.XXX marks the spot where the dot con boom begins

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This morning’s Observer column about ICANN’s decision to allow new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs).

Given the pressure on namespace within the existing gTLDs, it was inevitable that Icann would come under pressure to expand their number. The first foray came from those who wanted to establish “.xxx” as cyberspace’s red-light district. After numerous spluttering rows, this was finally approved a few months ago. You may be reassured to know that applicants for a .xxx domain must first complete an application process that will be overseen by the International Foundation for Online Responsibility (Iffor), a body set up to “promote the development of responsible business practices and conduct within the online adult-entertainment community”. So that’s all right, then.

But the .xxx stuff was really just the overture to the main business, which is accommodating the needs of corporations. Icann has now announced that it will allow them to apply for new gTLDs, such as “.fashion” or “.drinks”, for example. Or perhaps even “.coke” (though cocaine dealers might have something to say about that)…

In a thoughtful comment on the piece, Anthony Van Couvering argues that I’ve allowed my conspiracy theorising to get the better of my judgement.

The big-corporation conspiracy theory is one that I typically warm to, but as someone who’s been involved with ICANN for years, I can tell you that far from big corporations pushing this, they have been dead set against it, and over the last few years have put a lot of dollars and muscle trying to defeat the expansion of the top-level domain space. The reason is twofold: first, they feel that they will have to do defensive registrations in hundreds of new namespaces; second, they already own most of the beachfront property, and if you’re in that position, the last thing you want are more beaches.

He goes on to say that:

So although it does function as a barrier to entry, the $185,000 application fee is probably not what’s going to stop someone who’s seriously interested in applying — it’s just one of many expenses.

So who will apply? The brands will apply, mostly for .brand, either to promote it or as a “just in case” defensive measure. Cities will apply, and both New York and Paris among others have made known their intent. Ethnolinguistic communities will apply: .scot (Scotland), .cymru (Wales), .bzh (Brittany), and .eus (Basque) are just some of the announced candidates. Finally, there will be entrepreneurs who think that they have some special sauce that will make their top-level domain one that will be attractive to consumers.

[…]

The new gTLD program has a complicated history, and many interests have forcefully put forward their agenda. What we finally got was a compromise that everyone can grudgingly live with, but which in the end opens up the top-level domain space that for years had been blocked by corporate interests. It is a Very Good Thing.

I hope he’s right.

When in Rome…

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… best avoid Mary Beard, who sets about Robert Hughes in a severe review of his new book about Rome.

Reader, be warned. Skip the first 200 pages and start this book at chapter six, “The Renaissance”. By the time Hughes reaches this point, he is well in command of his material and is on characteristically cracking form. He offers some delicious pen portraits of the artists and architects who designed and made what are now the tourist high-spots of the city: the Sistine chapel, the Piazza Navona, St Peter’s basilica, the Campidoglio. Particularly vivid is his discussion of Bernini, “the marble megaphone of papal orthodoxy” – who was loathed by most visitors in the 19th century (“intolerable abortions” was Charles Dickens’s description of Bernini's monuments), but increasingly admired in the 20th. And he nicely captures the spirit of the 18th-century grand tour. The desire of the young milords to discover the grandeur of ancient culture was only one side of the story. Sex tourism was the other. Rome was, as Hughes observes, the Thailand of the period, and he includes plenty of revealing stories about the brash bigwigs who turned up in the city: Lord Baltimore, with his harem of eight women, or Colonel William Gordon, who (if Batoni’s famous portrait is anything to go by) pranced around the Mediterranean in a kilt and swaths of his family tartan. What on earth did the locals make of these people?

In his epilogue, Hughes, the modern cultural critic, elegantly savages the mass tourism and commercial culture of Berlusconi’s Italy. A visit to the overcrowded Sistine chapel has become, he insists, close to unbearable, “a kind of living death for high culture” – which can only get worse “when post-communist prosperity has taken hold in China”, and the Chinese flood in by the million. The same, he might have added, is also true of St Peter’s basilica itself. It may be large enough inside to hold huge numbers of visitors in relative comfort, but they now have to go through a metal detector to get into the place. When I tried to visit one afternoon last December only two of these machines were working, and people in the queue winding around the piazza would have been waiting for more than an hour.

So far, so good. “In fact”, writes Beard, “the second half of the book is an engaging history of this wondrous city, very much in the tradition of The Shock of the New, packed full of sharp observation and trenchant one-liners, artfully and fearlessly told”.

But:

The first half of the book, especially the three chapters dealing with the early history of Rome, from Romulus to the end of pagan antiquity, is little short of a disgrace – to both author and publisher. It is riddled with errors and misunderstandings that will mislead the innocent and infuriate the specialist.

