The Register published a piece of mine today. First time I’ve written something without swearing in it for about 18 months.

I may even get some beer tokens out it.

First time I’ve had somebody else editing my copy in about four years, too. But it didn’t feel weird at all. The headline’s not mine, but there were only two significant edits, both entirely cool and reasonable, that I spotted in the body.

The story’s at the top of the Reg’s five Most Read stories in the IT Director category, and appears to be the third most-commented story on the front page.

I’ve no idea what that means, but 37 comments in three hours can’t be bad.

Here it is:

Vatican vetos ‘dot god’ domain

It’s more loving than any of you motherfuckers ever show me.

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I’ve been outsourced to India!

Well, it may not technically be outsourcing, but some Indian dude is writing copy about my old domain name beat for Computer Business Review now.

I say writing, but let’s not rush to conclusions.

This story about Sedo flogging green.co.uk was the top headline on cbronline.com on Thursday.

Owner puts up green.co.uk for auction

Search Engine for Domain Offers (Sedo), a US-based online market for the purchase and sale of internet domain names and websites, has announced that the domain name green.co.uk has been put up for auction by its owner, Mr Green.

I probably would have said Sedo was German, personally, but it’s possible I’m just behind the curve.

Anyway, apart from the addition of “US-based”, the story looks like a textbook rewrite of the Sedo press release.

I think my job, had I still got one, would have been safe from this guy.

That last sentence is sarcasm.

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“We’ve stated long ago that we had no interest in being a registry — we like interfacing with end users too much. A registry only interfaces with registrars.”

– Bob Parsons, Go Daddy, April 15, 2005.

“GoDaddy.com, Inc. and Afilias USA, Inc., have teamed up to create The Domain Name Alliance Registry, LLC (“Alliance Registry”), a joint venture seeking to assume stewardship of the usTLD”

– press release issued a few moments ago.

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This sounds like it could be fun, for domain geeks like yours truly.

Roland LaPlante, Vice-President & Chief Marketing Officer of Afilias, will be in Washington, DC to discuss the RFQ issued by NTIA for the .us registry, America’s sovereign space on the Internet…

…despite the biggest market expansion in domain history, usTLD is languishing, and appears to be suffering from lack of attention over the last six years by the current provider, NeuStar.

Claws out, handbags at dawn.

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I think I’m probably right in guessing this guy is trying to scam me into buying “my” brand in dot-cn. The email has full phone and email contact details, giving it an air of legitimacy.



But it is trying to sell me the .cn version of a .com domain, namely computerwire.com, of which I am not and never have been the registrant. I merely have an email address @computerwire.com.

Dear manager:

This is Shanghai JinYue Network Technological Inc , which is the oversea domain name register center in China authorized by our government . On 30th July. we received KINGSAN Investment company’s application,they want to register “computerwire” as Internet Brand and CN domain name. But after checking I find this domain name conflict with your company , so I send you email ,and want to confirm whether your company have authorized KINGSAN to register or not .
I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

John Zhou

China Internet Domains Accredited Registry:
Shanghai JinYue Network Service Co.,Ltd

Tel:+86(0)XXXXXXXX
Fax:+86(0)XXXXXX
Email: XXXXXX
Internet:www.cniigov.cn

As you can see from the many comments on this post, I am far from alone in receiving this likely scam.

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This is easily the funnest tech industry book I’ve read in a long time.

The premise, in a nutshell: in the early 1990s an entrepreneur called Gary Kremen registered the domain name sex.com. It was subsequently stolen by an absolute bastard called Stephen Cohen, who quickly creates a multimillion dollar porn empire.

The book Sex.Com tells the story of Kremen’s long legal fight to get it back, and the increasingly personal and bitter hostilities between him and Cohen.

The genre is essentially courtroom drama, which could have very easily led to a very dry legal tome on the controversies of internet property rights during the early days of internet governance. McCarthy is now officially an ICANN policy wonk, so I had feared the book would veer in that direction.

But I’m delighted to say that he instead chooses to focus on the far more entertaining human story of two men who start off as strangers and quickly come to realize they really, really fucking hate each other. These are two men where a series of taunting telephone calls could easily and in fact does (if only in the paranoid ravings of the vanquished) culminate in a gun battle in a Tijuana suburb between a gang of bounty hunters and the Mexican police.

