Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m opposed to the proposed expansion of the .jobs charter from what is currently allowed to what would be allowed. What is currently allowed is for Employ Media, the registrar, to help an employer such as Toyota funnel job seeker traffic to its career web site by registering and promoting Toyota.jobs. What Employ Media wants to do is expand that so that it may use secret criteria which may or may not change and may or many not be applied uniformly to create tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or perhaps even a million new geographic, occupational field, and other such domains such as NewYork.jobs, engineer.jobs, and diversity.jobs. In essence, Employ Media would be given the right to create the sandbox and decide who gets to play in it, for how long, and at what price. Those who are friends may get to play for longer and at a lower cost. Those who aren’t friends may be treated quite differently. And Employ Media may retain whichever domains it wishes for itself. In effect, Employ Media becomes both the registrar and the competitor.

One of the key complaints against the proposed expansion of the .jobs charter is that Employ Media would create perhaps a million new job boards. A White Paper on Dot Jobs just published by Direct Employers Association executive director Bill Warren — one of the key driving forces behind the proposed expansion — addresses this concern in what I can only describe as double speak:

[T]his is not a million job boards but rather one dynamic jobs platform, it will provide a single interface for posting jobs to niche, targeted locations. Automated job feeds and single postings will only be accepted from vetted employers and, when the .jobs TLD build‐out is complete, all jobs will automatically appear in the appropriate city, state, country, and occupational .jobs URLs. Job seekers will be able to enter a desired city, state, geographic region, country, or occupation plus .jobs (Atlanta.jobs, Georgia.jobs, etc.) in their browser for immediate access to relevant jobs.

So if I understand Bill properly, they’re not creating a million job boards but one and that one job board will be accessible by perhaps a million different domain names such as NewYork.jobs, engineer.jobs, and diversity.jobs and each of those domain names will have different content which is targeted to its users so NewYork.jobs will contain only information about jobs in New York, engineer.jobs will contain information only about engineering jobs, and diversity.jobs will contain information only about jobs for diverse candidates. I’m sorry, but how is that not a million job boards? Oh, because underlying each of them is a common platform. In other words, one database and common software will drive all of them. Does anyone really think that 99 percent of the visitors to these sites will understand that? If there are a million domains with different content, that’s a million job boards regardless of any double speak to the contrary.

Whether the underlying software is shared or unique to each board, they’ll function to the individual users as separate boards. And if they function as separate boards, then they are separate boards. Ever hear the expression that if something walks like a duck and talks like a duck then it must be a duck? Well folks, Employ Media and Direct Employers Association can call it what they wish, but this is a duck.