Recent Posts
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- Epik gets acquired again! The plot thickens…
- Airline gTLD crashes and burns
- First chunks of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook drop
- Epik to reveal its owners soon
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- Has Epik gone “woke”?
- First bits of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook expected next week
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- ICANN finds new home for Lebanon’s TLD after founder’s death
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- Shiba Inu outs itself as crypto new gTLD applicant
- Over 50,000 .ai domains sold in three months
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- Registries and registrars vote ‘Yes’ to new DNS abuse rules
- ICANN predicts flattish 2025 for domain industry
- Fast-growing Gname buys another 150 registrars
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- Have your say on police domain takedown powers
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- ICANN picks Istanbul for 2024 meeting
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- ICANN accused of power grab over $271 million auction fund
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- .blackfriday is still a bit rubbish
- Internet Naming Co acquires five more gTLDs
- Domain universe grows despite .com drag
Universe.jobs launches with hundreds of premium domains
The controversial Universe.jobs project has soft-launched, offering jobs listings at hundreds of premium geographic and vocational .jobs domains.
Country and state domains such as usa.jobs, gbr.jobs and texas.jobs, as well as industry domains such as firefighter.jobs and journalist.jobs are live and resolving.
If you visit, say, usa.jobs or rus.jobs, you’ll be presented with a bunch of job listings from the USA or Russia. If you visit retail.jobs, you’ll be bounced to usa.jobs/retail (at least, I was).
Even combinations, such as texas.nursing.jobs, seem to work.
I’ve no idea how many domains have been activated this way, but since all the geographics seem to be active I’m guessing it’s at least several hundred at the second-level.
The site, which is presented as a service of the DirectEmployers Association’s National Labor Exchange, currently says it’s in beta.
But the big questions now are: is this legit, and who owns the domains?
Employ Media, the .jobs registry, had to fight ICANN and mainstream commercial jobs boards in order to drop the contractual restrictions that previously limited .jobs to company names.
But some argued that, despite the relaxation of the string restrictions, employer-independent jobs sites such as Universe.jobs would still be verboten under Employ Media’s charter.
The .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition, made up of newspaper associations and boards such as Monster.com, tried to get ICANN to reconsider its decision, but failed (kinda).
While the Coalition’s Reconsideration Request was unsuccessful, ICANN did say it will start to monitor Employ Media for compliance with its charter more closely.
More interestingly, perhaps, during the ICANN investigation Employ Media abruptly dropped plans to create a “self-managed” class of domains – names registered to itself, but “used” by third parties such as DirectEmployers.
Did it make good on its promise? It’s difficult to be certain, because the Whois for the many of the domains in question seems to be broken.
I’ve been able to establish that some older domains, such as usa.jobs and nursing.jobs, currently belong to DirectEmployers, but trying to figure out who owns some of the more recently registered geographical .jobs names is an excruciating process.
The Whois link buried at the bottom of the official Employ Media web site directs you to the Whois service provided by VeriSign (which runs the back-end registry infrastructure for .jobs).
VeriSign’s tool does not return the name of the registrant, only details such as the registration date, associated name servers, and the URL of the appropriate registrar’s Whois server.
In the case of all these geo domains, the registrar appears to be NameShare. The Whois server URL given by VeriSign points to a second tool, at whois.nameshare.com, that doesn’t work.
If you try to query, for example, usa.jobs (after filling out the Captcha) you get this message:
[r3] Error Message: Unsupported TLD .jobs
If you visit the NameShare homepage, you will be able to find a third .jobs Whois tool, at whois-jobs.nameshare.com/whois/. This doesn’t seem to work properly either.
This tool will tell you that the domain usa.jobs belongs to DirectEmployers.
However, almost every other Universe.jobs-related domain that I queried returned a “not found” message, even when the domain resolves and the VeriSign tools says it’s been registered for over a month.
I’m not sure what’s going on. Some kind of technical problem, no doubt.
[…] Universe.jobs launches with hundreds of premium domain names […]