More About The .org Reassignment

Joel Rowbottom writes: "After ICANN 'awarded' ISOC with the running of .ORG in the Draft Staff Report, public comments regarding the process are starting to come out of the woodwork. Eric Brunner-Williams has commented on the flawed scoring and ICANN allegedly using the process to financially shore up ISOC and Afilias; the dotORG Foundation have posted some comments and questions (quote: 'we are perplexed by the Academic CIO Team's rating of our bid's technology as marginal'); Carl Malamud has posted the IMS/ISC response; and Organic have posted a rather damning indictment of the process as well (disclaimer: I work for Organic Names). For the $27,000 it cost each bidder to 'participate' (and that's just the entry fee), we'd have expected a little more professionalism than just getting some 'free' t-shirts! Comment to ICANN today org-eval@icann.org and make a difference."

Comments

Will This ever end

[ResQuad]

They keep complaining and whining about ICANN, why doesnt someone actually get their butt in gear and do something?

Re:Will This ever end

[Anonymous Coward]

"why doesnt someone actually get their butt in gear and do something?"

You mean somebody else, right?

Why don't YOU get YOUR OWN ASS IN GEAR and do something?

Maybe whining on /. will fix it, right?

Write/call/fax your congresscritters, tell your friends, start a website, whatever.

If you really give a shit about icann & .org it's YOUR problem. Quit complaining and help.

Armchair quaterbacks, backseat drivers, .....damn

Re:I'm sorry, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

[Having unlimited TLDs are bad] because when you advertise, people not only have to remember your address but your TLD as well.

This is a really silly argument. I run my own business, and when I advertise, I certainly don't expect people to remember my phone number, my name, my address, and my website address. These things are printed in the yellow pages, on business cards, and on brochures. If someone visits the site enough, perhaps they'll memorize the URL, just like with a phone number.

Are you aware that there are over 250 TLDs right now? When someone types in platypus.ee, do you think they're aware that .ee is the country code for Estonia? It could be "Electrical Engineer" for all the average user knows--the ending isn't important, it's what's on the site that matters.

People with no knowledge of the Internet at all don't have any trouble with unlimited TLDs, because they're not preconditioned to associate meaning with the extension, and think everything has to be a .com, .org, or .net. And people with a lot of knowledge are likewise unaffected by this "it's confusing" argument, because they know that the domain name is just a layer of abstraction over IP addresses. It seems to be only those half-educated few in between, who possess just enough knowledge to be dangerous, who get their feathers ruffled over the concept of unlimited TLDs.

When I was a kid, I lived in a small town where everyone had the same area code and prefix on their phone, and you could get away with dialing only the last four digits to reach people. It was hardly any great culture shock to be introduced to modern cities, where one had to remember 10 digits in a phone number? And these are totally random collections of numbers.

Seriously, this is a pretty weak argument for keeping monopolistic restrictions on TLDs.

Think again

[0x0d0a]

So I'd almost call this post a troll, but it has a point -- that maybe commercial types would do a better job.

However, you're missing one thing -- the informal group of volunteers and engineers that produced and have kept much of the administrative side of the Internet going for thirty years now *are* the open source/volunteer types that you're bashing so much. As a matter of fact, the commercial types are the untested ones, not the volunteer engineers.