Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Computer Weekly: The net's boys-only club

Downtime has no objection in principle to Verisign, the long-time operator of the .com domain, having a dinner for its mates from the internet. But it does have some quibbles about who it chooses to bless as ".com honorees".
Among the 25 (well, there's an arbitrary number for you, apparently chosen mainly because Verisign thinks it's 25 years since the net went commercial), the only non-US bods are Tim Berners-Lee and eBay's Pierre Omidyar. It is also resolutely a boys-only club.

Here is the full list as supplied by Verisign.
AOL (Steve Case
Alibaba Group
Amazon (Jeff Bezos)
Andy Grove
Apple (Steve Jobs)
Baidu; Cisco (John Chambers)
Craigslist (Craig Newmark)
eBay (Pierre Omidyar)
eTrade
Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg)
Google (Larry Page & Sergey Brin)
Infosys
Jim Clark
Microsoft/MSN/Gates Foundation (Bill Gates)
MySpace
Napster (Shawn Fanning)
Netscape (Marc Andreessen)
Paypal
Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Scott McNealy)
Tim Berners-Lee
Twitter
Vint Cerf
Yahoo, (Jerry Yang and David Filo)
YouTube.

Downtime thinks Niklaas Zenstrom and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype, deserve a place, as does Meg Whitman, who made Omidyar a billionaire. Anyone else you think is more deserving?

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