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WHO Bid To Regulate Health Sites
Andy Smith writes "This BBC story reports on efforts by the World Health Organisation [?] to improve the quality of health-related web sites. They want a new TLD -- .health -- to be introduced. All .health sites would then be regulated by the WHO. Here's the press release, which predicts that 'dot health could soon be as well known as dot com'." It's quite an issue - do you want to be able to "trust" the health sites, assuming that's what regulation means, or do you worry more about the innovation of the sites being quashed by an organization?
Anyone sponsored by the world health organisation should return the favour by putting who after their title.
We need a new Doctor WHO.
I'm consolidating replies. Deal.
.health != censorship. Still plenty of room for .med. Or .medicine. Or www.realtruemedicalfactsIswear.org. If the WHO doesn't do a good job with their resource, nobody will use it, at which point they'll have economic incentive to give it back and let someone else have a go.
.health for? .xxx? Somebody's got to run it. Why not have people actually exercise a bit of discretion over what goes in what TLD, so that .orgs really are non-profit and .coms are only companies and .nets are only ISPs and so on? (And I personally still don't see .xxx as censorship; I see it as an excellent way for people who want porn to get porn and people who hate porn to avoid porn.)
1) Impartiality != inability to judge merit. Judges are in theory impartial, but their very job is to discriminate true from false, legal from illegal.
2)
3) People *are* too dumb to decide for themselves when specific expertise outside of their domain of knowledge is required. There are many things which each of us is too dumb to handle. I should not be allowed to make design decisions for particle accelerators. A nuclear physicist should not be allowed to set himself up as an authority in treating disease. If there are regulations on who can bill themselves as an MD and hand out medical advice in meatspace, why should the same rules not apply in cyberspace? The information doesn't gain extra validity from being on the Web.
4) The WHO is probably as qualified as any organization to set up a global database of summarized and easily-digestible medical knowledge. They're one of the biggest names in international medicine. I certainly wouldn't want something like this limited to just the AMA.
5) If not them, then who else? What would you use
1. Values are subjective and cultural .health
domain, for instance?
An American's PG-13 movie is an Iranian's porn flick. Or as fishbowl wote above, What are the odds that any "medical marijuana" information sites will ever be allowed a
2. Positive-value TLDs are a form of censorship. .health run and censored by WHO, there would still
be uneducated people who wouldn't trust WHO as a source of
information telling them that cell phones and power lines
can't give them cancer, and there would still be a large
number of people in L.A. who would seek out sleazy
inyeccionistas rather than trusting WHO's statements that
they should take fluids and aspirin if they have the flu.
The solution is education, not censorship.
The agenda behind positive TLDs is the feeling that people are too stupid to make up their own minds. KahunaBurger wrote I'm tired of this crazy internet attitude where people honestly think you can throw all the claims into the same pot and the accurate ones will rise to the top naturally. As a physics professor, I devote my entire professional life to making people smart enough to make their own decisions. From what I've seen, a definite characteristic of ignorance is to distrust the right sources of information because they contradict one's prejudices or assumptions. Even if we had a
3. Negative-value TLDs are the back door to censorship.
These may sound like they're more benign, since they aren't content-controlled. But the agenda is to force unpopular speech into an internet ghetto, where it can be easily filtered out.
4. Linking and subdomains work fine for endorsing content
All these organizations that are applying for positive-value TLDs are free to make their own web portal sites, with links only to the content that they deem OK. They are also free to give subdomains to people they approve of.
5. Power over an entire TLD's contents is too much to entrust to any one organization .health
to WHO because it seems like a scientific and objective subject.
Who ever said governments or unelected bureaucrats were objective?
Think back to Galileo's trial for heresy. Think back to the judge
who ordered Lavoisier's execution, with the words "The state
doesn't need scientists." Think of the politicians in Alabama
who require all public-school biology textbooks to have
disclaimers in the front about how evolution is "just a theory,"
and can't be proven because nobody was there to see it happen.
Nobody, elected or unelected, can be
trusted with power over a sphere of human activity as vast
as .health or any other TLD.
Many people seem to think that it's OK to give power over
6. What if they do a bad job? .health or .kids have shown they have what it takes to put together
a world-class web portal. If Yahoo or Open Directory does a bad
job, people will stop going there and they'll be replaced by
somebody better. But once the fix is in on a TLD, it becomes
a permanent entitlement. The likely result is that the TLD namespace
will become polluted with low-quality, sparsely populated TLDs,
just as the .com domain list currently reads like an unabridged
dictionary worth of placeholder sites.
None of the organizations applying for positive-value TLDs like
7. You would never know what you were missing. .health and .christian. They block
access to .com and .org, because, well, they has too much yucky stuff
on them. If the library is your only way to get internet access, then
you'd never know what was censored. Far-fetched? Let's not underestimate
the cluelessness of politicians.
Suppose your local library, under political pressure, starts allowing access only to high-quality TLDs like
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These are not the people who should be determining what is and is not good for you. A more valid approach would be convening an independent group of experts who would look at sites and give them their stamp of approval. They could also maintain a list of sites they considered quacky.
...
Political organizations are always tainted by their quest to increase their funding and power. If you doubt that, a close look at the EPA or the FDA should convince you rather quickly
So this group (WHO) is political and useless, but we should make another group because it would be better? How will this new group of people get funding and stay away from politics if they are rating all the medical information on the web?
You seem to be saying "these guys suck because they were appointed experts by the world" and that the solution is to appoint another group of experts by the world (just without all the bad parts).
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I agree with Harlequin Jones. If WHO wants to show that it deserves any standing among websites it could start by setting up a high-grade site of their own. yaWHO or something. Let's see if they know what they are doing on the Internet. (Do they already have a site? Never heard of it.)(Don't have the resources for a web site? Then they don't have the resources to regulate other sites, do they?)
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The advantage of a domain over an "Approved by the WHO" graphic is that it is much easier for them to control.
.health domain carries over an "Approved by the WHO" graphic.
Say I run a snake oil web site and I want to mislead the public into thinking that it is approved by the WHO. All I have to do is go to an approved site, save the graphic, and add it to my page.
Sure the WHO can take me to court and ask me to remove the graphic. But first they have to notice the violation, next they may have to spend the legal fees and a possibly a fair amount of time in court. In the meantime, who knows how many people have been to my site and been misled?
If they are the ones that grant the domain name, they don't have to spend any resources looking for and dealing with pirates who are misappropriating their "approved by the WHO" graphic and they don't have to worry about the misinformation that is spread before they can take action.
That seems to me to be a significant advantage (from the WHO perspective) that a
Respectfully, David Tallan
My god, you mean WHO hasn't single-handedly solved every health problem on earth yet? For shame! They're obviously corrupt because they spend any time on tobacco while people are starving (of course, they also do stuff about the starving people, but it's not solved yet so they're obviously not doing enough!)...
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Any body (formally or informally organized) serves, first and foremost, to ensure its own existence and to spread its influence. I was trying to point out that any organization serves its own needs first, even if it labels itself with a "non-profit" or "health" tag. Perhaps TLDs should also be handed out to individual corporations, so that, say, Microsoft can regulate the 'Net's contents of Microsoft related information. In this way, MS consumers could be sure that they recieve only the offical and correct information from the obvious single authority on such matters.
