online and broader opportunities for public engagement, funding, and partnerships. Organizations that are non-governmental, non-commercial and non-criminal qualify to get a .NGO domain, and there will be a validation process associated with registration to ensure that prospect applicants qualify.