CITRI Press Releases

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

UK & US Businesses team up to form CITRI, a non profit group aiming to raise funds to bring IT and the Internet to the people of Iraq

A new non profit group has recently been formed whose goal is to focus the efforts of the IT community into creating a better tomorrow for the people of Iraq .

CITRI - the Committee for Information Technology Reconstruction of Iraq aim to raise funds to invest in public access Internet projects and infrastructure in the emergent regime.

One of the main ways they plan to do this is by auctioning domains in Iraq 's .IQ domain space. All the money raised would go towards a variety of projects the group is considering.

CITRI conservatively estimates that individuals and corporations registering domains in the .IQ namespace could raise in excess of ten million dollars. This pales into insignificance compared with the billions the war effort is costing, but the CITRI projects would never the less make a positive difference.

CITRI members are no strangers to regeneration projects, having worked on previous projects with worth billions of dollars and diamonds.

Ultimately, CITRI believe that the .IQ namespace should be controlled by a local academic / non profit registrar.

The project is still at an early stage, but so far goodwill has prevailed, and many initial expressions of support have been received, such that the auction process will be handled by one major partner (naming no names yet, but you can probably guess), DNS control another etc.

Discussions are underway with IANA (the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) regarding formal redelegation of the .IQ domain – the current assignees currently resting at the pleasure of the US government (in a federal penitentiary). Whilst the process is by no means assured, it would seem almost criminal to pass up such a good opportunity whilst the will exists.

Whilst as a country top level domain, .IQ should be primarily used for entities within Iraq there are some interesting domains available – for example anyone in Mensa would probably appreciate an email address @high.iq! Given the purpose to which any funds raised would be put, demand is expected to be strong.

Full details are to be found at the group’s homepage of www.citri.org

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If you would like any further information, or to schedule an interview, please do not hesitate to contact Ben Fitzgerald-O'Connor on the details above.