An MD thinks as economically as an MBA. Wise to keep in mind
Some of us have fallen in love with the notion of giving without reserve-Raoul Vanegiem, Revolution of Everyday Life
Nothing stops you from faking the information. What makes you trust any doctor?
Probably becuase health.com is already taken. And .com doesn't make too much sense for a information providing non-profit (?) organization.
This is reminiscent of the Oklahoma land grab. The territory of Oklahoma was off limits to settlement until 12pm on a certain date. The people who wanted a piece of land lined up at the border and raced into the territory to stake their claim before someone else got there.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
This is just a certification mark institutionalized in the domain naming system. As such, it doesn't bother me so much. The validity of the certification mark is entirely dependent on the percieved trustworthiness of WHO. If they mess up and start not including good information because it doesn't come from sources they approve of, the certification mark will lose its validity.
As for the comments people are making about whether or not the Internet is authoritative... It is no more or less authoritative than any other source. Every piece of information you get needs to be picked through critically. The idea that some source or another is somehow 'official' exists because of mass broadcast media. It's a historical anomoly that I think is in the process of being rectified.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
"WHO bid to regulate health sites"
"I don't know, who bid to regulate health sites?"
"Exactly."
"Oh, exactly bid to regulate health sites?"
"No, WHO bid to regulate health sites"
"Exactly."
"Now you've got it!"
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Just like you can't call your local GNC store a health facility and you can't claim that the products they sell can make you healthy then sites who don't want to be subject to the regulation wouldn't opt in to that domain. OTOH sites that do would have a defacto baseline certification like a seal of approval, for what it's worth. I think this whole topic has more to do with services than sites. So for example the eating disorder treatment specialist I saw on the news and who handles all his patients online only would have to certify into the .health domain in order qualify. By extension you would have all of your financial dealings through intermediaries in the .health domain such as HMO's <keeping with the myth that HMO's have anything to do with health, wink> and so on. Of course all of this implies some kind of audit and policing to insure compliance.
First, this violates the first Amendment (not that the UN cares, but people in democracies should be concerned about attempts to regulate any content).
Second, intelligent people do disagree on medical issues. For instance, herbal remedies or chiropractic medicine. Some say it's quackery, and others say it works, and shouldn't be banned just because the mechanism by which it works hasn't been understood yet.
Third, the whole value of the internet is its freedom. ANYONE can make a web site. But if the WHO is going to regulate anything, they will have to have prior approval. If they do, that pretty much bans all 'unofficial' health web sites. If they don't, that just guarantees that hospitals, companies, doctors and other credentialled providers have a huge regulatory hurdle to jump through, when the quacks and con men don't.
Really, what does this accomplish which the WHO can't do already with a gif, a review committee and a 'seal of approval'. If they like a web site, just give it the seal and the right to use the trademarked gif.
Answer: Noone cares what the WHO does or thinks. By getting the force of law behind them (through ICANN's power over TLDs), they are hoping to grab legitimacy and importance by force-- when they certainly haven't earned it.
Wouldn't the best way to do this be with an SSL certificate from the WHO? Provided browsers could present this certificate in a way that ordinary users understand.
:-))
(Hey, Rob sneaked in another reference to the WHO on Slashdot
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Hi, but what about web sites of people which a sick of a determinated illness. Usually you can more help (in the case of rare diseases) from other people experience. .
Check the case of Diabetes insipidus and the site of Diabetes Insipidus Foundation
bye
OverLord
Interesting experiment: (1) Open the dictionary to a random page and pick a random English word. (2) Check, and you'll almost certainly find that word.com is registered. (3) Now go to word.com and see if there's any useful content there. There almost certainly isn't.
The beauty of adding TLDs is that it increases the number of intelligible, memorable domain names by many orders of magnitude, which would make it economically impossible for the same losers to buy up every domain name. (Well, I'm sure Internet Solutions would love to see them try ;-)
But proposals like this will just pollute the TLD space in the same way the .com space has already been polluted. All that's going on here is a type of inflation. It's no longer sufficiently prestigious to own a .com or .org domain. Now, you need your own TLD to show how important you are. If ICANN starts approving all these censored TLDs, you can bet that in a few years, the same dictionary experiment will yield the same result for TLDs that it currently gives for .coms. The only difference is that a TLD is thousands of times more expensive, so ICANN will rake in the bucks, and the internet namespace will become the property of big corporations.
If WHO is so wonderful, let them build their who.int site into a world-renowned, high-quality portal that everyone will go to because it's so great. Yahoo and Open Directory did it without having .yahoo and .dmoz TLDs.
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Innovation in making up bogus medical reports? It should only be facts.
Why should an international organization like the WHO which is not beholden to the people of the world be allowed to regulate? I say let each country decide how it will or will not regulate. The UN (the WHO is a UN agency) smacks of elitism more than anything else. They don't trust the popularly elected democratic governments in the west to run their countries and internet access.
Assuming that the WHO takes the time to be impartial about stuff at the edges of knowledge (as in "we have no clue why this works, and we haven't entirely proven that it *does* work, but we're pretty sure it's not going to hurt you"), this would be a Very Good Thing. There is an ungodly large amount of health misinformation on the net, and most of the sites that have true scientific data force you to pay or be affiliated with an institution to access it.
.health, it's probably right; with other stuff, be careful." It'll probably be turned down, following the same precedent as .xxx, but I wish it wouldn't be.
Being able to simply look at a domain name and know "this is solid peer-reviewed stuff" would be great, and it'd be even better to be able to tell patients "If it comes from
As long as they don't try to shutdown health related websites that aren't in the .health TLD, more power to them. Most people are intelligent enough to decide if they want FDA approved drugs, or if they're willing to do their homework and try alternative medicines, why not the same thing for web sites?
Never ask a geek why, just nod your head and slowly back away. -Rob Malda
OK, another example, vaccinations. The WHO are rather keen on assaulting everyones immune system with these foreign proteins.
Sure there are plenty of raving nutters who oppose the WHO. However that is no validation of WHO's actions. There are some very odd people opposing Micros~1, does that make free OS's wrong & Windows a stable, useful OS? Probably not.
http://fsfeurope.org/
The Rolling Sttones are going to regulate all the websites by all the drug companies.
All the best,
--Bob
"alternative" is a bad name because it implies that you have to do one or the other. Many of the non-wacko practitioners of such fields as herbalism, accupressure/puncture, massage, etc now refer to their practice as "complementary" or "suplementary". This sort of use is supported by many mainstream doctors as well, with the understanding that you have to tell your herbalist what "regular" medicines you're on, and your doctor what herbs you're taking. It's all chemicals, whether its produced in a medical plant or a medicinal plant. (ok, that pun probably failed miserably, I was trying to play off of plant=green thing, herb, vs plant=manufacturing building.)
Note to the orriginal poster - what the hell are you talking about? WHO is not the AMA, and from what I have seen, has a broad yet appropriately scientific attitude on alternative/complementary medicine. And when did the WTO come into this? Lose the ultra-independant mindset, a large organization dedicated to world health acting as a gatekeeper for all the BS out there is a good thing, and the snake oil peddlers can still hang out in .com making folks like you believe them even more because "the medical establishment is afraid of our challenge to their power, and refuses to let our wisdome be heard!" What a ripe load of BS.
-Kahuna Burger
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Giving the WHO control over .health sites would hopefully let them influence other health organizations and maybe even provide a forum for individuals to share information on health organizations in their region.
