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.edu Expansion Blurs The Lines

Posted by timothy on from the what-about-primary-and-elementary dept.

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."

2 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. Blah! by GoRK · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    Even better, they ought to move the k12 subdomain to .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..

  2. My Possibly Stupid Question by Babbster · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Why should I care about this? Is there some risk that a potential student is going to get confused and type in www.dawnsbeautyschool.edu instead of www.princeton.edu?

    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.