Latest news of the domain name industry

Recent Posts

Employ Media asks ICANN for a .jobs landrush

Kevin Murphy, June 13, 2010, 19:26:49 (UTC), Domain Registries

The company behind the .jobs sponsored top-level domain wants to loosen the shackles of sponsorship by vastly liberalizing its namespace.
Employ Media has applied (pdf) to ICANN to get rid of the current restrictions on .jobs domain ownership and open hundreds of thousands of strings to the highest bidder.
The registry wants to amend its contract with ICANN to cut the text that limits .jobs domains to the exact match or abbreviation of a company name, and add:

Domain registrations are permitted for other types of names (e.g., occupational and certain geographic identifiers) in addition to the “company name” designation.

Employ Media is basically asking for the right to open the floodgates to a complete relaunch of the .jobs TLD with very few restrictions on who can register and what strings they can register.
Phase One of the relaunch would be an RFP “to invite interested parties to propose specific plans for registration, use and promotion of domains that are not their company name”.
It sounds a little like the current .co Founders Program, or the marketing initiatives Afilias and Neustar asked for to supplement the auction of their single-character domains.
In practice, I expect that this first phase is when the DirectEmployers Association would expect to grab hundreds of thousands of .jobs domains under its universe.jobs business plan, in which it intends to offer job listings tailored to “city, state, geographic region, country, occupation [and] skill”.
Phase Two would see your basic landrush auction of any premium domains left over.
Phase three would be “A first-come, first-served real-time release of any domains not registered through the RFP or auction processes.”
While I have no strong views on the merits of this particular proposal, I do think that the application and ICANN’s response to it could wind up setting the template for how to operate a bait-and-switch in ICANN’s forthcoming round of new TLD applications.
If you say you want to do one thing with your TLD, and later decide you could make more money doing another, how much will ground will ICANN give when it comes to renegotiating your contract? It will be interesting to find out.
Reactions so far from the HR community have not been positive.
Steven Rothberg of CollegeRecruiter.com wrote that the process by which Employ Media’s sponsor, the Society for Human Resource Management, approved the new proposal “stunk”.
“The only winner here is Employ Media,” he wrote.
Comments posted at ERE.net, which has been on top of this story from the beginning, express what could be easily described as outrage over Employ Media’s plans.
The comment posted by Ted Daywalt of VetJobs.com is especially worth a read.
The Employ Media proposal has been submitted under ICANN’s Registry Services Evaluation Process, which allows comments to be submitted.

Tagged: , , , , ,

Comments (1)

  1. Jim Fleming says:
    June 13, 2010 at 8:09 pm

    In Theory, all of the current .JOBS domain name owners
    from the Proof-of-Concept Market Trials would have ONE
    vote each.
    Internet Governance based on Democratic principles has
    become an ISOC & ICANN Oligarchy. [A few insiders make
    all the key decisions.]
    Many of the theories postulated in the 1990s leading to
    the creation of ICANN, in 1998, have proven to be faulty.
    There is little choice but to start over and build a new
    Internet, with decades of experience.

    Reply

Add Your Comment