Excellent point. They, or the AMA or FDA or whoever I choose to trust, could also create an "approved" branding scheme with a trademarked graphic and have a page of links to approved sites. Having a single, largely unaccountable bureaucracy have control over a domain is unnecessary.
The AMA can quite literally suck me off. They are another unsactions hate-mongering machine, similar to the WTO, which is unregulated, and for some reason people seem to care what they have to say. WELL I SAY if your doctor is well trained, no matter what discipline, you are in better hands than some rich white boy who's daddy bought him a degree any day of the week.
Now if we could just get the US gov't past the marijuana thing...
Really? I think most people would want to find out more about any group that they were going to trust with their lives. ;-p
Bet you'd trust Jeb Bush to declare an election result, too
http://fsfeurope.org/
Registrant: TimePublishingVentures(HEALTH5-DOM) 1271AvenueoftheAmericas NewYork,NY10020 US Recordlastupdatedon28-Jan-1999. Recordexpireson23-Mar-2001. Recordcreatedon22-Mar-1995.
(end comment) */ }
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I mean, I'm opposed to any new TLDs.. but beyond that.
This is not conspiracy.. this would actually not be bad (if I didn't disagree with the concept of adding new tld's in the first place).
Nothing is stopping them from doing this under who.int! or getting health.int up! After all, they are the world health organization!
The idea of 'okaying' things is just fine (ever read the Oceania constitution? Same idea). There is absolutely nothing wrong with an organization giving it's approval to many sites, and telling the public what that approval means.
So long as they don't try to eradicate sites that DON'T want their approval, I say it's perfectly fine.
This already happens to a degree. You can try alternative medacines if you want (kind of hard if the treatments you want require prescription drugs though). You do not HAVE to go to the health-board approved people. You only have to understand the difference.
I think this is a fabulous idea. Why? Because anytime you go to a site in the .health domain you can be confident that you're getting medical information that agrees at least in part with the opinions of the medical establishment. As much as we gripe about doctors and HMOs and other features/bugs of Western medicine, they do a pretty decent job.
.com or .org or .ws or any other TLD they choose. Perhaps we can even form a new gTLD, .ill, for health-related sites that aren't WHO-sanctioned. =]
.health site is guaranteed to contain valid medical knowledge, does not imply that a non-.health site is guaranteed not to contain medical knowledge. That's one hell of a fallacy. If WHO were proposing to regulate all health websites, I'd be up in arms. But they're simply proposing to carve out a hunk of the DNS namespace and set it aside in the name of conservative medicine. If I open my own health website under a different TLD (sex-prevents-heart-disease.com?) and it's popular enough and useful enough, then its domain name really won't matter.
So what does this mean for health sites that the WHO won't sanction? Are they out of luck? Certainly not! They can set up a beautiful website under
Seriously--the fact that a
But all physicians are related - they've all been through medical school, they've all been through the state-sponsored "health" monopoly gateway program ("licensing" exams), and they're (almost) universally whipping boys of drug company. Most doctors don't care about dealing with what causes health problems, they only deal with symptoms. An example: I've been troubled by an RSI for quite some time (almost a year now). A month ago I went to the student health center to get a referal to a chiropractor (as recommended by various parties on slashdot). The guy basically said "haha, what do you know? A chiropractor can't help you. Here's some drugs, if they don't work we'll send you to the surgeon". I didn't want to be dependant on drugs, so I bought a copy of Pain Free at Your PC, and am now able to type without as much of a problem. (I believe that I should be doing the exercises in the book more often to be completely pain-free...)
How would a comittee of physicians deal with something like a report on how to achieve superhealth? Sure, some might be open minded, but most would turn off their critical thinking skills after reading the fourth line: "Consider the possibility that people in general, and the "medical profession" in particular, do not understand very much about the etiology (causation) of heart disease." When your comittee of physicians disagrees with information, it's defacto censorship. People searching out information to "become their own doctor" will look at a report such as the one above, but then think "well, the WHO said it's mostly bullshit, time to move on". The next site they go to will probably be by some "authority", such as the mayo clinic's site or the AMA's site. And their money stays in the hands of the state-sponsored health monopoly. In short, most doctors just don't have a clue.
Not all physicians are closed minded though... If you can find one who really cares about making his patients truly health, you're in luck.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
of statements like this
when posters are talking about how dubious some alternative health information is on the web.
Try some facts:
Japan experienced yearly increases in small pox following the introduction of compulsory vaccines in 1872. By 1892, there were 29,979 deaths, and all had been vaccinated. [1] Early in this century, the Philippines experienced their worst smallpox epidemic ever after 8 million people received 24.5 million vaccine doses; the death rate quadrupled as a result.[2]
As for
Improved sanitation and hygienic practices lead to a drastic reduction in this disease before mass vaccination was even introduced.
(1) Trevor Gunn, Mass Immunization, A Point in Question, p 15 (E.D. Hume, Pasteur Exposed-The False Foundations of Modern Medicine, Bookreal, Australia, 1989.) (2) Physician William Howard Hay's address of June 25, 1937; printed in the Congressional Record.
http://fsfeurope.org/
A "WHO Certified" graphic is not a good idea. It is too easily stolen and put on non-approved sites. Certificates and other such authentication requests get more complicated than we need to.
Some of you don't like/trust WHO. That's fine, that's your right. People have linked to various web sites showing the evil that WHO has done. Regardless, WHO has been responsible for some very GOOD things, like the elimination of small pox (Okay, they do have some stored, but there has not been a person infected for I believe over 20 years). In any case, imagine the following.
WHO gets granted and begins using the .who domain. Lets say I am a strong believer in the WHO and trust their findings. As a reasonably informed user of the internet, I know that by going to www.cancer.who (or whatever disease/virus/ailment you want) I am getting accurate information from an agency I trust. Is this wrong? Lets say I distrust the WHO, I know that anything in the .who domain is something I won't necessarily believe or at least take with a grain of salt.
So maybe this will expand and other national health organizations will want their own TLD (Health Canada, AMA, etc). That's something that can be decided at a later date. Remember, the WHO is generally well respected in the world as backing up reccommendations with evidence. I won't say facts, as previous posts have mentioned, you can't say Drug X will cure Ailment Z.
Personally, I'd say don't let them have .health, but give them .who.
Yes, TLD was not meant to be flat, but how deep does it have to get before we become a little more free with TLDs. I'm in favour of this, .xxx for porn, and probably more proposals I haven't heard of.
Seriously. All the WHO wants is to ensure that the materials on these sites are accurate. I doubt they give a hoot about how it looks, so long as it isn't deceitful.
If you leave it in private hands, then the bottom line becomes more important than accuracy and truth of the information. WHO is an unbiased organization run by the United Nations. "WHO" better to oversee .health sites?!
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
-John Lennon
Gee, good thing WHO isn't the US, isn't it (rolls eyes). I hate to break your paranoid bubble, but WHO is an international organisation (first hint : the W stands for "world" not "wow the United States is great and noone else knows anything) and draws heavily from European nations (where midwifery is the norm). And the "medical establishment" isn't as monolithic as you seem to think, even in the US. For instance, if you're smart (or lucky) the midwives you worked with were CNWs or certified nurse midwives. They are part of the medical establishment, even if they argue with other parts. There are also obsetricians who work with midwives in case a high risk condition emerges.
Anyway, the worldwide "medical establishment" has eliminated smallpox, decreased the danger of polio and generally improved the lives of millions of people. Maybe you shouldn't insult thousands of dedicated people just because you had a bitchy OB/GYN.
