John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

The Total.Chaos Domain Has Already Been Registered? How About Shameless.Money.Grab?

Think Internet domain namespace is an unnavigable mess now? Just wait. ICANN, the Internet’s body for domain-name management, today voted to allow domain names using any combination of letters, including non-Latin characters. Beginning next year, anyone can register as a TLD (top-level domain) any combination of letters they like, their range limited only by the breadth of their own imaginations and the $185,000 application fee.

“This may be the dawn of a new age of online innovation in the domain name space. … The Internet’s addressing system has just been opened up to the limitless possibilities of human imagination and creativity,” ICANN chief executive Rod Beckstrom said during a press briefing this morning.

But by “limitless possibilities of human imagination and creativity,” he really meant corporate imagination and creativity. Because that’s who’s being targeted here: Entities with the money to blow on $185,000 TLD application fees and a desire to promote themselves. This is going to be a massive brand-identity landgrab and one that’s unlikely to do much good for consumers, but plenty for ICANN and its coffers.

Twitter’s Tanking

December 30, 2013 at 6:49 am PT

2013 Was a Good Year for Chromebooks

December 29, 2013 at 2:12 pm PT

BlackBerry Pulls Latest Twitter for BB10 Update

December 29, 2013 at 5:58 am PT

Apple CEO Tim Cook Made $4.25 Million This Year

December 28, 2013 at 12:05 pm PT

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald