Here is my attempt at writing a nice simple form letter that everybody could use.Maybe
if we can make it easy enough to complain, somebody besides myself and a couple of
others will actually do something outside this forum!
Feel free to criticize this
form letter, as long as you also post an improved version....[grin] Just be
sure and send the form letter out to people, groups, organizations, etc. etc! rather
than just in here.
Sir;
I would like to inform you of a rather unusual
aspect of the ICANN - Verisign agreement that is currently being discussed.
The
proposed agreement would force most .ORG owners to give up their domains. This
includes individuals, families, open-source projects, small 'help' sites and many
others. Anybody who isn't officially a non-profit organization registered with
the I.R.S (or appropriate agency with other countries.)
The idea seems to be to
force .ORG 'back' to its 'non-profit only' status. Unfortunately, there are
several things wrong with that.
1) .ORG was *never* intended solely for registered
non-profit organizations. It was intended for miscellaneous items that did
not fit into .COM or .NET Way back then, it was generally expected they would
be organizations because it was hard to believe that any individual would ever want
a domain. None the less, it was still intended for *anything* that didn't fit
into .COM or .NET
2) Out of sheer necessity, .ORG has been distributed to individuals,
groups, etc. for many years. There simply aren't enough .COM and .NET domains
for the entire world.
3) .COM and .NET are not being forced to only commercial
and ISP sites, so why .ORG? It is worth pointing out that .ORG is the TLD that
VeriSign is losing control of.
4) It is way, way too late to change .ORG now.
.ORG has been in use for years for open-source, family web sites, personal web sites,
misc. help sites, etc. If ICANN wishes a TLD for genuine registered non-profit
organizations, then we propose .NPO for them.
What are individuals supposed to
do? Crawl under a rock and pretend we don't exist? If it wasn't for .ORG we
(and many others) wouldn't even have a place on the web.
ICANN has suggested that
there will be an 'appropriate' transition period. Meaning you get to register
your domain for one more year and after that, you wont be allowed to again.
Meaning you are still forced to give up your domain. A domain you registered
with the intention of keeping it for life. A small place on the turbulent web
you could call 'home'.
ICANN is planning on introducing new TLDs, of course.
Unfortunately, most of them are restricted TLDs. Only .name and .info would
be available to individuals, open source projects, or small 'help' sites. And
it's doubtful those TLDs will ever be popular. Probably no more popular than
the 'alternative TLDs' that have been proposed recently by other companies, such
as New.net
If ICANN had done this 5+ years ago, and given us a dozen new TLDs to
use, then it wouldn't be so bad. But instead, they deliberately delayed the
new TLDs, fighting it every step of the way. Two TLDs (.com and .net) are not
enough for an entire world. There was no choice but for people to start registering
.ORG for their own (non profit) purpose.
For those of us in the U.S., we can't
even register a useful .US domain, like most countries allow. Instead, all
we are allowed to get is a geographically organized .us domain, such as JohnDoe.LosAngles.ca.US
A fourth level TLD like that is worthless for almost everybody. It's barely
usable for local governments. It was organized that way to provide more domains,
but it's actually had the effect that everybody avoids it completely.
For U.S.
citizens, only .COM, .NET and .ORG were available. Since we weren't companies
or ISPs, neither .com nor .net were appropriate.
For some reason, ICANN is
*not* publicizing this point. They are not notifying .ORG owners they are in
danger of losing their domain.
Nor is ICANN offering any sort of compensation.
Not a free alternative domain of your choice (which, of course, is still unuacceptable.)
Not even a free lifetime registration of our current .ORG domains (so we could be
guaranteed of being 'grandfathered' in). Nothing.
Here is the link to
the sole news article that any news site bothered to write:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/17299.html
Here
is the link to ICANN's own forum:
http://forum.icann.org/nsi2001/
ICANN's
forum has been fairly vocal about the problem, but unfortunately nobody outside of
there is noticing. And ICANN is apparently not listening. (Nor are they
telling us that we've misunderstood!)
The *ONE* message that was posted was in
the very beginning and pointed out they would generouslly allow a transition period.
We
would like for you to read this email, read the URLs given, and then consider informing
your readers and subscribers about this.
Sincerely,