Kahuna Burger
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Would this be the same World Health Organisation that was accused by New Scientist of supressin g information on cannabis?
PigPog.
I don't understand your logic. Because traditional modern medicine doesn't have all the answers they can't have a TLD?
.health sites (to some extent). If you don't trust the WTO, than just ignore the .health sites.
.gov, so I can go to irs.gov and d/l my tax returns without having to worry if irs.gov is REALLY the irs's web site or not.
The TLD will just mean certified by the WHO. If you trust the WTO you can trust
For instance I don't trust the government to tell me the truth about a lot of issues, but I'm still glad there's a
http://overwhelmed.org
what would be best would be notifications prominently displayed on any given .health site of the medical community's acceptance of said treatments, regimens, drugs, etc. That way you could have alternative treatments, new drug therapy combinations (drug cocktails), yoga, exercise sites and the like. As long as there was some sort of cohesive rating system and the ratings were updated, both internal and for the actual sites, on a regular basis, I don't have a problem.
Of course, being in glowing health (for a computer geek) means that I won't be using it as much.
Eric Gearman
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Since, if you don't agree with WHO, you don't have to be in .health. After all, no one seriously thinks that .mil violates the 1st amend since it's restricted to US military? Or .edu being restricted to schools?
Best Slashdot Co
...and it sure would be nice to know that .sex and .xxx domains really will be qualified smut, not just the head of some high profile actress cut-and-pasted onto another body.
--Benjamin Franklin
Franklin's quote shows that there are at least two more TLDs that we should be considering here.
By the way, I'm now the (unelected and unaccountable) administrator of the new organization ICANT (Internet Censorship Administered through New TLDs). ICANT's previous TLD proposals are here and here.
I'm glad that the proposed registrar for .health is
an unelected, unaccountable, international
organization with a big enough budget that they
can afford to throw $70,000 at ICANN for a new TLD,
without having any proven track record of operating
a top-drawer web portal, even at the domain level.
Based on the same criteria, I propose that .wisdom
be administered by the Church of Scientology, and .wealth by either the Sultan of Brunei or
the Kennedy family.
By the way, ICANT has been getting lots of annoying e-mails from people saying that they want information freedom. We wish they'd shut up. The problem is that freedom is too much work for most people. Censorship is much easier.
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Hopefully we never /..health. :
--Benjamin Franklin
Franklin's quote shows that there are at least two more TLDs that we should be considering here.
By the way, I'm now the (unelected and unaccountable) administrator of the new organization ICANT (Internet Censorship Administered through New TLDs). ICANT's previous TLD proposals are here and here.
I'm glad that the proposed registrar for .health is
an unelected, unaccountable, international
organization with a big enough budget that they
can afford to throw $70,000 at ICANN for a new TLD,
without having any proven track record of operating
a top-drawer web portal, even at the domain level.
Based on the same criteria, I propose that .wisdom
be administered by the Church of Scientology, and .wealth by either the Sultan of Brunei or
the Kennedy family.
By the way, ICANT has been getting lots of annoying e-mails from people saying that they want information freedom. We wish they'd shut up. The problem is that freedom is too much work for most people. Censorship is much easier.
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Thats odd, my uncle died from lung cancer caused by cigarette smoke and he never smoked! His secretary, however, was a chain smoker.
Another strange note is that I heard the exact same story but with pot smoke inserted instead of second hand smoke. Could this be an Urban Legend (tm)?
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My site has been instrumental in at least two cases in preventing people being treated for CSR with the very thing - cortisol - which causes it. Because it is a rare condition, incompetent treatment is not uncommon.
I am adamantly opposed to this proposal. The WHO should do what everyone else does - put up their web pages, and earn their reputation. Instead what they are proposing is that they become gatekeepers to all health information on the internet. I don't object if they want to create a system whereby you can have a 'WHO approved' logo on your site, but putting one highly bureacratic organisation into such a powerful position is a recipe for disaster.
This is not in line with the internet model which is that people should be able to decide for themselves what they believe. Anyone who believes that officials have their own best interests at heart and that they have no conflicts of interest is naive. This system would also introduce huge delays in getting information online.
Haven't these guys ever heard of a contract? Someone infringes on your service mark, and you can lay the smackdown upon them in the court system. These guys obviously just want a little more ink in the newspaper than would be given if they created a seal of approval.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Actually, the WHO is one of the few organisations that uses .int - who.int. Quite what the position would be in giving out subdomains of that to unrelated organisations, however, I dunno -- it would probably be frowned upon, as the purpose of .int is quite clear.
will probably always be around as long as there is progress in real(?) medicine.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Well, trying to get a TLD out of it under their own control is very ambitious, but if I read their project right, it could be worth a TLD to do it (or it might not).
.org, not a .com. We're talking about the WHO here after all, not a pharmaceutical company.
If they can manage to get enough sites under their TLD, that means thta they can offer a lot of information to a lot of subjects. Reliable information on a subject as important as your health and those of your loved ones, how important is that?
How many go to the library to consult medical dictionnaries when they have a health problems? Most importantly, how many people in the general population, in the global population?
To give them an easy way to get the information would be a big bonus. And existing sites could probably get their sites there rather quickly (if they can get the approval done in a reasonable manner). That gives a seal of approval and trust for people who might not know a lot about the subject.
This kind of things would be inconvenient to put under a subdomain name I would think. It is more combersome, and more difficult to reach the whole population as easily like that. BTW, if that is ever done, it would be under a
Of course there are all the alternative medecine sites, but they don't want to remove those, only put the "right sites" on the spotlight. Comparatively it could harm those sites if they can't get in there, but in this I'd side with the WHO. You don't really want to be using hemeopathy to treat your cancer. I'm fine with people using it, but I would sure never recommend it to anyone like that. Not when I don't know the active principles and how it works and study thereof.
And if there's any organization who could and should put something like that off, I think it's the WHO, I hope they manage to get the project going (and hope they will even if they can't get their TLD).
This is exactly right, or at least part of it is. I don't think the .com part is central.
.kids or .porn -- the idea that people who want to distribute some sort of rating or trust info ought to be able to use TLDs to do it. The problem with that idea is that there are countless possible ratings systems that we might need to distribute, and it really doesn't make sense to have too many TLDs.
But I agree completely about the hierarchical nature of the DNS system. The WHO should use subdomains under their own name -- who.org, or whatever.
This is really the same issue as using
It makes more sense to look at the existing systems to deliver rating information, ranging from SSL's hierarchical key certification, to the W3's PICS standard to just putting a gif on a site that says it's certified, seeing where the shortcomings are, and coming up with a consistent, elegant, reasonable, and non-authoritarian way to deliver rating information consistently.
Okay, it had to be said. But how about if The Who regulates Woodstock 2019?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
>> And health-industries are industries, aren't .com!
...
>> they? Should be under
In area's of the world where decent public health care isn't available, perhaps. In the rest of the non-US world this isn't a truism. I certainly hope that the TLD's aren't going to be *that* US centric
"The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth." -- Bene Gesserit Precept
This particular move, not only limiting the .health domain to health-related info, but to also have the information scrutenized by WHO, has several benefits; users know that the information there should be factual or otherwise they have a way to point out disputed information to some organization in order to have that information fixed or removed. What will probably happen is that sites that do go to .health will be generally more high-quality sites with better standards for information and will make sure to self-regulate themselves to keep them that way, and any site that is not doing so will be challenged by the WHO for why it should keep the .health domain.
