Wednesday, June 08, 2016
Now that's SMART.
Heard a PSA on radio just now. The main pharmaceutical trade association has bought the .pharma address suffix, and only allows proper pharmacies to use it. "If you see dot pharma, you know it's legit."
SMART!
When the web address system was laid out, there was an unenforced expectation that .com would be profit-making companies, .org would be NGOs, .edu would be colleges, and so on. This lasted about three milliseconds because nobody was CHECKING.
More details on the dot pharma:
The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy® (NABP®) has launched the .pharmacy generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) to provide consumers around the world a means for identifying safe, legal, and ethical online pharmacies and related resources. Of the tens of thousands of rogue sites selling prescription drugs online, NABP has reviewed over 10,800 and found that nearly 97% do not follow pharmacy laws and standards established to protect the public health. With this in mind, NABP will grant use of the .pharmacy domain only to legitimate website operators that adhere to pharmacy laws in the jurisdictions in which they are based and in which their patients and customers reside, so that consumers can easily find safe online pharmacies.This is a genuinely Historic first. Previous forms of addresses and phone numbers never provided a SURE way to distinguish legitimate operations. You could be aware that the car dealers on East Sprague are more likely to be shady than the downtown dealers, but neither address guaranteed anything. As I mentioned yesterday, an American radio station with an XE call sign was probably skirting the law, but a K or W could also be shady. The name gave you a hint but not much more. Now you have CERTAINTY. Later thought: This is a welcome retaking of SKILL-ESTATE that had been lost. When customers can tell instantly and definitely who's legitimate, the BORDER between licensed and unlicensed practitioners grows sharp and bright, and it doesn't even require any new regulations.
Labels: skill-estate
¶ 5:22 AM
