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.

Every year, at Christmas, I take a large plastic water-bottle full of pennies to the Salvation Army.

It contains every penny that passed through my hands that year, which I have little use for at that time. Perhaps you’d be surprised to hear that $40 to $60 can fit in a one-gallon bottle. Little by little, every penny saved adds up to this gift – and that’s the method behind saving money for a later day.

On a given day, thousands of domains are registered around the world. The Registry keeps a large part of it for its functions, the rest is charged by the Registrar and perhaps the reseller that might be handling each domain. Imagine, if one penny went towards a specific cause – every single time a domain was registered – that’d be a really painless method of assuring everyone is contributing to that cause.

Global warming prevention? Cancer research? Waterworks in Africa? One penny per registration would amount to millions of dollars in donations, day after day after day.

Let’s make it happen. We can afford to donate that penny, the same way that we toss it down the plastic bottle thinking it will never amount to anything.