Phil Corwin the attorney who represents the ICA just posted its site, an article about Federal Online Privacy legislation that maybe proposed and its possible effect on domain names.
Here is the article in full.
“””The Wall Street Journal’s (online.wsj.com ) July 31st issue carries a front page story, with extensive sidebars, titled “The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets”. It’s the first of an eye-opening series. If the remaining installments are as revelatory as this opening salvo, it will likely stoke the growing calls on Capitol Hill for federal online privacy legislation.
Domainers need to pay attention to this debate, because it has potential to drastically alter the technologies and economics of online advertising. And advertising is the lifeblood of domaining.
Here’s a sample from the article:
The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.
- The study found that the nation’s 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred. The nonprofit Wikipedia installed none.
- Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to “cookie” files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them.
- These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.
Not coincidentally, Congress held two hearings on this subject in the past two weeks. You can read the testimony and watch the webcasts at
and
Congress is going out of session until mid-September, and will then be in for just a few short and highly partisan pre-election weeks, so no online privacy bills are going to be enacted this year. But when you watch these hearings you see that online privacy is not a partisan issue – that is, while Democrats and Republicans may differ on what approach new law should take, they are getting in sync on the basic proposition that something should be done to catch the law up with the technology. Some issues percolate for years on Capitol Hill and then reach a critical mass that propels legislation forward. That inflection point may well be arriving for privacy legislation, especially when an already distrustful-of-institutions public (known every two years as “voters”) realizes that nonconsensual technologies have been installed on their computers that track and analyze every keystroke, creating files that are “anonymous” in only the narrowest sense.
How will this debate affect domainers?
That’s not at all clear. For example, the “BEST PRACTICES Act”, H.R. 5777, introduced by Rep. Bobby Rush, would require “covered entities” to establish notice and opt-out consent requirements for first party data collection and use, as well as generally require opt-in consent for the transfer of personal data to third parties. Are parked or developed web pages “covered entities”? That’s not at all clear from the proposed statutory language, which wasn’t drafted with domain monetization in mind – although it does seem to exclude contextual (as opposed to behavioral) ads from the category of unique personal identifiers (such as a cookie) used to store individual information or maintain a preference profile.
Many domainers have no control over or idea of the technologies being employed to serve the ads shown on their domains, but it’s quite possibly one that employs a unique personal identifier. After all, Google is by far the largest provider of online ads, and the Journal reported:
Some two-thirds of the tracking tools installed—2,224—came from 131 companies that, for the most part, are in the business of following Internet users to create rich databases of consumer profiles that can be sold. The companies that placed the most such tools were Google Inc., Microsoft. and Quantcast Corp., all of which are in the business of targeting ads at people online. (Emphasis added)
The online ad industry is responding to the prospect of new law and regulation with the very true observation that it’s advertising that pays for most useful and valuable online content, as well as explanations that the various online behavior tracking and ad serving companies provide disclosures, claim they don’t identify individuals, provide disclosure and opt out at their websites (or at aggregated industry websites like http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp ), and help make sure that we only see online ads relevant to our interests. All that is true, but legislators may still decide that a business model that expects an unsophisticated public to read dozens or hundreds of disclosures and then make informed choices doesn’t cut it – especially if they think that taking action can help boost Congress’ dismal approval ratings.
Meanwhile, in questioning before the Senate Commerce Committee, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said that he personally favored an opt-in requirement for all behavioral tracking – and, more importantly, that the FTC was leaning toward proposing a “Do Not Track” Registry for cyberspace that emulated the established “Do Not Call” Registry that has staunched the former flood of telemarketing calls. This raises the prospect that the online ad world will face the choice in the next two years of cutting a deal with a “Good Cop” Congress to avoid the more onerous proposals of a “Bad Cop” FTC.
In the long run, restraints on behavioral advertising may well increase the value and utility of good generic domains. After all, you don’t have to track someone’s behavior across the Internet to know that they are probably looking for something widget-related when they visit widgets.com (currently a parked webpage), and that allows you to serve up highly relevant contextual ads. But the one law that never gets repealed in Washington is the law of unintended consequences. That’s why ICA will be carefully tracking this evolving policy debate and explaining the domain monetization business to legislators to make sure it’s not inadvertently hit by legislation targeted at others.””
Reason #10,251 to get your own advertisers.
Spying is nothing new.
It is like my noisy neighbors.
If you cannot handle this kind of spying, go live in the caves with Osama.
I would like to exchange links with your site.Is this possible?
