As expected, VeriSign raised the price of domain names, effective in October. New prices wholesale prices (to the registrar) for .com domain names are going from $6.42 to $6.86, while .net will increase from $3.85 to $4.23. This news came a few days ago in a letter to registrars. (Hint to consumers: renew your domains now.)

VeriSign’s contract with ICANN lets them raise prices by 7% a year, and if the sun rises in the East, then VeriSign will raise prices to the maximum extent allowed. You’d think that as the number of domain names increases, prices would go down, right? Isn’t this the trend everywhere else in technology? You know, economies of scale and all that…

For instance, Moore’s law states that the number of transistors you can pack onto an integrated circuit will double every two years. There are lots of corollaries in other fields, where innovation and scale push either increased capabilities, or dropping prices. Here’s a short list where Moore’s Law is mimicked in other areas:

• Cost per transistor
• Computing performance per unit cost
• Hard disk storage per unit of information
• RAM storage capacity
• Data per optical fiber
• Pixels per dollar

So, basically, many if not most of VeriSign’s registry costs have been falling at an exponential rate. Hard disk storage, computing performance, bandwidth, RAM storage — all central to registry operations. And yet the cost is going up. How is this justified?

At an ICANN session on deleted domain names in Cape Town in 2004, VeriSign complained about how much money they had to spend to handle all the non-registration activity (drop-catch, domain tasting, etc.). The registrars, almost as a chorus, volunteered to take over the registry and absorb all the costs. The registrars were well aware that the .com contract between ICANN and VeriSign was a virtual guarantee of what has been conservatively estimated at $3.4 billion in revenues for VeriSign over 8 years. Even supposing that this activity was the burden that VeriSign claims, ICANN’s better response would have been to get rid of the long-overdue recently-canceled [wait 5 seconds for annoying ad to disappear] much-abused 5-day grace period, which is responsible for much of the registry traffic.

VeriSign’s other justification for turning its plummeting costs into a price-hike is security. There is absolutely no doubt that the .com registry is pummeled by attacks from various malefactors, and that these attacks are not cheap to repel. It’s also true that VeriSign is one of the most reviled companies on the Internet; it shares the moniker “Evil Empire” only with Microsoft, and I don’t think it’s crazy to suggest that their security costs would go down if they didn’t do things to make people hate them. But why should they? The bitterness they engender only serves as justification for price hikes.

The .com contract with VeriSign, which allows for this price-hike, was not ICANN’s finest hour. If ICANN has any reason to exist, it is to prevent this kind of absurdity. ICANN’s original remit, after all, was to do two things: bring down the price of domains, and to create new top-level domains. On both fronts, performance has been less than stellar.

ICANN traded the community interest for some guaranteed money from VeriSign. It was a very simple trade in many ways, which allowed ICANN to bulk up to an annual $50 million budget. This is cleverly sliced up to appear to be diversified, but is upon closer examination really a lot of staff costs hidden under such categories as “Excellence in Policy Development” ($2.97M); “Excellence in Operations” ($15M) and so on.

Overall, ICANN now spends 37% of its $50M on personnel (=staff); 19% on “professional services” (=outsourced staff); 13% on “administration and contingency” (=staff); 9% on ICANN meetings (mostly staff travel and lodging costs); and 7% on travel and other meetings (more staff travel costs). Of the paltry $1.59M spent on capital projects, $650K went to the L Root Server, $54K went to IANA for DNSSEC, while the much of the rest is for staff-related costs such as a new telephone system and new office furniture. This from an organization which is supposed to assure the smooth technical functioning of the Internet.

The charitable view of this Constantinian bargain is that because ICANN is now simply too big to abolish, Internet users everywhere should rejoice that VeriSign and other big companies and governments will never have unfettered sway. But the corrosive effects of the deal with VeriSign are still eating through the organization: in addition to the redistribution of wealth from Internet users to VeriSign, the .com contract once and for all got rid of the now-dated notion that ICANN consisted of its membership, and not its leaders and the ICANN staff. Today, I am not aware of a single person who is not being paid by ICANN who says “we” instead of “they” when referring to ICANN.

