.jobs in breach of ICANN Registry Agreement

"The recently launched universe.jobs appears to be a job board that advertises job openings for multiple employers. It is our understanding that one registrant, who is a member of SHRM, registered forty thousand second-level domain names in the .JOBS TLD for use on this job board. It appears that Employ Media and SHRM, through the Direct Employers Association, intend to use the .JOBS TLD primarily to compete with other internet job boards. Such use is inconsistent with the purpose stated in the .JOBS Charter and represented to the ICANN community. As opposed to numerous, international, human resource management professionals registering second-level .JOBS domain names, it appears one US-based registrant is registering thousands of second-level .JOBS domain names. These registrations appear to serve the interests of the registrant or company causing the registrations, as well as Employ Media and SHRM rather than the interests of the human resource management professionals."

Read more http://icann.org/en/correspondence/burnette-to-johnson-fassett-27fe...

They finally figured out the obvious.

Comment by Jacob Rhoades on March 1, 2011 at 12:14pm: Wow, thanks Suresh for sharing. Its interesting how much SHRM was behind the push and development of .jobs...one would think that getting into the job board business would be the least of their concerns.

Comment by Suresh on March 1, 2011 at 2:23pm: I will be tuned in to see their next steps. There are few other domain extensions that have been bungled or hyped, but this is a first of its kind - essentially a backdoor monopoly.

Comment by Tim Dineen on March 1, 2011 at 5:48pm: If ICANN hadn't figured it out, Google would have figured out the scheme so as to end the SEO strategy behind all this mess... the plan was destined to fail and it was only a matter of time. Thankfully it's sooner rather than later.

What a waste of something that was potentially good idea (the existence of TLD .jobs) initially.