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.edu Expansion Blurs The Lines
klaricmn writes "Yahoo is reporting that the US Department of Commerce has decided to ease the regulations that govern the administration of .edu domain names. Read the official release on the Educause site. This change would allow a for-profit training institution such as "Dawn's Beauty School" to apply for a domain name in the same TLD as Harvard or Yale."
Okay, I missed the first paragraph of the article - I don't see why distance-learning and theological schools shouldn't have been allowed to have .edu domains before. But check out this quote:
"Somebody who goes six months to a beauty school, I would not consider in the same league as somebody who's even been two years at a community college," said Ralph Meyer, a retired administrator at Princeton University. "There's too much dumbing down already."
Wow! I guess this ex-administrator from Princeton believes that a person's academic background is typically ranked by whether the place of education had a .edu domain.
I don't think it should be about "two years at a community college" - it's not for places competing with colleges/universities - it's for places that provide you with an education. I'm not religious, but theological schools shouldn't have been blocked before. Likewise, is distance learning somehow inferior to Princeton? Not necessarily. You can still go to Princeton or some other "four-year institution or community college" and end up gaining very little.
This sig intentionally left bla... dammit!
Who's got the whiteout?
In 1993 - 1994, they used to let secondary schools and in some cases even elementary schools and middle schools register .edu domains. If they open it up to vocational institutions, they also should open it up to the legitimate primary and secondary schools they took it away from before.
.edu and create a lot more subdomains for .edu to handle this kind of stuff.. Training institutions and other vocational schools can get a domain in .voc.edu after a certain amount of time or whatnot, other schools can register in elem.edu or somesuch..
Even better, they ought to move the k12 subdomain to
I admit that I'm not an networking engineer, so maybe there's some very complex technical issue I'm missing here. If so, enlighten me.
If the only argument against it are schools previously in the .edu domain feeling like their domain is cheapened, I say get over it. Unless there's obvious abuse like someone registering prindeton.com and trying to pass themselves off as being Princeton University, there's no issue - and that issue would seem entirely separate from which TLD the site is in.
If Dawn's Beauty School is teaching its students something ( edu cating them), then they would seem to have just as strong a claim to having an .edu domain - which to a lay person who hasn't read the docs on the origins/requirements of TLDs just means "school" - as Princeton, Yale, Reed or Oregon State. Elitists should take a pill.