Still, now that we are done with the bibulous reign of Vint Cerf, we may cautiously hope for some improvement. For a possible preview, here is an lengthy interview with Peter Dengate-Thrush, the new Chairman.

I wish him luck. But unless things change, we are now living not with Moore’s law, which governs technology, but with many of Parkinson’s Laws, which govern unwieldy bureaucracies. C. Northcote Parkinson, who studied the British Army and Civil Service, noted that the number of employees in a bureaucracy rises 5-7% annually “irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done.”

Tags: ICANN, VeriSign, Peter Dengate-Thrush, C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson’s Law, Moore’s Law, ICANN Budget, Sitefinder, ICANN-VeriSign contract, .com contract, domain name price, price of domain names

After DotAsia announced the results of its collision auction for the recent Sunrise Period, I was wondering in my last post why some valuable trademarked names had been auctioned for a pittance, and an anonymous commenter supplied the reason: the contestants are making the deals between themselves, and paying the registry nothing. That makes sense for them, but not for DotAsia.

Without saying that they had been victimized in the past, we have found DotAsia’s Advisory on Auction Tampering (PDF), a one-page guide to how you may lose your domain name if they catch you. That might have worked with the companies in the Sunrise Period, but I’d be surprised if there isn’t a lot of tampering going on for the LandRush auctions.

Keep your eye out for crazy low reported auction results in .ASIA. It will be hard to spot unless the prices are way under expected value.

Tags: DotAsia, .asia, domain auctions, Sunrise, LandRush, auction tampering

Registries and registrars have been touting auctions as the fairest way to distribute names where there are multiple parties and no clear rights that favor one party over another. The fact that they have a fair amount of self-interest in promoting this solution doesn’t mean it’s the wrong one. Auctions may be the only way to distribute competitive names without hideous amounts of cost and time.

Dot Asia has auctions for Sunrise and Landrush names; the Dot Asia Sunrise auctions are going on right now. These have been referred to as “collision auctions”; they occur when two parties have the same (or similar) trademark for a name, and they both want it. When there are two applications for the same name, Dot Asia immediately sets it aside for an auction between the contenders. So far, this has occurred with about 200 names, with an average price (so far) of US$1515 each. The winner to date is ace.asia, which sold for US$20,501.

What’s baffling here are some of the very low auctions numbers. You’d think that if there was more than one party who wanted century21.asia, for instance, it would sell for more than US$20. I’m guessing that one of the parties didn’t show up for the auction.

The Landrush collision auctions should be much more interesting, with more names and more contenders.

Did you see the sweet article in the Times about Fake Steve, the blogger who pretended to be Steve Jobs?

Two wonderful posts just in the last week:

1. He fesses up to getting caught, and twits the blogerati for having been unable to ferret him out for 6 months, when the Times did it in a week.

“One bright side is that at least I was busted by the Times and not Valleywag. I really, really enjoyed seeing those guys keep guessing wrong. For six months Dr. Evil and Mr. Bigglesworth put their big brains together and couldn’t come up with the answer. Guy from the Times did it in a week. So much for the trope about smarty-pants bloggers disrupting old media.”

OUCH!

2. Hilarious take on Ruprecht’s lassooing of WSJ.

“Meanwhile I just want you to know how excited all of us in Silicon Valley are to see you guys finally getting to experience first-hand the ‘creative destruction’ that you’re always celebrating in your own pages.”

Mwahhahhahahhahahahaahhaaaa!

Fake Steve is really Daniel Lyons, senior editor at Forbes. For the first time ever, I like Forbes too. What a hoot!

Tags: Daniel Lyons, Fake Stever, Forbes, Valleywag, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch, creative destruction, media elite, evil laugh, fun

“Customer Intimacy”

This vile jargon arrived yesterday in the daily email splooge from CXO Media.

The term is uncomfortable and a little creepy. Is customer intimacy like airplane intimacy or subway intimacy or prison intimacy? It sounds like a windowdressing term, used by companies to mean the exact opposite of the plain language.

