CALLING ALL INDEPENDENTS:
'LET THE DOT-ORGS RUN THE DOT-ORG'
ID endorses IMS/ISC Proposal.
Call to action
A small, self-funded band of Internet pioneers wants to change the way dot-orgs are registered, but they need your help.
Trusted.resource.org, a non-profit run by Internet pioneers, would like to run the dot-org registry as a public trust ... not as a profit center.
ICANN, the Internet body charged with making such decisions, will likely give the job to a corporation rather than this non-profit dot-org group.
Trusted.resource.org's only chance is to demonstrate community support. Put simply, if enough of us voice our support, ICANN may award the dot-org registry to the most competent team (the dot-org team) instead of the greediest or best-funded one.
INDEPENDENTS DAY endorses Trusted.resource.org and encourages all independent site owners and creators to do likewise by posting a comment on the IMS blog at http://not.invisible.net/signals/bin/000055.shtml.
CORPORATE REGISTRIES DO NOT WORK FOR YOU
Corporate registries do not work for you. And most barely work at all.
In theory, domain registries have one purpose: to serve the public by carefully and accurately maintaining records showing who owns what site and where it is hosted.
In practice, domain registries have quite a different purpose: to make as much money as possible while providing little to no service. Set up solely to make profits, these registries operate without supervision or oversight. They constantly make mistakes, and are unlikely to fix most of them.
Who gets hurt? Small, independent sites and small business sites.
CORPORATE REGISTRIES KILL INDEPENDENT SITES EVERY DAY
Through carelessness, incompetence, and inertia, corporate registries are constantly harming and killing small, independent websites.
Any site owner who's registered a domain knows what kind of service to expect from corporate registries like Verisign/Network Solutions. Your domain can be sold out from under you. It can be wrongly assigned to a company that has nothing to do with your site. Your domain may lapse without notification. It can lapse even if you've paid to renew it. You can spend ten hours on hold without ever resolving your problem. You can send email that will never be answered. You can send forms proving your ownership, but no one will ever confirm that your forms were received.
Verisign/NetSol is the largest and most famous offender, but they all pretty much suck. If you're a big enough corporation, you can probably get some help when a clueless registry's incompetence screws up your business. But if you run an indie site, a personal site, a dot-org, or even a small business site, when you're hosed, you're hosed. These companies could care less about you. They don't get the web. They just make money off it.
TRUSTED.RESOURCE.ORG WANTS TO CHANGE ALL THAT
Trusted.resource.org is a non-profit dot-org created by people who were contributing to 'net and web culture before most of us learned how to plug in a modem. Their only interest is in running the dot-org registry as a public trust (instead of a corporate bust).
Read their proposal: http://trusted.resource.org.
Think about it. Then make a difference by showing your support: http://not.invisible.net/signals/bin/000055.shtml.
Thanks for listening.
INDEPENDENTS DAY
