I'm just an individual. I registered a .ORG domain because, well, because .com
was already taken (and I'm not a company, anyway.) And I'm not an ISP, so a
.NET wasn't appropriate. And although I'm a U.S. citizen, the .US domain is
so badly organized that it's worse than no domain name at all. So really, for
an individual, a .ORG was the only one that made sense.It's certainly not like
they've been providing more TLDs for us to choose from, so what else were we supposed
to do? Just quietly crawl under a rock and pretend not to exist? If over
the past 5 years they had given us other choices, they might have some moral justification
for action like this. But they didn't.
It's just a personal web site.
I don't make any money.
But it's mine and I've been using it for a while.
I registered
it in good faith. They accepted my money.
But now I'm being told that it's
going to be foricbly taken from me. (In most parts of the world, that's considered
theft.) They aren't even going to compensate us by giving us something of value
(say... Oh, a free lifetime registration of a .web or .www, or .per or .whatever
(I'd refuse a .name! Yuck!!! Nobody is ever going to use those new TLDs.))
They just plan on forcibly taking it away. To steal it.
They aren't planning
on forcing .NET back to internet service providers, or .COM back to genuine companies,
so why are they trying to force .org back to non-profit organizations, which if I
understand the previous posts, was never true anyway!
I guess that realistically,
it's not that big of a deal with me since I'm not going to suffer major financial
harm. Just a lot of inconvenience and feeling like I've been slapped in the
face. But I do feel like somebody has just broken into my home and stolen my
stuff while I'm asleep in the next room.
And I know a lot of sites that don't make
a profit and are run by an individual (or small group) that this would effect.
(A lot of open source programming projects spring to mind.) They aren't legally
non-profit organizations. They are too small of a group to be able to put up
with all the paper work to even think about becomming a legal non-profit group.
They are, however, in every other sense of the word, an "organization" and "non profit"
and would certainly be entitled to a .ORG. Except, of course, ICANN is disagreeing.
If
there is a class action lawsuite, please count me in. It's not the money for
me to register a new domain, it's most definetly the principle!