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Ask HN: Who would you send a tech-related investigative story tip to?

10 points by ecaron ↗ HN
If I was a better blogger, I would probably try and build/break the story myself. But I'm not, so I'm seeking the wisdom of the crowd...

ICANN will soon be voting on a change to the .jobs TLD. They took comments on it for a month (http://forum.icann.org/lists/jobs-phased-allocation/), and just released a summary of all the comments (http://forum.icann.org/lists/jobs-phased-allocation/pdfD2L3BBFXOj.pdf). The thing is that this "summary" so biased that it is hard to talk about it without sounding like I'm making it up. But I'll give an example...

In the summary, they give the following list as a sample of the companies that oppose the change: American Veterinary Medical Association, National Science Teachers Association, Pacific TransUnion LLC, Job Target, IAEWS members, Newspaper Association of America, CareerXroads, LatPro, Inc., and NAFSA: Association of International Educators.

Not in the list: Google. Which is interesting, because Randy Levinson of Google submitted a fantastic article regarding the need for the rejection (so http://bit.ly/d8Zx3b). Somebody at ICANN nuked the record of the letter though (http://forum.icann.org/lists/jobs-phased-allocation/threads.html) - thank god for Google Cache.

Any directions on who I should try to tell this story to?

8 comments

[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 29.6 ms ] thread
anigbrowl
I personally like Ars Technica as a neutral media outlet with skilled writers and editors.
ecaron
Thanks for the tip! I submitted the tip and will let you know if I hear anything back from them.
ibejoeb
Are we not giving first picks to Lamo anymore?

Sorry.

Indyan
Can you explain to me why this is an important issue? The jobs TLD in general is considered to be a bust. Only 15K registrations so far, and most corporates don't even seem bothered to register their own .jobs domain.

Edit: The pdf you linked to doesn't exist.

ecaron
The PDF is linked to at http://forum.icann.org/lists/jobs-phased-allocation/msg00316.... As of this moment, the link is now http://forum.icann.org/lists/jobs-phased-allocation/pdf6cGj5... - I'm not sure if they rotate the URLs to prevent direct-linking or if the original changed.

The issue is important because .jobs was originally sold, and marketed, as a guaranteed legitimate source of jobs because only real, verified companies can buy a .jobs - so if you go to microsoft.jobs, you know it will only shows jobs from Microsoft because Microsoft owns it. The new proposal completely does away with this requirement. It would be analogous to stealthily making the Ford Fusion no longer a hybrid.

What's worse is that the registrar will get first choice on who gets to buy which domain for how much - which would be a first for any TLD and set a dangerous precedent.

A better written piece explaining why this is an important issue (and why rejecting it is important to protecting jobseekers from fraud) is available at http://www.ere.net/2010/07/15/open-letter-to-icann-reject-th...

pclark
Mike Butcher or Robin Wauters at Techcrunch, or Marshall K at RWW.