What says CXO in their email?

[P]lease join this webcast – hosted by Cisco Systems – as Governor Tom Ridge and Circuit City CIO Bill McCorey reveal valuable insight for retailers looking to strike the right balance between privacy and customer intimacy.

Of course! What could be more intimate than Cisco, which builds special censorship routers for the Chinese, joined by Homeland Security honcho Tom “Patriot Act” Ridge and the Circuit City Information Extractor? And who better than these guardians of liberty to instruct us on data-mining privacy?

Customer intimacy in this sense isn’t the intimacy of the subway all, it’s the intimacy of a mugging.

Meanwhile, on the rest of the Web, “customer intimacy” turns out to be replacement jargon for customer engagement, in the sense of “really really engaged customer engagement, so engaged and close and real and engaged it’s actually intimate.”

I’m imagining the meeting at Clusterfcuk Inc.:

– CEO: I just read a book. Good to Gooder. I read the whole thing. I now realize that I don’t want to be a Good Company, I want to be a Gooder Company!
– VP Sales: You mean more sales?
– CEO: You just don’t get it, do you?
– VP Marcom: He means you can’t just shove things down people’s throats anymore, you have to engage them!
– VP Sales: I’m already married.
– CEO: I quote:

“A Good Company gets ‘em once, but a Gooder Company mugs its customers again and again. A Gooder Company gets all “friendly” and “authentic” and “trustworthy” with the customers, then takes ‘em to the bank.”

– VP Marcom: Great idea! What do we call it?
– VP Sales: Sales.
– VP Marcom: No, something that the customers will love, so they feel “friendly” like the book says. Something that says we love you, you can trust us.
– CEO: Um, “Custalove?”
(Silence)
– VP Marcom: “Customer engagement”?
– CEO: Been done.
– VP Sales: “Customer Sales”?
(Silence)
– CEO: I’ve got it! Customer Intimacy! Intimacy, it means a really close loving relationship. My wife was telling me about it.
– VP Marcom (admiringly): You’re brilliant! “Intimacy” even has an entry in dictionary.com. Who knew?
– CEO (glowingly): Now we’ll get them for life. God I love this book.
– VP Sales (aside): See, I said it was about sales.

Tags: intimacy, customer intimacy, CXO Media, Tom Ridge, Cisco, Good to Gooder

One of the intelligent voices in domain names, Bret Fausett, has launched Name Brief, a new blog about, yes, domains.

Bret already has a great blog, Lextext, but this new venture is a different beast. Everything about Lextext asserts its not-for-profitness; everything about Name Brief lets you know that it’s a money-making venture. The Lextext aesthetic is made-by-hand, content-over-design; the Name Brief feeling is hip, slick, commercial, with-it. (Hell, the tags on Name Brief are bigger than the headlines at Lextext! How Web 2.0 can you get?)

This is not a Bad Thing. Quite the opposite. Knowing Bret, this new venture is going to be a great contribution to the space, and if he’s trying to make a few pennies out of it, that’s a sign of his seriousness in the endeavor — and that means more great posts from Bret. Take, as an example, his recent post on typosquatting, where the evolution of corporate domain name portfolio strategy is beautifully laid out. If it takes some Adsense revenues to get Bret to post more, I’m all for it.

One small caveat. I understand teasers for RSS: you want people to click over to your site to get the whole story. But once I click, do I have to read the same teaser again, then click again to get the full story? You’re counting on some pretty dedicated readers….

Congratulations, Bret!

Tags: Bret Fausett, Name Brief, Lextext, typosquatting, domain name portfolio strategy, Adsense, good news

Optimize my Adwords campaign? One click? How long has this been here? What will the God of Search advise?

Well, I’ll be a mummified monk!

Quoth the oracle:

“Your campaign exceeds the limit of keywords and ad groups that the Campaign Optimizer can accommodate …”

But, see, I have a only a few thousand keywords, and fewer than a hundred ad groups. I’ve heard people talk about their million keyword campaigns!

