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TLD Registrar Wants To Charge $300 For .Pro Names
dipfan writes: "The commercialization of the net continues: RegistryPro, the ICANN-approved registrar of the new TLD name, wants to charge up to $300 for .Pro addresses - or about 10 times the price of a .com address. The company says it will restrict .Pro to doctors, lawyers or accountants: 'qualified professionals in good standing ... .pro will be a premium brand, enabling effective, secure communication between professionals and users for the first time in the history of the Internet.' The Washington Post quotes RegistryPro's chief executive: 'The goal of RegistryPro is to build out a gated community for professionals on the Internet.' Is this what happens when you give one company a license to print money?"
Prostitutes won't be able to register...
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Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
Seems they'd have even more claim to the ".pro" space than the doctors, etc...
And then there will be the professional porn sites, the professional gambling sites.. the professional pop-up ad sites.....
Don't Tread on Me
Doh!
.pro here i come.
The company says it will restrict .Pro to doctors, lawyers or accountants: 'qualified professionals in good standing ...
And just how do they determine who is 'qualified' or 'in good standing'?
Oh, yeah.... I forgot about the $300.00 'proof'.
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As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
On top of being able to resell em, they have class value :)
God spoke to me
"what this company is doing with .Pro domains is innovative."
Seperating stupid people from their money by offering to sell symbols of success is not innovative. Read "The Emperor's New Clothes" for prior art. 8*)
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
frankly if that name did become wildly popular there is nothing stopping the country registrars from offering .pro.au or .pro.uk and the like
Wow, you wouldn't want to be in Belgium, would you?
Don't worry, .serf is coming to the internet soon. All of you less important, non-professionals will be able to buy .serf domain names for a lot less than the $300 .pro name. However you will have to pay a yearly tithe to your local lord (check out the .lord, .knight, .baron and .royal endings to find out your local overlord) for the use of such an ending. And you aren't allowed to vote either.
Ok, I realise they have pretty poor sanitation, but I wouldn't call Spain, France, Italy and Portugal third world countries!
use constant PERL_IS_BROKEN => $] >= 5.006;
Gated communities are nothing but economic discrimination at its worst.
Economic discrimination? That's a new one--"BigCorp. refused to sell me their product just because I didn't have any money to pay them! I'm being discriminated against!"
And this type of discrimination usually takes into account all other types of discrimination including racism, sexism, elitism, etc.
Sexism? There probably is an all-male gated community somewhere, but I'm not sure sexism is the motivation...
I don't mind people being rich. I mind when they think they are special or better because of it.
So it's okay for people to be rich, as long as they don't buy things that other people can't afford.
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Benjamin Coates
They left the 'n' off the end.
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
I can see the conversation with the registrar already:
.pro domain name for myself. Where do I fax my credentials?"
"Yes, my name is Seymour Edward Xavier, Ph.D. I'd like to register a
(If you don't get it, think about it for a minute.)