-eric

But my personal business isn’t really a good example, since (a) I mostly work under my own name (Sarah Welstead), and that DOES deliver great Google results and (b) all of my clients are referrals. I don’t actually accept ‘random’ clients, so I don’t care how findable StayAwake is from a keyword perspective (and I knew, even 10 years ago, that the chances of being found from a search for ‘stay awake’ as 2 words were virtually nil).

As a general rule, I agree with you on the desire for ‘short, relevant, memorable’ keyword domains – which is why I think .jobs and other domains should be more widely available. The more of a monopoly .com has on credibility, the worse it is for anyone who doesn’t have $100k to secure (i.e. buy from a cybersquatter) a good .com domain that isn’t some huge long bastardization of their company name/function.

@David Thanks for the clarification, and I can appreciate the concern around allowing a single 3rd party, for-profit organization to have too much control.

However, I still think that relaxing some of the regulations would deliver a long-term benefit for everyone, because as I said, NONE of the recruiting and HR professionals I’ve spoken to in the past 12 months (including some very senior, successful ones who tend to know their industry VERY well) had any clue .jobs even existed.

Maybe one of the benefits of the current hue and cry will be improved awareness…

@eric – The rights that Employ Media is requesting seem so different from the rights that I see the other managers of domains exercising that I am amazed that this has not raised more eyebrows in tech and domain policy circles.

@Master – I’m hoping that there was a serious discusion of exactly that in today’s PDP Council meeting.

@Sarah With only about 15,000 sold, most don’t consider the .jobs domain to be a commercial success. Indeed, that lack of commercial success is probably the only reason that this proposed change did not generate more outrage. If the exact same proposal would have been attempted with the .com domain, it would have been front page news in every newspaper in North America.

To be clear, the amendment considered by the SHRM PDP Council today was not ever going to open up more domains to be purchased by the general public, as you describe in the case of the .ca TLD. In this case, Employ Media was asking SHRM to amend the charter to give them the broad ability to either sell the new domains or maintain ownership of them while still allowing other other parties to use them. Theoretically, they could use this power to allow anyone to buy them, but their announced plans were to develop all of said domains with a single partner, DirectEmployers, which sounds about as far from the opening up of the .ca domain that you describe as I can imagine.

And while I think I now have a better sense of the outrage this whole thing is causing (the lack of transparency and disclosure, the ‘change without due process and input’, etc.), I still can’t quite understand.

Yes, I understand SHRM wants to prevent fraud and cybersquatters and protect ‘the HR community’.

But the whole thing reminds me of what happened with the .ca domain (that’s the official domain for Canada) circa 2000: The .ca domain was initially over-protected; you couldn’t get one without submitting a big application proving you had offices in more than one province; they cost a lot more than regular domains; and they had far less credibility than .com or even .co.uk.

The result? People like me, who started small businesses at the time, were forced into getting URLs like http://www.StayAwake.tv because I didn’t qualify for a .ca domain and the .com one was already taken. Even larger companies sometimes didn’t qualify, and the process was (for the time) such a pain in the neck that they just didn’t bother, and kept using .com.

The result of THAT? .ca domains never really took off, they didn’t confer credibility, and didn’t take any of the pressure off .com domains – all that happened was that your customers outside Canada (and even sometimes IN Canada) were like “What the heck is your URL about? What’s .ca? Where ARE you?”

Finally – I think in 2003 – the .ca domain was opened up more widely. There was some of the same hand-wringing about CIRA (Canadian Internet Registration Authority) along the same lines I’m seeing here with SHRM, but in the end, more Canadian companies got more .ca URLs for less money – which gave the .ca domain more credibility and more Canadian companies an easier way to make a name for themselves online. The .ca domain was not suddenly held hostage to zillions of evil cybersquatters, most .ca buyers were legit, and most companies were able to get the URL(s) they needed.

If the SHRM was so invested in the .jobs domain, and it’s so important for companies and HR practitioners, how come 98% of the recruiting and HR professionals I’ve spoken to in the past 12 months don’t even know it EXISTS?

If you are an EmployMedia partner, that puts a gun to your head… that doesn’t seem good for DirectEmployers or SHRM or its members.

Putting the domains to some good use is one thing, and creating an exit strategy for EmployMedia is another.

Perhaps the proposals put forward by Employ Media and Direct Employers will prove to be in the best interests of the HR community and even the general public, but that can’t be known until all of the stakeholders have had an opportunity to understand the issue and weigh in on it.

With an almost complete lack of transparency over the entire process — even that the issue exists — the process reaks. The work of ERE here has been exemplary.