The proliferation of Web 2.0 social media services has magnified the old problem of cyber-squatting: Every new service represents the possibility that someone else might claim your name, or your organization’s trademark, as a user name before you do! This problem is especially significant where user names correspond to vanity URLs, as with Twitter and, more recently, Facebook.
So I was intrigued to discover that the market is responding to this need: ClaimMyName (CMN) will take care of user registrations on 30 Web 20 services for $329 or on an astounding 300 services for $799. CMN is a “freemium” service offered by DandyID.com, a nifty free service that allows users to organize all their social media profiles for something like 390 services so that buttons for each service can easily be added to an author bio page on a blog, as we’ve done at the TLF. So if I really wanted to make sure that no one else registered http://<WEB2.0service>.com/berinszoka, or /techliberation or /ProgressFreedom, this service would allow me to do so with just a few clicks—at a price of either $10.97/service for thirty or $2.66/service for 300 services.
CMN is essentially a mini-Mark Monitor, the international company famous for protecting trademarks online—except that CMN facilitates self-help by users outside of trademark law: No registration is required; everything is done on a first-come-first-serve basis. Pretty cool.
We’ve written a lot lately about Microsoft’s efforts to reinvent itself, first rebranding its Live search engine as the Bing, and then partnering with Yahoo! to make Bing the search engine on Yahoo!’s still-impressive empire of content and services. But if Microsoft is going to beat Google in Search 3.0 and master shifts in the driving paradigms of the Internet from search and browsers to ubiquitous integration of social networking and other paradigms as yet unforeseen, Microsoft will need more than just brilliant engineering: They’ll need clever marketing.
So it seems that the software titan is turning to user-generated advertising, such as this gem:
WARNING: Battlestar Galactica spoiler: Google may well be in danger of losing its monopoly on cool to Microsoft if Bingcan get at least four of the Final Five Cylons to volunteer as back-up singers in a promo video contest.
Google clearly considers Microsoft a threat, having recently launched an ad campaign of its own for its Apps services, which compete directly with Microsoft Office.
Five years ago, we started the TLF to report on—and hopefully help to reverse—this dangerous trend of over-regulation of the Internet, communications, media and high-technology in general. We’ve become a full-service technology policy blog that covers complete gamut of public policy issues affecting the future of the Internet and technology.
Please join us as we celebrate, commiserate and plan for the next five years of fighting the good cyber-libertarian fight. We’ll even through in a free TLF laptop sticker! Just RSVP on Facebook today!
RocketBar will be offering the following drink specials:
$3 PBR cans,
$5 Rail Cocktails,
$5 House Wine and
$4.50 Miller High Life 16oz cans.
They have a wide variety of games, so you can get your pool/shuffleboard/darts/Risk/Trivial Pursuit on.
Maybe Obama should invite Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer over to the White House for a beer to settle the two companies’ differences!
While he’s at it, Obama might want to invite Apple CEO Steve Jobs, too, since the common cause Apple and Google once made against Microsoft now seems to be giving way to increased rivalry between the two titans of Internet cool. Or how about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, given Facebook’s growing challenge to Google? Yahoo!’s Carol Bartz seems to get along much better with everyone than the boys in the group, so she’d probably help Obama keep things under control.
The Internet industry’s war-of-all-against-all is reminiscent of Tom Lehrer‘s classic 1960s satire “National Brotherhood Week”:
I’m listening to the audiobook of Telecosm, George Gilder’s prophetic book about how abundant broadband would revolutionize the planet—which I recommend to everyone. I came across this passage, which reminded me just how good we really have it:
Reported to catalog only 16 percent of web pages, the best Internet search engines are foundering under the load, taking as long as six months to add new content.
If that was Search 1.0, Search 2.0 is great! Today’s search engines will index this post in a matter of minutes and while there are still parts of the “Deep Web” that aren’t crawled, a number of Search 3.0 upstarts are working on solving that problem, too!
Like many others, I’ve wondered whether Yahoo! got less than it should have becuase government antitrust regulators prevented Google from bidding up the value of a deal with Yahoo!.
Carl Icahn, who owns 5% of Yahoo! seems happy enough while others still wonder if Microsoft got the better end of the deal, BusinessWeek reports. While many observers have howled that Yahoo! gets revenue-sharing instead of cash up front, Yahoo! Carol Bartz notes that a cash deal “would have had significant tax consequences while contributing only $3 million in annual interest to Yahoo’s bottom line.”
Whatever the initial terms of the deal, its value depends on speedy approval without onerous conditions being imposed by antitrust regulators—even if they take the form of “voluntary” concessions. Let’s hope the government gets out of the way to give this new partnership a real chance to go toe-to-toe with Google in search, as I’ve suggested here, here and especially here.
