Professionals to Get Elite Internet Status

By David McGuire
Wednesday, May 8, 2002

Lawyers, physicians and accountants soon will be able to register Web addresses in a worldwide Internet domain reserved exclusively for certified professionals, but they will have to pay nearly 10 times the cost of ordinary domain names. 

After months of delays, Internet addressing authorities approved New York-based RegistryPro Ltd.'s contract to register domains with the ".pro." suffix. The U.S. Department of Commerce still must sign off on the agreement but other domain contracts have sailed through. 

"The goal of RegistryPro is to build out a gated community for professionals on the Internet," RegistryPro chief executive Sloan Gaon said. "It involves creating an environment of trust that does not exist today on the Internet." 

RegistryPro will sell .pro addresses only to Internet users who can prove that they are certified physicians, lawyers or accountants. The company will rely on an automated verification system and human legwork to ensure that registrants are who they say they are, Gaon said. 

Once verification is complete, each .pro registrant will receive an address and a digital certificate that can be used to authenticate transactions online. 

Although RegistryPro has not yet set a wholesale price for .pro addresses, Gaon said that one-year .pro registrations will retail for $250 to $300, roughly 10 times the cost of a one-year .com registration. 

More at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/