Time to Get Rid of ICANN

ICANN has always been something of a disaster area, showing scant understanding of what the Internet really is, contemptuous of its users, and largely indifferent to ICANN's responsibilities as guardian of a key part of its infrastructure. Here's the latest proof that ICANN is not fit for its purpose:

The familiar .com, .net, .org and 18 other suffixes — officially "generic top-level domains" — could be joined by a seemingly endless stream of new ones next year under a landmark change approved last summer by the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, the entity that oversees the Web's address system.

Tourists might find information about the Liberty Bell, for example, at a site ending in .philly. A rapper might apply for a Web address ending in .hiphop.

"Whatever is open to the imagination can be applied for," says Paul Levins, ICANN's vice president of corporate affairs. "It could translate into one of the largest marketing and branding opportunities in history."

Got that? This change is purely about "marketing and branding opportunities"...the fact that it will fragment the Internet, sow confusion among hundreds of millions of users everywhere, and lead to the biggest explosion of speculative domain squatting and hoarding by parasites who see the Internet purely as a system to be gamed, is apparently a matter of supreme indifference to those behind ICANN: the main thing is that it's a juicy business opportunity.

Time to sack the lot, and put control of the domain name system where it belongs: in the hands of engineers who care.

Follow me on Twitter @glynmoody

Intellectual (Monopoly) Ventures

Mike Masnick is a truly fantastic writer, because he begins a piece thus:

Malcolm Gladwell is a truly fantastic writer

...only to end up proving that Gladwell may be a great writer, but he doesn't actually understand the implications of what he's writing about. No, don't worry, I'm not going to draw the same conclusion for Masnick, since he *does* know what he's writing about, pace some trolling in the comments to the above piece.

Indeed, I think the posting in question is doubly fine: it not only calls into question the extremely odious business model of Nathan Myhrvold's "Intellectual Ventures", but it hammers home the "M"-word:

Gladwell uses this to talk up what Myhrvold is doing, suggesting that Intellectual Ventures is really about continuing that process, getting those ideas out there -- but he misses the much bigger point: if these ideas are the natural progression, almost guaranteed to be discovered by someone sooner or later, why do we give a monopoly on these ideas to a single discoverer? Myhrvold's whole business model is about monopolizing all of these ideas and charging others (who may have discovered them totally independently) to actually do something with them. Yet, if Gladwell's premise is correct (and there's plenty of evidence included in the article), then Myhrvold's efforts shouldn't be seen as a big deal. After all, if it wasn't Myhrvold and his friends doing it, others would very likely come up with the same thing sooner or later.

This is especially highlighted in one anecdote in the article, of Myhrvold holding a dinner with a bunch of smart people... and an attorney. The group spent dinner talking about a bunch of different random ideas, with no real goal or purpose -- just "chewing the rag" as one participant put it. But the next day the attorney approached them with a typewritten description of 36 different inventions that were potentially patentable out of the dinner. When a random "chewing the rag" conversation turns up 36 monopolies, something is wrong. Those aren't inventions that deserve a monopoly.

Quite. In a way, what should be renamed Intellectual Monopoly Ventures represents the quintessence and, I fervently hope, the apogee, of a patent system gone mad: a company set up with the express intention of coming up with *ideas* and patenting them so that it can hold companies that might actually create *inventions* based on them hostage. Perfectly parasitic and utterly pathetic.

Something's Rotten in the Domain Name System

Although I can't quite claim to go back to the very first commercial domain, I do remember the Wired story about how many major US corporations had neglected to register relevant domains. And I also remember how around $7.5 million was paid for the utterly generic and pointless business.com domain.

So I've seen a thing or two. And yet I can still be disgusted by the depths to which the scammers can sink when it comes to domain names. Try this, for example: a company that seems to be magically reserving domain names shortly after people have entered them as a Whois search - only to dump it if it doesn't pull in any traffic.

It's this kind of parasitical business model that is pushing the domain name system close to breakdown, and making the Internet far less efficient than it could be.