Regular readers will know that Adam and I have been waging a lonely defensive action in the war on “Free!” (ad-supported) content and services online, pointing out that restrictions on data collection and use for advertising would ultimately hurt consumers by reducing funding for the sites they love (1, 2, 3, 4). In short, there is no free lunch! I’ve also written a number of posts this past week about the dangers inherent in antitrust regulation—arguing that government efforts to make online markets more competitive through antitrust tinkering generally do more harm than good (1, 2, 3).
These two debates have long shared a common thread: Some have argued that effects on privacy should become a part of antitrust analysis and those who consider Google to be “Big Brother” want Washington both to clamp down on data use (“baseline privacy legislation”) and to ramp up antitrust scrutiny of the company.
But a French company has opened a much more direct front in the War on “Free.” Bottin Cartographeshas sued Google for unfair competition (concurrence déloyale—literally, disloyal competition) and abuse of its market dominance. The case is a little more complicated than English language reports suggest: It’s not just that Google is giving away a product (Google Maps) that Bottin charges, or wanted to charge, for. Like Google, Bottin charges enterprise users. But Bottin complains that Google doesn’t show ads on the public version of Google Maps. (Neither does Bottin, but maybe that’s part of why they’re upset.) Bottin’s lawyer claims that Google’s “strategy is to capture the market and squeeze out the competition by creating a monopoly for itself.” He goes on to assert that Google is “ruining the market” for mapping services.
Bottin seeks half a million Euros (plus interest) in damages, but their lawyer insists: “It’s not a question of money. Either Google puts advertising on Google Maps or the company must be forced to pay damages and abide by the terms of fair competition.” The hearing is set for October 16.
This argument, crazy as it sounds, is one Google is likely going to have to fend off repeatedly in the coming years—and not just in Europe, where “unfair competition” is still very much about protecting competitors rather than consumers. Chris Anderson, author of the new book Free, recently addressed this very issue. Anderson’s book describes multiple ways of supporting “Free” content and services.
As you might have noticed, we’re giving the TLF a facelift as we approach our five-year anniversary on August 14. Our own Jerry Brito is leading the charge, with Cord Blomquist and PJ Doland providing backup vocals. Thanks, guys!
We’re still ironing out bugs and experimenting with widgets, but we’d welcome your feedback as we work things out. Please feel free to share your thoughts on the new design or features by posting comments here, or to email me at bszoka <at> pff.org.
The iPhone-obsessed blogosphere is atwitter about the Apple”s exclusion of the Google voice application from the iPhone app store. On Friday, the FCC sent letters of inquiry to the two companies as well as AT&T.
Whatever one thinks about whether Apple and AT&T should be able to operate their own networks as they see fit, this cat-fight should at least demonstrate the pointlessness of the investigation opened by the FTC in May as to whether Apple and Google are violating the antitrust laws by having two members of their boards of directors in common: Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former Genentech CEO Art Levinson. If the two companies were, in fact, trying to collude in an anti-competitive manner, they don’t seem to be doing a very good job of it!
Meanwhile, if you don’t like how Apple runs its app store, don’t get an iPhone! If you already have one, you could follow the lead of TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington and simply cancel your existing iPhone contract to get a more “open” phone—such as one powered by Google’s Android operating system.
Me, I’m just waiting for Google Voice to offer number portability so I can start using the service without having to change the number I’ve had for the last five years—and plan to take to my ashen grave (somewhere beyond low Earth orbit).
Probably largely the same reason that people hate lawyers: Anytime you’re dealing with legal rights and contracts, it’s a pain to get anything done. (Having just celebrated my fifth law school reunion, I should know!)
Case in point: I was thrilled to discover the Canadian radio show The Age of Persuasion, dedicated to a subject I’ve come to know and love (to the point of considerable repetition): advertising! Yup, that’s right, those annoying little ads that fund all the free online content and services we all take for granted.
Anyway, the good news is that the show is available online. The bad news is that it’s only available in streaming audio form—which means I can’t take it with me on my iPod, which means I’ll basically never listen to it. From Podcasting: what’s ‘holding up the delay’?:
Okay, we’ve got to stop meeting like this.
Time, she passes, yet the legals surrounding podcasting are yet to be settled. Meanwhile, our finely honed spider-sense (and a steady stream of daily emails) tells us many of you are wondering when an AOP podcast will happen.
Alas, for the moment, we are bound not to release Age of Persuasion episodes for podcast. (No, we don’t like it either.)
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
But a French company has opened a much more direct front in the War on “Free.” 
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.