Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

The devastation from the earthquake that hit Haiti cannot yet be assessed; some fear that 50,000 people might be dead and thousands more injured.

In today’s interconnected world, with each natural or man-made catastrophe the descriptive terms are the first ones to be searched on the Internet; currently people all over the world are interested in finding out what is going on in Haiti and would like to make donations.

However, Haiti.com is being used as a tourism portal to the Caribbean, as it forwards to the domain COL.com. The bright colors of the COL.com web page are in stark contrast with the grim situation in Haiti, where buildings lay in rubble and blood-drenched corpses are being brought out from under the debris.

In a similar fashion, Donations.com and its co-owned Donations.org do not resolve at all. Owned by some corporation based in Switzerland, both generics would play a major role in directing traffic en masse to temporary portals created for the particular devastation.

Unfortunately, the opposite happens currently, as opportunists have already registered domain names related to the earthquake that hit Haiti and are listing them on various venues, including eBay and Sedo.

These are not noble attempts to direct donations but an attempt to collect – or, extort – money from organizations that exist or would be formed in order to rebuild Haiti.

Essentially, the only place to donate through which guarantees an efficient processing of the donations, is the Red Cross. And please note, that’s at RedCross.org as the .com – owned by the Red Cross – ironically appears to be down.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Business, Domains, Social issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.