Which reminds me of something I read once:

That’s what they tell you, just as you’re about to add keywords for an Adwords ad group.

So, ergo, therefore, unless those million-keyword people are losing money (yeah, right), then either:

• Google’s software is broken and they just forgot to tell anyone
• Google really believes that it’s better to have fewer keywords, but the moneymakers have LOTS of them

What’s the disconnect? I don’t think Google’s right about this.

Tags: keywords, Google, Adwords, Google Adwords, number of keywords, promises promises

I’m a fan of maps. Done well, nothing conveys information as well, or shows the connections between things as quickly, or brings clarity beyond the power of words.

The clever people over at Information Architects Japan have almost done it right. Sadly, they’ve dripped globs of annoying hipness on top of what’s otherwise a fun and informative effort.

Version 2 of their Web Trend Map 2007 shows the 200 most popular websites (sort of, see discussion below) as if they were stops on the London Underground. At least that’s what I thought at first. But IA says they based it on the Tokyo Metro (PDF), and the sites match the locations in Tokyo. “You” are the Emperor’s place, for instance (lower center). As well as the interactive version (click the thumbnail above), there are also printable versions and a Mac screensaver version here.

The map is fascinating viewing, and it’s easy to appreciate the ingenuity of overlaying the Internet on to a metro subway map. It is a great birds-eye view of the Internet. Tracing the connections between the sites is fun, and by adding information about what kind of site it is, from news to music to community to technology, you get a quick view of what’s happening on the Internet. And, in a real contribution, they’ve added the category of “Chinese,” also knows as “the other Internet.” I think it’s a major step to show the Chinese Internet so plainly.

Unfortunately, much of the map is not a quick view of the Internet, but a quick view of what the designers happen to think is hip. Real information is mixed with fashionable opinion. And that leads to confusion, which is a Mortal Sin where maps are concerned.

Distortions are unavoidable in any map, especially a graphical treatment of a subway. Gothamist glossily discusses some of the issues in a review of a proposed new NYC subway map, and many New Yorkers will remember the much admired (and much reviled) highly-stylized Massimo Vignelli NYC Subway map.

But in a good map, distortions are the result of trading off accuracy for clarity. The IA blog post on the map lets on (by omission and inference) that these aren’t actually the Top 200 sites by volume of visitors: it’s a combination of that, plus larger sites in Japan and Germany that they liked. So it isn’t accurate, and adding inaccurate information doesn’t make things clearer. “Web Trends” quickly becomes “Web Trendy.”

The key shows some specifics:

First, sites are rated (top right) from Web 0.5 all the way up to Web 2.5. Web 0.5 is represented by Jakob Nielsen, the (desperately unhip) usability guru, while Web 2.5 is presumably embodied by IA themselves, if only they had a bigger site. Whatever you may think of Jakob Nielsen, this is not information, it’s opinion, and it dates and muddies the information that is presented, and makes it seem less reliable.

Worse, each site is given a forecast, from “unreal” (great) to “stormy” (not so great). In other words, hot or not. If attaching a cool-factor to a present site is opinion, then reading tea leaves about how it’s going to do in the future is sheer bunkum. Prophecizing is fine, but in my opinion it harms the real qualities of this effort. (By the way, is “unreal” a good thing?)

But I suspect, in the best Web-of-any-generation way, this isn’t about information, it’s about marketing. The map is made available in any number of formats; it will be downloaded endlessly — and lo and behold! — I learn, at the bottom of their blog post about the map, that IA is selling “ten free spaces” for ads that aren’t free at all, they’re $2,000! What a relief! I thought for a short moment that IA was actually trying to produce something people could use…

All in all, this is a cheery and well-done effort, but the noise and hype undermine what could have been something real.

I wasn’t able to find much substantive discussion on the Web, but here are a few fillips:

• Design Notes
• ifconfig
• Mashable
• Download Squad
• Visual Complexity mentions that there are a lot of “in” jokes that would amuse Tokyo residents.
• Steve Rubell likes it because his blog is on it

Finally, it’s almost impossible to think about this without reference to Edward R. Tufte’s wonderful book Envisioning Information, which makes extensive use of train schedules and Japanese maps to illustrate his points about information design.

