Hey, What's Up With All The Broken Links?

Yes some of the links in the Amiga Web Directory appear as if they are now broken. It's not because the information providers have decided to just call it quits or that the Amiga Web Directory staff got into a little too much ale while coding the URLs, either. What has happened is this: the Internic finally pulled the plug. According to published reports, the Internic, that somewhat independent authority which coordinates the assignment of non-numeric domain names (like "cucug.org"), "disconnected" over 9,000 domain names late last week after futile attempts to collect annual registration fees from the domain name owners.

A new policy which went into effect last year charges non-educational domain name holders a modest $50 fee per year to cover administration. If you want to know whether your provider or favorite homepage is one of the sites on the Internic's "dog house" list and you have access to a "whois" command, just look them up by their domain name. If you see "Domain Status: On Hold", then they need to cough up a check pronto.

Apparently, though, just because a site's status is "on hold" does not necessarily mean that they're a dead beat. Our good friends at Microsoft found one of their hottest new ventures, the MSNBC Web site (http://www.msnbc.com) go dark in a heartbeat. This happened just as NBC and MS were pumping all kinds of dollars into media promotions of the site. Was Bill too busy counting his money to notice the polite email reminders from the Internic? Yes and no, according to Keith Rowe, technical director of MSNBC. Apparently MS did indeed pop for the registration fee and the Internic folks just didn't post the payment properly. Maybe someone should have been actually reading the email, but we figure that if they were using Exchange (the Win95 email client) they were probably still waiting for the screen to update.

So, please don't be too alarmed if some of your favorite links in the Amiga Web Directory do not seem to work. We're going to allow a reasonable amount of time to pass before we begin deleting links with no DNS entries.

Thanks for your patience!

- The Amiga Web Directory Staff

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Champaign-Urbana Computer Users Group / cucug@cucug.org