Dropped
Sorry we do not exchange links
How could I miss this post? This is great, @ MHB – thanx! 🙂 “Explaining the domain monetization business to legislators” is all this is going to amount to, IMO. It doesn’t make me happy all the tracking and cookies loading slows down my internet surfing experience, since I usually open 30 windows, even with a cable connection. That’s the price of free online surfing. Terms DO specify about 3rd party links & paid ads that put cookies. That’s why there’s software, like AdAware, CCleaner, and PC Tools Spyware Dr to mop up the mess of cookies after each session.
Not too long ago, Adobe acquired one of the most deceptive and stealth tracking companies. I was a bit shocked. Most all the major sites use this “technology” (read: trick) and now Adobe, a company with a mainstream reputation, is behind it. This tracking data is very valuable to many large companies and I feel very certain there is no way voters and laws will ever stop it. Companies like Adobe will weasle endlessly to put different spins on controversial stuff they do. They are very good at it. They are the ones who stretched DMCA beyond its limits to silence a developer (Google it), who made PDF’s into potential programs that can do nasty things in the hands of malware writers, who have convinced over 90% of internet users to install a piece of software on their computers, called “Flash” (which like PDF can do quite a bit with your PC), and who tried to redefine the now ubiquitous extension .swf as “small web file” when it really means “Shockwave Flash”. Why? It seems to me, they do not want users to understand what’s going on, or the potentila risks, but they are champions of “user-friendliness”. Incidentally, they also emply the guy who proposed the idea of a domain name system way back when, and has stood by for over 20 years while the abuses of it have gotten worse and worse. I have a paper he wrote in the 80’s where he details many of the same problems we see today. Yes, the 80’s. These problems were seen *very early on*. But, as he wrote in the 80’s, now that everybody’s using it it’s too late to repeal it: it would be far too much hassle. This is the classic excuse for almost every fatally flawed networking protocol we’re now using. As long as we keep using them, they will *never* be scrapped, not matter how terrible they may be.
The lesson to be learned here with respect to any of these “technologies” is that “once it’s in widespread use” without major objection, then it’s nearly impossible to scrap it and start over. And people will create every possible argument to justify its continued existence.
Tracking visitors is very widespread, and the objection is minimal.
Lawsuits:
http://www.infoworld.com/print/134282
Not to be pessimistic, but I wouldn’t count on any big changes. People complained about Netscape’s original text cookies when they first came to the public’s attention as they were used by advertisers, but cookies didn’t disappear. In fact now sites tell users to enable them. And users comply. What choice do they have? If methods become controversial, i.e. there are complaints, then developers just find other ways to get the user data they’re after. This game has been going on a long time. The original companies have been sued before but it has not stopped them. It is far too profitable. By the time people figure out what’s being collected by the methods these comanies focus on, it’s too late. The only way to avoid these insidious methods is to understand how they work. And investing the time and effort to do that is something the public and legislators will probabaly never do. There are developers out there who make their living working for companies like “Commission Junction”, etc. who spend 24/7 coming up with ways to get various user data; it is their “job” and they take pride in it. Users may not wish to understand what these developers are up to, but they’ll use the technology anyway. Therein lies the problem.
“…advertising is the lifeblood of domaining”
According to the “domaining” pundits, “development” and “content” are where domainers should direct their attention. Not to sound cynical, but I think that’s a red herring.
Advertising is not merely the lifeblood of domaining, it is the lifeblood of *the network*.
It made a certain search engine (Google) the giant that it is, and it keeps her there (98+% of her revenue). And arguably, at this stage, Google is “controlling the network”. Does any other company have more influence over the web? Wait and see. If you think social networking is going to overtake Google, it’s still the same principle: advertising is what funds the business. That’s what enables the company to grow.
In the beginning, decades ago, the money to build out the network, as well as much of the influence, came from other sources. There was no massive ad revenue fueling companies that could do what Google can do today.
These days, funding may still derive from various non-advertiser origins in order to build network infrastructure, but how signifcant is that overall? Think of the end result of building it. Why build the network further? The “real” driving reason localities want to build and access the network is to get at this massive ad revenue, via local businesses who either will purchase ads on the network, create them or sell space for them. The businesses that want access to this medium want it for its ad potential. And it’s advertisers that will drive consumers to the web. They’ll demand access.
Though things were different in the early days, I think it’s clear that *advertising* is the driving force behind the network now. “It’s where the money comes from.”
“2o7.net” looks a lot like “207.net”. Reminds me of “typosquatters”.
Add some subdomains, e.g. 192.168.2o7.net, and it looks a bit like a local (safe), “non-internet” IP address. This is exactly what they do.
Why would you choose those exact subdomains, out of 1000’s of other possibilities?
Welcome to Deception 101 a.k.a. internet advertising “analytics”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omniture
Does anyone really care? I think not.