I dunno how much it will catch on as with .com, however; webmd.com, for example, is well established and I doubt they want to give up their name (though I bet they'd grab a webmd.health domain).
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Health information is unique. It makes sense to have some form of objective evaluation of sites providing healthcare information.
If that's your goal that the WHO is one of the worst choices you could make. They are a political organization with a political agenda, and as such their conclusions should be considered suspect, if not highly suspect.
A couple of years ago they did a very comprehensive, well designed study on the issue of Second Hand Smoke. Much to their displeasure and horror, they found that it caused no harm at all. They tried to bury the report. When the British press, though constant hounding, embarrassed them into publicizing their results, they issued a press release. In the body of the release they admitted that the tiny increases they found were not at all statistically significant, but they outright lied in the headline.
More information is available here.
These are not the people who should be determining what is and is not good for you. A more valid approach would be convening an independent group of experts who would look at sites and give them their stamp of approval. They could also maintain a list of sites they considered quacky.
Political organizations are always tainted by their quest to increase their funding and power. If you doubt that, a close look at the EPA or the FDA should convince you rather quickly
-- Get Smartenized! Read the Hittman Chronicle
I think health information would be fine content for a .health site. Marketing hoopla and unsubstantiated information could be ruled out (as in no Bob dole talking about E.D.).
Think about it with "diet suppliments" in the US. There are plenty of substances that claim to help you burn fat or put on muscle that all kinds of people SWEAR work, but most of them say "these claims not investigated by the FDA." It doesn't mean they don't work. It just means the FDA hasn't qualified the claim.
If the WHO is going to do some kind of effort to set forth a qualification scheme, more power to them! At least you could then go to a .health site and know that it was approved by the WHO.
If you don't trust the WHO or you think it's evil, great, ignore the approval. There's nothing that says you have to think that a .gov site has any kind of legislative authority over you, or that a .edu has any business teaching the masses, but for lots of people, those qualifications are significant and give the viewer some kind of trust in the information on those pages.
Quite frankly, .com, .org and .net mean nothing to me, other than "we were lucky enough to find a domain we could buy."
Odds aren't so slim. Research on Selenium performed over the past several years has shown remarkable efficacy in prostate cancer. Research on St. John's Wort is turning up the heat for FDA to take some initiative in regulation because of potentially fatal interactions with your "AMA approved" drugs. And lets not forget the alternative therapies that get out into "mainstream alternative" practice sans research, like the fine art of pressing children to death during "rebirthing" procedures. And would you ever take anything called "rolfing" seriously? Not unless it has to do with Muppet pianists...
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Joshua
Terradot
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!
the cancelation of Dr. WHO. It was part of a secret deal to resolve a trademark dispute with the World Health Organization.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Nitpick, perhaps, but this proposal is not for the good of the internet, it is to promote health. The outside influences should be restricted to promoting health rather than one groups economic interests, but I don't think we need a broad coalition of sys admins and router managers involved.
Its also funny that so many people are just assuming that alternative and complementary therapies will be ignored, instead of recomending that their advocacy groups try to get involved. Instead of assuming that chiropactic medicine, for example, will be completely excluded, the question should be "is a recognized chiro group getting involved to help seperate good chiro from bad chiro?" Unhelpful or dangerous alternative practitioners are a greater danger to the field than mainstream medicine could ever hope to be.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
There's a lot of room of fraud in the definition. I was diagnosed with "fibromyalgia" (fibro = muscle, myalgia = pain). The test with how sensitive they observe your reflexes to be. The test is not that objective. Even then (I was in 7th grade at the time) I wasn't to sure of it. (I was a big fan of Sagan and the Skeptical Inquireror even then, and new something was up).
Later one (by the time I was in ninth grade), FM was reclassified as "FMCFIDS" (fibromyalgia-chronic fatigue-immune defenciency syndrome). A lot of fadishism was involved.
What I think they were doing is lumping many vaguely similar maladies together under one umbrella. FMCFIDS did not include spasms, or memory loss, but I suffered from those. Also, my mom and I felt that the fatigue/immune defency (and even depression, which fortunetly I didn't have!) were just a function of the pain and the stress associated with that.
But all this is a great argument in favor of freedom of information on the net. All this information was available. Skeptical articles saying it's hooey. Fibromyalgia support groups which were sappy. (To my horror, I found out the majority of sufferers were women! Ugh!) Israeli articles about spontaneous remission in schoolkids. There was no WHO controlling the flow of it.
And if there is a .health TLD, the WHO will be involed! Reputable journals already have their own domains. The bureaucrats will come out, and say "we have to protecttthe people from bad information, we have to protect the people from themselves," and regulate medical information just as they regulate medicine itself.
The "con" side was led by a fellow student. The student just kept repeating the same thing: "look at the evidence, then make up your own mind." I didn't take his advice. Instead, I assumed that if the WHO was advocating fluoridation so strongly, then it must be good. The majority of people seem to have thought the same: the "pro" side won the referendum.
In the last few years the official story on fluoridation has changed. Fluoridation might be far more dangerous than was supposed at the time of the referendum. Children's toothpaste is now with very low--or no--fluoride, for that reason. The safety level for adults is not really known. In fact, at the time of the referendum, little was actually known about fluoride safety levels. Yet the WHO claimed that its proposed level of fluoridation was certainly safe for everyone.
There is a good "con" site at http://www.npwa.freeserve.co.uk/. This site is an important part of the campaign that has kept Britain 90% fluoridation-free.
I don't really know for sure, but I suspect that if the same situation existed today, the WHO would prevent a "con" website from going up under .health.
The WHO can make mistakes, there is lots of internal politics, and there is a great deal of conservatism in what is called "medical science". The WHO will face up to none of that on their own.
Another good example is with acupuncture. It is only in the last few years that proper experiments have been done, showing that stimulation of acupuncture points affects related areas of the brain. For example, stimulating the acupuncture point associated with hearing affects the part of the brain associated with hearing. And stimulating nearby skin has no effect. (There is an excellent summary article in The Economist here and another good summary from Britannica here ). Again, although the WHO might accept such sites now, they would likely not have done so ten or more years ago.
If the WHO really wants to encourage health, how about a special seal/label/badge that could be put on websites: "This cite certified by the World Health Organisation"? Such a seal would have many advantages, and avoid the main disadvantages, of a regulated .health TLD.
>Creating .health would set a precenende for
.biff. The person who invented the naming heirarchy had a dog named Biff, and now Biff is implicitly immortalized in every internet address name in the world.
>hundreds and hunderds of toplevel domains.
This is a little known fact, but there is only *one* top level domain in existence. Since every address has that single top level domain, it's implicit and we don't have to type it. *.com, *.org, *.net, and the upcoming *.health are actually subdomains of that one toplevel domain that exists. You can't actually type the toplevel domain on addresses because all the routers have been optimized to reject address with the redundant toplevel information. But, just for the record the official toplevel domain that is implicit in every internet address is
Believe it or not!
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Personally I am against the idea of a whole new tld for health. There are many larger groups of websites online that don't have TLD. [whatever].who.int should work just fine. As far as "trusting" the websites that are under .health, wouldn't subdomains suffice?
Government Of, By, And For The People... Not Monied Interests.