Hughes, it seems, has made “more than a few pardonable slips”.

The “ancient” parts of this book are littered with howlers. Sometimes, for example, CE and BCE are confused (so that Julius Caesar’s Gallic enemy Vercingetorix is said to have been beheaded in 46CE, almost a hundred years after Caesar himself was assassinated), or the correct chronology is flagrantly reversed (“a succession of autocrats, starting with Augustus himself and continuing onwards through Pompey and Julius Caesar”, he writes, when in fact Pompey and Caesar preceded the emperor Augustus). On other occasions, the identity of the characters is hopelessly muddled. Hughes clearly has not been able to distinguish “Pompey the Great” from his (very different) father, also inconveniently called “Pompey”.

Tut, tut. I still love Robert Hughes, though. He writes about art like Hemingway wrote about bullfighting.

The naivete of (some) UK universities

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David Mitchell had a terrific piece in the Observer triggered by stories that up to 10 British publicly-funded universities are in talks with Carl Lygo, the CEO of BPP (Britain’s first for-profit ‘university’), about possibility of running the business side of these institutions by going into “partnership” with them.

The idea is that they’d still make all the academic decisions, while BPP would deal with the admin. Mitchell has this to say about the proposition: “There is little doubt that state funding changes an institution’s attitude to money and can increase its propensity for waste.”

But…

I think it’s a big jump from that observation to the current orthodoxy that the public sector’s flabby inefficiency and the private’s dynamic productivity are inevitable and universal – that the private sector possesses some kind of magic which, by dint of being paid by the state, no one in public service has access to; that the private sector is always brilliant and the public always useless.

I suspect Lygo of subscribing to this view when he says: “We have got a lot of universities in the UK and not all are in a strong financial position… the private provider would add expertise in the back-office functions.” What expertise? Expertise in administering, say, Bristol University that the people currently administering Bristol University don’t possess but a new company that’s never done it before is going to be brimming with? Won’t they just employ the same people to do the job but pay them less or sack a few? Is that what he means by expertise?

It’s not expertise, it’s ruthlessness, it’s the prioritisation of profit. What Lygo is offering people running universities is the opportunity to divest themselves of many of the problems inherent in their jobs. If you don’t want to take the tough decisions, he’s saying, if you doubt you’ve got the backbone to make the efficiency savings, then we’ll handle them for you. Pass your troubles on to those of us untroubled by conscience. Not only would this be a dereliction of the universities’ duty, it would also help perpetuate the myth of the private sector’s omnipotence and the public’s doltish money-burning idiocy.

The private sector caused the credit crunch, the financial crisis, the global recession. The public sector bailed out the banks and brought the world back from the brink of ruin. When our railways were in public hands, they were shabby, unreliable and loss-making. In private hands, they still are but public money ends up in the hands of shareholders and the tickets cost vastly more. The NHS is the most efficient health service of its peers despite having, up till now, much less private sector involvement than they do. The armed forces remain in the public sector and people seldom have cause to criticise their efficiency or commitment.

What Mitchell doesn’t mention, but Howard Hotson did in his splendid piece in the LRB, is that BPP is an offshoot of Apollo, the US Corporation which owns the ‘university’ of Phoenix.

In 2004, a scathing report issued by the US Department of Education concluded that Phoenix, as the Chronicle of Higher Education put it, had a ‘high-pressure sales culture’ that intimidated recruiters who failed to meet targets and encouraged the enrolment of unqualified students – in short that it rewarded ‘the recruiters who put the most “asses in classes”’. Apollo illegally withheld the report, but it was leaked and the group’s value on the stock market crashed. A suit was brought alleging that its management had ‘disseminated materially false and misleading financial statements in an effort to inflate its stock price and attract investors’.

In 2006 the company’s controller and chief accounting officer resigned amid allegations that the books had been cooked; in 2007, the Nasdaq Listing and Hearing Review Council threatened to withdraw Apollo’s listing from the stock exchange; in 2008, a US federal jury in Arizona found Apollo guilty of ‘knowingly and recklessly’ misleading investors, and instructed the group to pay shareholders some $280 million in reparations. Apollo appealed, but the appeal was rejected by the US Supreme Court on 8 March this year.

In the face of strenuous lobbying from the for-profit university industry, the Obama administration is now reversing the regulatory changes of the Bush years that allowed this bonanza. It has just been revealed that attorney-generals in ten states are investigating the University of Phoenix ‘for possible deceptive practices in its student recruiting and financing’ dating back to 2002. It looks like the party may be over, at least for the Apollo Group. Enrolment at Phoenix dropped by 42 per cent in the last three months of 2010. In January the group conceded that it expects applications to drop by another 40 per cent in the first quarter of 2011.

