Where there’s an Internet development, there’s a scam. And where there’s an Internet scam, there’s an American. 

There is a serious side and a less-than-serious side to what follows. The serious side is that the ambulance-chasers and claim-jumpers of the United States are waging war against the .eu HLD system.

In the interest of TelecomRedux’s own ‘homeland security’ program [sic], US readers are requested to remove their shoes and place their irises (that’s ‘eyeballs’ for the non-technical) very close to the screen.

America’s emotionally, physically, sartorially and ethically priapic lawyers just swoon and self-engorge at the idea of a something-for-nothing proposition. Perhaps all human kind is predisposed this way, but the vast majority of us do not attempt to make a profession out of it.

One piece of evidence to back this up comes with the fact that ‘spam’ is now a dollar-denominated industry. Repeated offers of cheap loans, snide software, ‘luxury” watches, share tips and what we might coyly refer to as ‘pharmaceuticals’ – which land on your desktop with tedious regularity – are all based on the greenback.

This does not mean that spamsters and scamsters are based in the United States; many clearly are not. Perhaps the US is already too full of the online pornographers and other idiots who make up the average community in cyberspace.

But in certain respects, ‘spam’ works like an extension of the dot.com mk1 mania of the late 1990s. Everyone, even small investors (who had probably never heard of Bernard J. Ebbers) thought they could get rich – very, very rich – quick – very, very quick.

The notion of ‘spam-n-scam’ can hardly be said to have originated in the online age, but it has picked up momentum as the pervasiveness of the Internet has become ever more apparent. The US likes to think it leads the way in that regard, so maybe its dominant role in ‘spam-n-scam’ is a natural side-effect.

The US also likes to argue that it is leading the rush into online security. This of course represents a far bigger business opportunity – an industry-within-an-industry thank cracking down on the culprits and criminals. It’s the online equivalent of the ‘bunker-busting’ bomb; that would be more difficult to fund, too, if there were no bunkers to bust. And we now all recognise where that leads.

There are two key factors here:
• the United States would like to think that it first invented and now owns the Internet. Profit rather than morality informs its world view of this business;
• the United States likes ‘freedom of speech’, which is enshrined in its somewhat dubious Constitution; this has been taken up by organsations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (‘EFF’), which self-refers as “a nonprofit group of passionate people — lawyers, technologists, volunteers, and visionaries — working to protect your digital rights.”

It is the combination of these two strains of thought, leavened by legal opportunism and avarice, that has produced the assault on .eu domain names. The Americans involved ought to be ashamed of themselves but given the ‘red in tooth and claw’ attitude to personal enrichment that exists there you can bet they won’t be.

Herman Sobrie, Legal Manager of EURid (which oversees .eu domain name registrations) put it simply last week: “we are convinced that the domain name holders of the 74 000 .eu names (Ovidio Ltd, Fausto Ltd and Gabino Ltd) are acting as a front for a number of registrars. The domain name holders and the registrars can be regarded as one and the same. Since registrars should only register domain names for existing customers and not “warehouse” the names in order to resell them at a higher price, this is clearly in breach of the registrar contract.”

The good news, insofar as any can be drawn from this turn of events, is in the longer term. Last year’s World Summit on the Information Society decided against global oversight of the Internet in favour of the US-centric ICANN. Next time around, that compromise seems unlikely to be repeated given US-sanctioned abuse of the medium.

And the less-than-serious bit? Sorry, it has slipped my mind.
Jim Chalmers