I could see this raising a big problem with sites that promote unconventional therapies and medicine that are't approved by the medical establishments. Take Dr. Lorraine Day's site or the Gerson Institute for instance. I doubt the methods of curing cancer described on Dr. Day's site would be considered as "adhering to agreed quality standards" by the health industry, for the simple reason that such a cure for cancer would hurt the pharamaceutical companies (i.e. Big Business). It's unlikely that WHO would let them become part of the .health domain, because these ideas are disapproved and mocked by the "medical experts". Meanwhile, such methods have been proven to be extremely effective, in fact more effective than the conventional treatments like chemo and radiation (but your doctore will undoubtedly deny it).
These alternative medicine sites could still continue to be hosted at a .com or .org, but they will be difficult if not impossible to find in the .health arena. People who have been told to trust only .health sites for quality medical content won't even give unconventional practices chance if they're not under the .health umbrella. With .health in effect, the public is shown yet another way to identify which practices are "good" and which ones to avoid and "shouldn't be trusted".
As I see it, this is just the latest attempt by the establishment to suppress effective and safe medical therapies that would hurt Big Business. It's disgusting.
On health care, the WHO seems to put more emphasis on equality than quality. Reports they have produced seem to indicate that they care less about whether average individuals are healthy than they do about insuring that everyone is of equal health:
http://www.cato.org/dailys/07-05-00.html
This is a difficult prospect -- as long as individuals have the liberty to make poor lifestyle choices (poor diet and excercise, smoking, drug use), some will always be less healthy than others.
I believe that the solution in the minds of those in power at the WHO is to take this liberty away from us for our own good. We have witnessed the anti-smoking crusade here in America already, and now Harvard professors are taken seriously when they speak of implementing sin taxes on foods that are high in fat, sugar, sodium, caffeine...for the good of society.
On any issue, not just health:
$a = liberty
$b = responsibility
!($a && $b) == (!$a && !$b)
HJ
-- A New World, Unordered http://www.anwu.org/
If the WHO wants to be in the web business and regulate the content, they should be ready to be sued if something goes wrong like any other company.
Have the X files finally gotten to you ?
WHO isn't about power, it's about health. I've seen the work they do and it's helping people. We need a global organisation like this because there are some health problems (pollution-related etc.) that cannot be solved on a national level.
In my opinion this might be a good idea. If you look for health information now, you never know which industry might be behind it to help their products sell better. The health industry is good at this, even funding research to show that their products work. I would like to be able to find some independent information on the web, instead of in industry-funded flyers your doctor passes around.
beauty is only a light switch away
between .health and .insurance?
Wow, now I can find out how fast my insurance is going to screw me in TWO places!
I gave up thinking of a cool sig
They are currently http://www.who.int. I'd never heard of .int before, but the IANA say it's for "organizations established by international treaties between or among national governments", and it's in RFC 1591.
.eu) if there is a need to distinguish UN related organizations from other international ones.)
(.un seems to be free as a two-letter pseudo-country code (cf.
rant
The same reasons that www.[city].[state].us and www.[company].on.ca here in Ontario aren't used - they're not as easy to remember. They ain't hip. They're too long. Too confusing. The "alway September" masses out there have been conditioned to www.[insertdomainhere].com. I'd be surprised if some even knew that .org, .gov, or .edu even existed!
(Nit-picky side note: besides, it'd be .health.org, as the WHO is an Organization, no?)
Besides, why NOT give them a new TLD? It's just bits and bytes, it's all free. Or just give them .who instead (as .health is rather Western-centric).
"There's a party," she said,
"We'll sing and we'll dance,
It's come as you are."
In reviewing submissions, however, the current organizations won't work. They have been infulenced by outside forces and therefore have their own intrests in each website as opposed to fighting for the good of the Internet. Being as democratic as the 'net is, a board of reviewrs should be elected by the internet at large, with to restrictions as to who can run.
BTW never vote for anyone named Jeb.
Quashing all alternative forms of medicine that don't conform to the voodoo science (IE: if its broke cut it out, the pill of the month club, and treat symtoms not problems)of western medicine. A better answer would be a WHO seal of approval. If a site isn't approved by WHO, then the consumer would know to investigate further before acting.
Poor health information can have very severe consequences. My girlfriend's father is one of the top Radiation Ontologists in the world, and he also leads an R&D lab which is doing work in both radiation and genetic ontology. Much of th rest of her family are also top doctors in the areas of bioengineering, psychiatry, nutrition, etc. It is on their authority I can say that a number of health sites on the Net contain information which is genuinely dangerous to your health. The lack of regulation of these sites is exposing people to danger, and it is not only the right but the duty of governments to protect their people. Doing so in conjunction with health professionals - that is, calling in the experts to help create treaty and legislation - is the proper way to "get it right" (don't we wish Internet experts were called in for Internet law issues?)
.health would be a big boon to small sites run by qualified health professionals who would like to provide high-quality online information and services to people. It would at least mean that the information on the site was of sufficient quality to meet a set of criteria for suitability for patient use. Some of the larger health sites would really deserve to fail this certification at this point - and the result would hopefully be that they would improve their information and services in order to get a .health... and thus the consumer's life is improved.
Not only will this help the consumer, it will also help promote healthy competition in the business. In response to the poor-to-dangerous cancer information online, my girlfriend's father and I put together a preliminary site regarding cancer treatment. However, lacking any clear regulatory guidelines for online health sites, we had two predicaments:
1) What could we legally do? He wanted to build a FAQ, and respond to specific questions. In the United States, you need to be certified to practice medicine in each state... What level of advice would be in violation of which state laws? Could we only allow people from New York to visit the site? What about international visitors?
2) Restricting ourselves to the types of services existing sites seemed to be getting away with, how could a small site with two people and hardly any money compete with financially well-off sites, most of which were in the top 10 popularity but had poor quality cancer information? There was no way, on the Internet, for anyone to believe that our site was any better - and it certainly LOOKED more fly-by-night, despite the credentials of the doctor behind it.
Just being a WHO certified
I think we Internet geeks who support lobbying ICANN and other governmental, quasi-governmental, and pseudo-governmental organizations and monopolioes on behalf of making the Internet better for the people actually ON the Internet lobby ICANN to accept this proposal.
o/~ we are pissed, we are pissed, we have to resist... o/~ - ec8or
Initially I wiew this as a good idea. Bad health advice can be downright dangerous, having a strong certification mechanism is a good thing.
However it does set a precedent, and we should think carefully how this, and other TLDs should be managed. A TLD is too valuable to be handed out frivolously. We need to be confident they will not be abused.
The present TLD system is pretty much silly. Other than for the US TLDs we have national TLDs. For most things on the net I couldn't care less about what nation whatever info I am after resides in. Functional naming instead of geographical is IMHO a good thing (TM). However when we do that we have to ask who will manage these new TLDs. With geographical naming it was easy. Whoever governs that particular area decides, but noone governs a functional area.
What we need is some robust, independent mechanism to grant and revoke rights to manage TLDs. With all the talk about owning real estate on the net maybe it's time the net got it's own government.
An entity not under the control of any single nation or corporation, perhaps somthing under the UN umbrella?
Anyone taking advice from a web site and not their doctor gets exactly what they pay for. Of course, I have a slightly different view being in Canada where a doctor's visit doesn't cost me anything (except *@#%$! insane taxes). I'm all for sites that are a layman's version of the Merck Manual, but anything other than that, and you're being silly.