So this is the group that is going to offer its commercial nous to the UK higher education sector? “Is it possible”, asks Hotson, “that [David] Willetts just doesn’t know what the Apollo Group was up to at the University of Phoenix? Or does he imagine that for some reason the same thing couldn’t happen here?”

I’ve seen too much of universities over my professional career to think that their administration and management couldn’t be improved. But the idea that an outfit like BPP has anything to contribute to their management is, well, insane.

Which means, of course, that it is now quite probable.

Why isn’t Amazon stamping out Kindlespam?

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Further to my Observer column about Kindlespam, I’ve been brooding on the subject.

The most obvious question is why Amazon doesn’t do something about it. After all, the Kindle is now the company’s key product, and the stench of corruption coming from Kindlespam must pose a strategic threat. Users can’t do much about it — other than by ignoring the avalanche of fake ‘eBooks’ on the site. And it’s very difficult (if not virtually impossible) for an author who suspects that his or her content is being ripped off to check, because she can’t inspect the content without buying and downloading the suspected rip-off. So any comprehensive trawl for infringing content would be prohibitively expensive and tedious. The only outfit that can check stuff before it’s published on the site is Amazon. So why aren’t isn’t the company doing it?

At first, I thought that Amazon’s rationale might be similar to the one Google takes on the issue of infringing or objectionable YouTube content: given that 48-hours’-worth of video is being uploaded every minute, it simply isn’t feasible to pre-scan stuff before it’s published. But Google will take it down on receipt of a complaint. That won’t get Amazon off the Kindlespam hook for two reasons: (1) Compared with video, pre-scanning of text is perfectly feasible, and computationally not that difficult; Amazon could easily do it. (2) Detection of infringing content in Kindlespam by rights holders is very difficult for the reasons outlined earlier, so while a take-down-upon-complaint policy is perfectly feasible, complaints will be much less frequent than they are on YouTube.

So we’re left with a puzzle. Pre-scanning for crap, spam and infringing content in Kindlespam is perfectly feasible — and indeed only Amazon can do it effectively. Yet it does not do it. Why?

One answer (suggested in my column) is that the company is making too much money from Kindlespam. (After all, Amazon get a 30 per cent slice on every bit of Kindlespam sold.) But another answer has just occurred to me. (I’m slow on the uptake.) If Amazon did pre-scan all the self-published stuff on the Kindle store, then it might have to take legal responsibility for the resulting content. It might have to take on the liabilities of a publisher, in other words.

So at the moment, Amazon is trying to have it both ways. It provides a platform (Kindle self-publishing) from which it rakes in dosh, but takes no responsibility for the avalanche of crap that the platform enables. Experience with conventional spam suggests, though, that this can’t continue: in the end the textual bindweed will choke the plant. And then what will Amazon do?

LATER: Behind all this is the whole problem of so-called content-farms — some of which are now probably using the Kindle as one of their outlets. They have been a scourge of the Web for a while, because essentially they are parasitic on Google’s AdSense system. The company has finally responded to the problem in classic Google style — with an algorithm, codenamed Panda. Virginia Heffernan has a good piece about this in today’s NYT. The headline — “Google’s War on Nonsense” — says it all.

Remembering Maurice Wilkes

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Today, the Cambridge Computer Lab will be honouring Maurice Wilkes with an afternoon of talks and reminiscences. I’m looking forward to it. He was such an amazing, practical man.

Here’s the programme:

Andy Hopper: Introduction
Martin Campbell-Kelly: Beginnings
David Barron: Pioneering
David Hartley: Service
Andrew Herbert: Research
Don Gaubatz: America
Andy Harter: Industry
Andy Hopper: Back to the Lab
Discussion

Kindlespam

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This morning’s Observer column.

At first sight, it seems magical. At a stroke, all those tiresome gatekeepers – those self-important agents, editors and publishers who stood between you and recognition – are abolished. Suddenly, the world can see your hitherto unrecognised talent in all its glory. Isn’t technology wonderful?

Er, up to a point. This ebook technology has proved so successful that Amazon now claims to be selling more electronic publications than conventional printed ones. The company is clearly surfing a wave. According to one industry expert, for example, nearly 2.8 million non-traditional books, including ebooks, were published in the United States in 2010, while just more than 316,000 traditional books came out. That compares with 1.33 million ebooks and 302,000 printed books in 2009.

Impressive, eh? It’s only when one peruses the cornucopia of literary productions available on the Kindle store that one detects the first scent of rodent…