“Roblimo” Miller –
Today, the Internet Society
(ISOC)
announced that it is applying to take over
registration of “.org” domain names when
Verisign’s contract with ICANN expires on
December 31, 2002. ISOC is a non-profit group, and membership is open to anyone interested in the
Internet. It would certainly be fitting for an
“org” to handle “org” registrations, which were
originally supposed to be reserved strictly for
non-profits.
Get more information from
this
page.
There are about 2.4 million “org” names currently
registered. ISOC is one of them. Slashdot.org is
another, although many could correctly argue that
Slashdot is now a commercial entity, so Slashdot.com would
be more appropriate. (Note that Slashdot is now Slashdot.com as well as Slashdot.org. Note, too, that NewsForge.org
resolves to NewsForge.com.)
Often site owners, including OSDN, which owns
both Slashdot and NewsForge, register the same
name under multiple TLDs [top level domains] as a
purely defensive move, to keep others from using
the same name with a different suffix, as it were.
Perhaps putting “org” registrations under control
of a strong, highly respected group like ISOC, a
true non-profit with a wide membership base
(anyone can join, including you) will help clear up some of this
confusion. It’s worth a try, anyway.
This is by no means a done deal. ISOC may or may
not be able to pull this off.
There’s a letter of support you can (and should) sign, and
you don’t need to be an ISOC member to put in your
two cents here, so you might as well go ahead.
Perhaps ICANN,
which controls the whole domain name schmear, will
listen, although there’s no way to be sure.
ICANN’s record of listening to the voice of the
general Internet populace is, at best,
spotty.