Tags: subway map, metro map, underground map, tube map, Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 2.5, Information Architects, Information Architects of Japan, Jakob Nielsen, maps, marketing, too bad

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee yesterday approved something called the Patent Reform Act of 2007, which closely tracks a similar bill passed by the Senate committee last week. Big Pharma, manufacturing, and biotech had come together under the umbrella of something called the Coalition for 21st Century Profit Protection Patent Reform to oppose the bill, but had failed under the hail of complaints for from tech companies about how very silly some patents are.

Sen. Patrick Leahy says that infringement damages would be limited, “unless the claimant shows that the patent’s specific contribution over the prior art is the predominant basis for market demand for an infringing product or process.” The bill calls for a period during which a newly-issued patent could be mocked, ridiculed, and challenged. The Coalition of Getting Rich on Bad Patents is now concentrating on making sure that window for appeal is as narrow as possible.

I say “mocked and ridiculed” advisedly — for the first time, the bill gives the chance for public opinion to overturn bad decisions, which in recent decades have been legion. With some howling from the wings, many of these 10 Worst Patents could have been overturned:

* One-click online shopping (U.S. Patent No. 5,960,411.)
* Online shopping carts (U.S. Patent No. 5,715,314.)
* The hyperlink (U.S. Patent No. 4,873,662.)
* Video streaming (U.S. Patent No. 5,132,992.)
* Internationalizing domain names (U.S. Patent No. 6,182,148.)
* Pop-up windows (U.S. Patent No. 6,389,458.)
* Targeted banner ads (U.S. Patent No. 6,026,368.)
* Paying with a credit card online (U.S. Patent No. 6,289,319.)
* Framed browsing; (U.S. Patent Nos. 5,933,841 & 6,442,574.) and
* Affiliate linking (U.S. Patent No. 6,029,141.)

At present, these patents are observed more in the breach than otherwise, because to take them seriously would effectively shut down e-commerce. Here’s hoping that the new law will (if passed and not vetoed) will cut down on silly patents and act as a safety for the overwhelmed patent office.

I don’t know yet how the new law will affect existing silly patents.

Also on the web:

• Ogan Gurel with a nice commentary on how the new law will save lives by encouraging convergent medical technology.
• Sarah Adee at Tech Talk, who note that another provision of the bill will limit triple damages to “egregious” cases, and point to a non-tech Silly Patent, that for crustless peanut-butter sandwiches(No. No. 6004596)
• Anne Broache of CNET, from an article some months ago, notes that vulture capitalists are lining up with Silly Patent defenders with the novel claim that patent reform would favor “deep-pocketed Goliaths.” The National Vulture Capital Association apparently expects us to believe that being able to, um, have a shopping cart, an affiliate program, and pay with a credit card would stifle innovation. It gives “mezzanine round” a whole new meaning.
• Joe Beyers, also at CNET, looks at patent trolls, a true scourge in American business — far more significant, in my opinion, than so-called “cybersquatters.” These are people who look at business processes no-one thought to patent, then bring businesses to their knees with ransom demands.
• Ars Technica notes that companies like Qualcomm, which exist on extracting fees from people who actually want to build things, worry about the bill “undermining value.”
• Hance Haney, an industry ghoul for the fake grassroots blog Technology and Democracy, goes on and on about the dangers of letting common-sense inventions (using a credit card on a website, people!) go unchecked. Hance Haney hates the “second window” provision that would let people challenge a Silly Patent after it was granted. These are the same people who see Net Neutrality as an “encumbrance.”

This bill is good news. Let’s hope it’s not gutted by amendments, and that it escapes Bush’s veto pen.

Tags: patent, patent reform, USPTO, EFF, about time

North American Professional sports teams, that is. A nice list compiled by Wise Geek.

Tags: domain names, sports teams, sports domain names, sport domain names