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The .EU Landrush Fiasco
googleking writes "Bob Parsons, CEO and Founder of GoDaddy.com, has blogged about the .EU landrush fiasco. During the landrush phase for names which opened last Friday, established 'big name' registrars got exactly equal chances of registering names as did anyone who chose to bill themselves as a registrar. Bob asserts that hundreds of these new 'registrars' are actually fake fronts for a big name US company." From the article: "Here's how it works: All the accredited registrars line up and each registrar gets to make one request for a .EU domain name. If the name is available, the registrar gets the name for its customer. If the name is not available, the registrar gets nothing. Either way, after making the request, the registrar goes to the back of the line and won't get to make another request, until all the registrars in the line in front of it make their requests. This continues until all requests have been made and the landrush process is over ... The landrush process on the surface seems very fair. But there was something wrong with the process -- very wrong."
If there's a way to cheat, it will be found.
Sounds like Mr. Parsons is just upset he didn't think of making the phony baloney companies like his competitors did.
He lost out, and they'll definetly get away with it.
Sometimes scams pay out. Not any more unethical than him selling out to MS for his parked domains.
Did anyone expect anything else? It's kinda funny how naive they were, actually thinking that people would be "good" and play by the "rules".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You don't understand?! If registrar X had 99 bogus registrars set up they get 100/second. That's more than 1/second.
Man, you really need that seminar!
So GoDaddy got outsmarted by somebody who gamed the system and now they're whining about it in the CEO's blog. Kwticherbitchin and figure out how to make money, not whine over lost opportunities.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
The landrush process on the surface seems very fair.
We apparently have radically different ideas of what counts as "fair".
established 'big name' registrars got exactly equal chances of registering names as did anyone who chose to bill themselves as a registrar
And what about Joe Jones and Sally Brown? Or more to the point, what about Steve McDonald, Cindy Frye, or Dan Walmart?
What you call "fair", I decry as massively biased right from the start. The very flaw you intend to point out, rather than making the process less fair, has imparted the only truly "fair" part of the entire dog-n'-pony.
I'll consider the process fair when humans get first choice, and trying to trademark common single English words carries the corporate death-penalty. Until then, let's not bother quibbling about whether conqueror-X or conqueror-Y managed to rape the most natives.
The TLD hijacking phenomenon that's a decade old profitable business model didn't suddenly stop that day. :-p
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Has anyone stopped to consider the source? Bob Parsons is notorious for his whining... Anyone who takes a gander at his blog every now and then is privy to the ex-Marine, poor-boy-done-good, megalomaniac either tooting his own horn, or complaining about the business practices of his competitors. Gimme-a-big-fat-Break!
I'm not fat, just big boned...
But the other 99 fake registrars don't need to re-issue requests made by the others (whether granted or not). So they not only can make more requests per second, but those requests are more likely to be still available.
A more efficient way to initially allocate major domain names might be to run an auction.
Currently, domain names are allocated according to the law of capture. He/she who first claims the domain name and pays a nominal fee has rights to the name. It IS like a land grab where you can acquire the rights to land by just showing up, except it's even worse because to grab land in the American West you generally had to show up and use it.
My rough idea:
(1) Auction period will last one month
(2) At the end of the auction period, domain names that were bid on will go to the highest bidder. (As long as bid is above the minimum bid.) (3) After the auction ends, domain names will be allocated under the old retarded process
This doesn't solve all domain name problems, but it would get popular domain names to the people/companies that value the name the most.
There seems to be a special place in the liberal heart for the notion of queues and everyone lining up for their "fair share" of whatever is being doled out. It sounds like a good idea in principle, but in practice this type of scheme inevitably falls victim to the realities of human nature. I remember experiencing something like this first hand when the housing authority at my university decided that a limited number of subsidized campus housing units would be doled out based upon a queue system. Of course, they thought that everyone would be nice and orderly, but in practice people camped outside the office for days before the rush began with one person "holding" spaces for twenty of his friends and people buying and selling places in line. They opened the process at midnight and everyone rushed the doors. The campus police were overwhelmed and they were lucky that there wasn't a riot. The point of all this is that the market has demonstrated time and again that queuing and rationing ultimately fail to satisfy anyone as somebody will always get the short end of the stick even though they would have paid more for item x than item y. Instead of trying to enforce some silly queuing system where people can and will find ways to cheat why did they not have an auction instead? Obviously some names like sex.eu are going to be worth hell of a lot more than blog.eu so why not let competing bidders determine exactly how much more? They could have used the proceeds to create a holding company for long term management of the domain and offer whatever names that were left at a fixed price. The conservative Europeans should have known better than to try and create a non-price based system that could not be abused by those crafty American companies and their high priced consultants.
Markets NEED to be unregulated
It is "unregulated" because there probably are no meaningful consequences to gaming the system. Today's lesson:
1. It's only wrong if someone gets caught.
2. If they get caught, then so what? They've got more domain names than the next guy so they win.
3. The person with most gold rules.
This highlights one of the consequences of a capitalist society. Now, you may say, "So what! At least I get a chance in a capitalist society because there's more opportunity"
But competition is not welcome in a capitalist system. Mature markets evolve to a duopoly/monopoly because the market winners actively supress competition and thereby foster inefficient markets. Thus inspiring regulations to prevent the formation of monopolies.