As such, McCarthy gives short shrift to the weighty legal issues at the heart of the case, briefly but competently dealing with each only insofar as they are necessary to advance the narrative. He’s far more interested in the people story. More attention is paid to the fact that Kremen’s lawyer is also his coke buddy and quite possibly on a parallel spiral of self-destruction. His pony-tail, which appears to irk the judge, is judged weightier than the contents of the motions he files.

One of the joys of reading Sex.com are the bizarre yet completely matter-of-fact passages that would be utterly out of place in any other industry books: “Kremen had recovered one of the three trucks that had driven off with the house’s possessions, handing over a wad of cash to a Mexican in a car park, no questions asked. But his big mistake was to put an old junkie friend in charge of fixing the place up.”

McCarthy’s either done a considerable amount of homework or he’s taking massive liberties with his assertions, often tossing around casual insults about protagonists and minor characters alike. Cohen, we learn early on, is chiefly motivated by “his unending, pubescent desire for uncomplicated, disconnected sex”. His fifth wife Rosa, who barely needs to appear in the story, McCarthy is quite comfortable telling us is “not very bright”.

It would be a mistake to say that McCarthy has written a black-and-white story about a good guy versus a bad guy. While Cohen is quite clearly presented as an evil bastard, it’s quite difficult not to admire his cojones and almost comic-book amorality, and to enjoy the occasional guilty chuckle when he does something for apparently no other purpose that to distract, confuse, or just generally fuck with, his opponents.

Kremen, clearly the nicer of the two, is portrayed sympathetically but by no means heroically. McCarthy makes his drug problems a central theme, and the book turns out to be as much about his battle with his internal demons as with his external tormentor.

Sex.com is primarily a very entertaining story about two guys having decade-long fight, but it’s also impossible not to learn a little something about the domain name industry along the way.

Not as much as I would have liked, however. We learn almost nothing about why Network Solutions (now the VeriSign registry) allowed the sex.com theft to occur in the first place and then continued to insist that it had done nothing wrong.

There was almost certainly a parallel people story going on inside NSI at the time, but we don’t hear anything about it, other than the fact that a number of rather controversial allegations were made, but filed under seal.

It’s damn shame. McCarthy is certainly privy to the same rumors as I, and yet he apparently failed to confirm them to the extent that he felt comfortable publishing. That was disappointing, but it did not detract from my overall enjoyment of the book.

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Bret Fausett links to a New Orleans news story about yet another Registerfly victim. This time a church is being screwed out of money.

Ticket sales for the Randy Travis concert to be held at the Castine Center in Mandeville Sunday abruptly halted Wednesday when the ticketing portal at cornerstonecares.com was hijacked by a domain name registration company operating as Registerfly.com
…
“It is a travesty to have such a great opportunity as the Randy Travis concert thwarted by a company’s total disregard for others. I am praying that God will show his might at this 11th hour for us,” [Cornerstone Church pastor Doug] Gilford said.

Bret wisely suggests: “this might be a time when [Go Daddy boss] Bob Parsons can do more than the Almighty.”

I’d like to humbly add a suggestion.

Bob, please let the idiot pray. This is one instance where Registerfly appears to have made the world a slightly better place.

Cheers.

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I still find it sacktighteningly funny that every month ICANN deletes a bunch of comments from its official blog on the grounds that they constitute “Libel/Conjecture/Nonsense”.

ICANN, please help me out here…

Without libel, conjecture and nonsense, what would be the state of internet governance today?

Who would go to all those meetings?

What would happen to mailing-list software sales?

Would Michael Froomkin be begging on the streets?

Would all those Congressional committees get yet another afternoon off work every year?

What would I write about?

I’m sure I’m not alone in saying BACK OFF ICANN! Stop suppressing our First Amendment right to talk bollocks in public!

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I see the blogosphere is still intrinsically self-correcting. That’s nice.

I had a bit of a minor dispute in the comments at ValleyWag yesterday, after they posted this codswallop about OpenDNS.

“OpenDNS would make typo-squatters an endangered species. By redirecting mistyped Web addresses to the correct site, Ulevitch makes life easier for Web surfers — and impossible for domainers,” Owen Thomas wrote.

Complete nonsense of course, based on a basic misunderstanding of a piece he read in the New York Times and, I expect, an adherence to that good old-fashioned journalistic maxim: “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”

I told him he was wrong, and I believe he was also informed of his mistake by smarter folk than I, so he corrected the story. The way the blogosphere does, y’know.

Oh, wait, no he didn’t.

These bloggers… tsk… they’re no better than reporter scum.

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