I have been writing about ICANN’s slow moving dotPro (.Pro, really, but half the time my newspaper subscribers seem to miss the . so I’ve take to spelling it out). But I was a little surprised to find the following:
Co. Finds Loophole on ‘.pro’ Web Names (washingtonpost.com)
NEW YORK — A company has found a loophole for selling Internet names ending in “.pro” without the usual credentialing requirements, prompting complaints from the Internet’s key oversight agency.
It’s a long story I don’t have time to tell right now, but for the last half year or so it has been possible, thanks to the good folks at ICANN (the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers) for North American lawyers (or accountants or health care folks), ICANNs contractor RegistryPro and a group of the RegistryPro’s contractors to apply for and get a dotPROFESSIONdotPRO — as in bayerlawfirm.law.pro or drbayer.med.pro — domain name. All you needed was some sort of official credential and $200 - $300 for the first year, and you were in business. Presumably, you want to have a dotPro designation because this proves to the world that you are, in fact, a lawyer or doctor or whatever. Except it turns out that you can get dotLAWdotPRO if someone on your staff is a credentialed lawyer, so it really doesn’t mean that your firm is a law firm, anyhow. (Presumably, GeneralMotors could get GeneralMotors.Law.Pro because it has a legal department. Or at least, that is the way it was explained to me. I don’t know if anyone has actually done that.)
One might also acquire dotLAWdotPRO to prevent others from using what you’d like to think of as your name, but if that is the only reason, you’d be better off if dotPRO never existed.
But it now turns out that EnCirca is now offering not only dotLAWdotPRO, but also plain old dotPRO domain names without any credentialing. dotLAWdotPRO is available for $199; a plain old dotPRO is only $99. I’m not sure what ICANN or RegistryPro is going to do about it. Or how EnCirca can get away with such offerings, anyhow. (The nature of the supposed “loophole” isn’t clear to me.) Nor do I know if, in fact, any uncredentialed dotPRO or dotLAWdotPRO domains have issued. (I don’t even know how many credentialed dotLAWdotPRO domains are in use.) But, as often happens, what should be simple, just isn’t.
If you’ve always wanted to show your professional credentials on the Web, surf over and get one. But of course, if dotPRO no longer needs any credentials at all, why bother?
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