I urge you to challenge your own assumptions about "free markets." There's lots of meaningful opinions on both sides. You need to know both.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I don't have the figures (any economists please? google?) but I am pretty sure that the Euro-zone of countries is now similar to North America in its size as a market for products. I'm pretty sure that countries in the Euro-zone often have similar product specifications due to common laws as well, so yup, I'd say branding your product as .eu is as important as a .com.
.com products, hey, I don't want to pay for a company to ship a paperback 3000 miles from the USA, I'd prefer them to post it from somewhere in the EU and charge me that instead (pretty well the same rate as from the UK). Don't have to pay import taxes either...
I'm in the UK and I purposely *avoid*
No, you don't.
That is misleading, the point is each of the registrars have equal change of connecting make request every second.
A registrar following the spirit of the rules has 1 request/sec.
A registrar with 99 fraud registrars has 100 request/sec.
Think of the line as 1 second. Every time you make a request you go to the end of the "line." Someone with 99 shell registrars goes to the end of the "line." By the time he gets to the front of the 1 second line, their 99 other requests have also been processed.
Man, you really need that seminar!
-Kurt
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Nobody has any business buying more than one or two domain names anyway.
Dunno about that. With cyber squaters who capitalize on misspelled url's, it seems in a business's interest to try to grab every possible typo version of their business name too...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I would agree with your assertion that more subdomains should be used, and that movies are a particularly obvious and egregious example. The switch from moviename.TLD to movienameTHEMOVIE.TLD is an early sign that even those with deep pockets are feeling the crunch. One solution would be moviename.movies.TLD, but of course everyone would object to whoever owns .movies.TLD. Which doesn't affect any studio with the balls to just use moviename.studioname.TLD
.com are safe, and recognizing that longer names are more likely to be, in some poorly-understood way, "bad", it's going to be difficult to get people to accept the logical extension of subdomains: buzzlightyear.actionfigures.merchandise.movies.dis ney.com
.gov for itself. Any rational organization would have put all national governments under .gov, so you'd see navy.mil.us.gov on the same footing as raf.mil.uk.gov. As we've seen, the early lack of foresight in claiming .gov for the USA has resulted in hundreds of country code TLDs, which has benefited countries whose code happens to have some use to foreigners (.tv, for example), but is a net loss in terms of overall rationality.
.us domain. Consider the URL for my local library system: www.scls.lib.wi.us. The South Central Library System is a library entity in Wisconsin, which is in the US. Or my home county's webpage: www.co.dane.wi.us. Other than having the CO and DANE in the wrong order, it's the model of rationality. If we can keep the number of TLDs down we will allow such islands of order to exist where they can still be reasonably found.
.eu domains will end up being the same as existing .com domains. In turn, most of these will in fact be the same page as the .com domains, with a few being owned by the same company and presenting substantially the same information with a more locally-appropriate flavor. Only a few will be completely separate (say, two small companies with the same name in geographically diverse areas). In other words, there is little need for something like a .eu TLD. Most of the blah.eu domains would more properly be served by eu.blah.TLD instead, and the primary result of the existence of .eu is to funnel money into the coffers of those involved in setting up and running the TLD, without creating commensurate value.
Unfortunately, your (and my) opinion that more subdomains should be used is just a consequence of the way the internet's run. Consumers are conditioned to expect blah.TLD as a domain name and to be distrustful of long names (with some justification). Having made the conceptual leap that not all domains ending in
Ultimately, the problem is one of control, whether that's self-control or regulatory control. Every time a new TLD opens up, there's the same rush to buy the same domains with another TLD. Why are there country code TLDs? Well, because the USA dominated the early internet and claimed all of
The namespace has been so poorly managed in the past that it's difficult to exert the necessary control to maintain order. The only positive outcome of that is that there's a reluctance to change, allowing us to become reasonably comfortable with the status quo. Earlier in the internet's development, a different approach to TLDs would have helped whereas today it can only waste more money. Fortunately, if the limited number of TLDs remains small, the overall anarchy can be masked by tighter local control. For an example of that, see the
It's fairly clear that increasing the number of TLDs only marginally increases the number of websites. Most of the
I hope that increased reliance on search engines to find desired content will diminish the perceived value of a domain name, with the result that branding and marketing will have less input in the choice of naming, thus hopefully leading to gradually more hierarchical namespaces. At best, that's a long-term goal, and I'm sure it will be preceeded by smaller-scale campaigns to standardize and/or rationalize naming within individiual entities. One example of this would be the namespaces Apple uses internal to OS X.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
Although you don't say, I'm going to guess that all four records point to the same physical AND virtual server, AND that your weblogs do not record significant traffic on all four, but that almost all of it comes in on a single name. The other three would then be of historic interest, but not much more.
Having said all that, it's close enough to the two or so name limit I suggested that I'd consider it passable, just not good practice.
But four names isn't where the real problem lies. There are companies with many tens or even many hundreds of names. This is where namespace pollution is a serious problem, and where no amount of justification could possibly excuse all of those names. When you get that many names bought, it is typically for defensive or hostile purposes, it is NOT for the object of making things easier or more rational. I would argue that the DNS tables are no more a place for inter-corporate warfare than the phone directory, and that those who would seek to use DNS for such purposes should be turfed off the DNS heirarchy altogether. The infrastructure is far too important and valuable to sacrifice to corporate IT militias.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)