HOWEVER - I will concede that it would be an excellent idea to have some online general health pointers, explanations, tips, and such for less-developed countries. Only problem with that is why would you assume someone who doesn't have access to any sort of medical treatment would have access to a computer, let alone the Internet??
If this proposal does go through, I want to know: is the WHO going to certify and oversee my vet's website, or do we need a .vet, too? :-)
"There's a party," she said,
"We'll sing and we'll dance,
It's come as you are."
The head of the WHO is the former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland. You guessed it, a social democrat.
.health, it might be a blow to alternative medicine as a whole, not just the snake oil peddlers.
Anyhow - if they want to certify content, why not just create a "certified logo", trademark it, and send their lawyer minions after whoever uses it without authorization?
I am very wary of this kind of straight-out regulation. Some of alternative medicine may be a hoax, but other practices have proven useful (like acupuncture). With
Stop the brainwash
I don't give a rat's ass about the .health tld, but the regulation bit has me up in arms.
Next big headline "WHO More powerful than WTO?" I can just see it. I already have to practically go to war with doctors all the time who make bad decisions because they don't know what the heck they're doing.
Fact: in the United States (and most European doctors are trained here) doctors do what they were told to do by doctors who where told to do... you get the point. I don't trust most doctors because they really don't use their heads. All they do is memorize a bunch of crap out of a book and then make decisions based on it. Most of the health-related websites, which I trust, go AGAINST popular opinion. People who know better because they do the research to back up their claims write those sites. This is because popular doctors dictate popular opinion, and they are normally nothing more than highly educated politicians.
To back up my claims: One of the best doctors I have known was a Paranatologist for my wife during her pregnancy. She was diagnosed with prenatal diabetes after taking the screening test. I had to argue with the doctor for an hour before he conceded that the test-results were entirely inaccurate due to the low-sugar consumption of a patient with no arms and legs. He was willing to bet her life on a textbook result from a test which was unfit for use in her pregnancy. I had to show him 6 references in metabolic research to convince him that the test was inaccurate. He didn't do the research.
I have had the same problem in similar cases at every doctor my wife and I have seen. They go on documented history and don't use their heads. Prescriptions are guesswork based on the same "match-and-win" approach to medicine. Over the last 60 years every single major belief of doctors has changed because of errors and flaws in treatment methodology. And now the WHO has all the answers and will be right all the time?
I think not.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
I'm still trying to figure out why Rob's favorite band wants a TLD entitled .health
"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
Read again, bucko. Nobody's saying they'll "banish" alternative medicine sites from the Web. They just want to regulate the .health TLD, that's all.
You can bet they'll try. The AMA and other "establishment" medical organizations don't want you to know about anything outside of their god complexes. Accupuncure, herbal remedies, and other alternatives to the western model of hospitialization, overmedication and invasive surgery are simply not tolerated (in the US at least)
For example, my wife just last week gave birth to our second son here in the comfort of our home. We've been relatively lucky to have found a family doctor (a rarity in itself) that will still treat her and our children. Her first OBGYN lectured her and pronounced that she would never treat my wife again if she had a home birth. Other women working with the same midwife practice we work with have had similar experiences.
The god complex of the medical establishment knows no bounds, and having control of the entire content of a TLD will only make it worse.
Better learn all you can about accupuncture, yoga, homeopathy and ROlfing now, before they get banised from the web.
Indeed a dark day for freedom on the web.
The World health organisation is one of the most significant organisations to encourage the use of dhmo as a medicine. While the health benefits seem to last for a couple of days, they have totally ignored the dangers.
DHMO has been found in cancers, in vast concentrations in endangered species, and has been known to cause vomiting. Excessive use is dangerous. WHO makes no effort to warn people of its dangers, yet does seek to make it available as much as possible. Tis is simply irresponsible
Those standards would be set by the WHO in consultation with "governments, medical associations, consumer groups, the health industry and others", it said.
I can imagine the lawsuits here. What will qualify for .health and what will not. Will a pharamcy retailer qualify for .health?
e.g. 'www.amazon.health'Someone you trust is one of us.
Whst's wrong with .health.com? Why can't they just create a subdomain? Why do they need a topplevel domain? The system was intended to be hierarchical, not flat. And health-industries are industries, aren't they? Should be under .com!
/. that a good idea might be to have the price on domains raise with the numbers of domains an organisation wants - that way, the system would force hierarchy. I like the idea, but it is to easy to work around - just have an employee register the domain name on him/her, or a daughter-company...
Btw, someone at some moment suggested here on
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
There are an awful lot of websites covering an awful lot of fields that appear to be "authoritative" at a casual glance, but that are actually riddled with inaccuracies, bias and half-truths.
Admittedly, not all of them are as downright dangerous as giving out dodgy health information, but people still need to learn to be critical of the information they may find on the web. "I saw it on the Internet" is still used by some people as an indicator that information is somehow more authoritative than that received from other, possibly more reliable, sources. Just look at some of the fantastical assertions that appear in the average day's load of spam, from "This cannot be considered spam as it is in accordance with House Bill 1618" upwards, for a fine example of this.
One of the problems with the Web these days is that nifty graphical design is still considered superior to accuracy of information, and J. Random Luser needs to work out that frames and Shockwave don't necessary mean that a site's an authority on its subject.
The WHO is a well-respected organization and I should like to suggest that the title assigned to the post is horridly inaccurate ("WHO Bid To Regulate Health Sites"). First of all, if such a dot-health Top-Level-Domain (TLD) were to be created, they would only be able to regulate sites under that domain, or whatever provisions are agreed upon.
There is a wealth of inaccurate medical information, of which there are many instances where "findings" are very unfounded, often in the name of a commercial investment. If the WHO were to certify information as either accurate, opinion, whatever .. this would greatly decrease the chances of the many gullible people being exploited by commercialism -- not to mention people need to educate themselves, talk to doctors, and stop being so damn ignorant. Nothing can replace the advice of a doctor with whom you respect .. be s/he a respected medical doctor you don't personally know but much about or your own doctor.
In general, when we (as Slashdot readers/writers/editors/admins/moderators .. including myself, admitedly) complain about something being blatently inaccurate, we consider the stupidity of the creator and frown upon any attempts to censor this information, no matter how inaccurate. The WHO is attempting to establish a system whereby it is able to certify certain information or opinions or whatever. They are not censoring anybody: .com,.net,.org are theoretically "free" from censorship by everybody. They are basically allowing the credible sources in.
I would like to apply a censorship theory often used when dealing Internet access in Libraries and apply it to this situation, where the logic speaks for itself: A library may not arbitrarily decide against acquiring a book or dismissing a book from the public shelves. Likewise, some claim, the Library should not arbitrarily filter certain key words or other things from the internet, since they've basically acquired the entire Internet, as they might have with books. As stated above, the WHO would probably have qualifications for obtaining a .health site, where the resident would maintain the site as agreed to.
...should stick to power chords and rock operas.
HH
Clearly the WHO is one of the most effective and important global agencies we have.
--
What are the odds that any "medical marijuana" .health
information sites will ever be allowed a
domain, for instance?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
That's how I read it too, except my mind went directly to "WHO let the dogs out -- WHO! WHO! WHO! WHO!"
--
I rather be safe than sorry. There are ALOT of shams going around in real life. We don't want that kind of CRAP circulating online. People preaching and circulating miracle cures and trends are just plain snake oils. WHO's just doing its job in safeguarding peoples health. It's not a matter of it squashing individuals right to innovate but on what's factual and safe. This is not like software where in freedom to innovate should rein unhindered. Imagine your health practitioner not being duely licensed to practice medice. Scary isn't it?
I think having .health regulated is better then not. If a doctor wants to have his information published he has to go through peer review, clinical tests, etc. If Joe Smack Drug Maker wants
to publish a site on .health I think they should have to go through the same process.
.com .org .net pool.
We have to many sites on the net that you can't take to be the truth, and you have to figure out for your self whats to be trusted and what isn't. Having a group of educated medical specialists looking at that info gives me a better sense of security. This doesn't prevent Joe Smack Drug Maker from publishing his site, but that's for the
It makes some sence to have a .[your certifyed] type domain.
.health domains...
.heath.. If they don't want the WHO regulations then they have to accept a lesser stand...
As far as hiarcy.. that's kinda dead becouse of the way people use the Internet...
Altavista was once altavista.dec.com.. It became altavista.com before it was sold off..
People like quickjump domains... They are lazy...
Accually that is a good thing in some ways....
The DNS isn't obsolete but it's design dosn't match the way non-tech people think.
A new enity that better matches the way people think could replace it...
As for regulating content... You'll just know that Altercare.com isn't certifyed by the WHO... but MainstreamMedical.health is...
Yes it'll put chains on some websites but not all.
Some people want/need some way to know the website is 100% lagit...
People buy magents and fat disolving lotions over the TV...
Thies people should know if they want 100% assurence that everything is ok.. go visit the
On the other hand if you are capable of sorting out the bull then go for it...
if a website wants to behave like it's dealing out nothing but 100% accepted medicen then they should get the
Part of this is just sad.. it speaks of people who can not think for themselfs....
But thats exactly the world we live in...
Windows 98 anyone?
I don't actually exist.
Note: This is NOT a flame. I really feel this way.
I agree with the poster above. People DO need to practice discretion in what they read on the web.
That said, why in the hell do I need a UN agency to tell me which sites are factual? And what does oversite mean? Does WHO get to tell the site what they can and cannot post? Anyone ever hear of the first amendment in the US? Fine, if the rest of the world wants WHO to censor their health information, let them have it. But in the US, we have the right to publish what and when we want, as long as it's not libelous, inciting riots, etc.
I think as a consumer, I can make an informed decision as to where I get my medical information. I don't need UN bureaucrats filtering/approving/officially stamping medical info for me.
I mean, what's next, the UN's WAO (World Auto Organization) that will have censorship rights over any auto-related site?
God, people are sheep. Always looking for someone else to tell them what's safe, what to do, what to say, what not to say.
EMUSE.NET
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
I don't mind an organization which can issue its stamp of approval, as long as that approval is not a requirement to exist.
.health TLD?
Hence the WHO needs to have someone make sure they don't prevent sites from achieving certification simply because their views are not in total agreement with WHO.
An example of where this would cause trouble. What if a medical site provides good information but strongly discourages abortion, and points out to medical problems that can arise from both proper and improper execution of the medical procedure? Would WHO disapprove? If so, would that be grounds to disallow the use of the
That is the true danger of letting any organization determine the usage of a paticular TLD.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The study found a Relative Risk (RR) for spousal exposure of 1.16, with a Confidence Interval (CI) of .93 - 1.44
This means that no conclusion of increased risk can be drawn from the study. It may be that the 16% increase in risk is noise, or it may be that it is real but a larger sample size is necessary to demonstrate it in a significant way. It does not mean that "they found that it caused no harm at all."
It may be possible to demonstrate that the study had sufficient power to detect a certain level of relative risk and to set an upper bound that way, but that has nothing to do with the numbers you present.
--
Health information is unique. It makes sense to have some form of objective evaluation of sites providing healthcare information. They may not mean this form or proposal is appropriate and not that I am supportive of censorship. You should be free to claim anything you want on the web. But, if a comittee of unrelated physicians disagrees or supports your results, then they should have the right to say so, and if I ran a website, I'd want to advertise that fact. Making this international could really help a lot.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Presumably this would work a bit like .gov at the moment, where you only get granted a domain if you really are a government agency. You'd only be allowed to register intestines.health if you are a reputable source, like a hospital or a published researcher. It sounds like a good idea, as it should at least provide some level of assurance that the site hasn't been posted by a total quack.
They could just as easily establish themselves as a powerful Internet presence simply by designing a very useful health-related website of their own. They could then "regulate" what other websites will be granted hyperlinks from their own.
This whole notion of an entire top-level domain being regulated by a global government strikes me as yet another grab for power. They wish to control what individuals around the world may see, hear, and think.
HJ
-- A New World, Unordered http://www.anwu.org/
As with everything else online, telling what is real and what isn't is next to impossible for someone without expert knowledge in the field. Just look at some of the hoaxes that have fooled thousands of the more gullible users, and they are relatively unsophisticated. People tend to believe what they read, especially when it's dressed up in a respectable looking webpage.
When it comes to health, a site that is pushing incorrect information, either through malice or incompetance, is endangering people's lives, and in much the same way as shouting fire in a theatre is illegal, it should be punished to the full extent of the law.
Having a WHO-approved TLD would mean that people could be confident that the advice they are getting is at the very least accurate and safe. It's one thing moaning about porn sites taking misspellings of people's names, but having people's lives put in danger is a whole order of magnitude different.
I think this is a great idea. I can't think of any reason to oppose it.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
A)bort, R)etry or S)elf-destruct?
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
The change it had to come. We knew it all along. We were liberated from the fold, that's all. And the world looks just the same, and history ain't changed. Cause the banners were all flown in the last war.
Yeah, meet the new boss... same as the old boss.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
The FDA is at least in theory accountable indirectly to the people whose decisions it affects. The WHO is accountable to ... who?
This is a list of those still in the running.
Compare it to the proposals which were accepted (two weren't accompanied by the $50 000 required and those who proposed the .nyc
didn't agree with ICANN about what should be confidential or not).
Compared to some, .health seems quite reasonable indeed. One can understand what it's for by its name and one can guess who's in it and why. I can't say that for more than half of those still under consideration.
National Public Radio reported on this on Monday. You can hear the story here in real audio format.
On the whole, this is a proposal I support. For the same reasons that we license health care providers we should certify providers of health care information. Note that this doesn't preclude alternative practitioners or alternative theories from being promoted on the web. But it does make clear who is offering a treatment that is not widely approved. And since my slumlord was also a homeopathic doctor, I fully support dividing the MD's from the folks pushing St. John's Wort.
Wait... you mean you still haven't joined the ACLU?
They have the same amount of autonomy in some regards as most soverign nations, they should probably have their own domain. They seem to be using un.org right now.
Then you have who.un or if they want health.un, so the authority is clear.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It makes it clear _who_ (in this case: _WHO_) is regulating the content. I see no reason to create a top-level domain for each organization which would like to regulate part of the net, they can do that now.
I'll stop now
Regulating certain TLDs is good, and does not squelch other's free speach as long as there are some TLDs that are not regulated.
.gov and .edu -- isn't it nice that you don't have to wonder if a .gov site is the government or just some prankster?
Think about
Just remember that the TLD doesn't certify the accuracy of the information, only the source.
http://overwhelmed.org