According to an article in TheRegister, a consortium of EU countries are trying to grab control of the internet from the US. There goal is to modify ICANN and make the internet overseen by an international community rather than the US.

I am opposed to this power change. See US should retain control of internet.

The October issue of Wired Magazine has a story about Randy Guthrie, a US citizen arrested in China for DVD piracy. What makes this story unique is how Guthrie was busted. A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent heard about Guthrie’s web site, ThreeDollarDVD.com, where Guthrie was selling pirated DVDs for $3. All the agent did was go to WhoIs and search the domain name. Guthrie’s e-mail address popped up: randyguthrie@yahoo.com. Bingo, there’s your man. In fact, you can still see this WhoIs record (click here to see it).

I’m surprised that someone doing something illegal online would neglect to consider the WhoIs database to cover their trail (not something I condone regardless). But Guthrie doesn’t sound very smart. Born to a wealthy family, Guthrie hads many failed business endeavors before moving to China and starting his bootleg DVD company. He sent all of his DVDs with his actual return address on the envelopes. He scoffed at letters from US customs telling him to stop sending DVDs into the US. He really didn’t do much at all to cover his tracks.

It’s an interesting story. Pick up the latest issue of Wired.

Network Solutions, which used to have a monopoly on the domain name registration market, is coming out in full force to admit its past poor customer service and promise better service going forward. If you flip through the October issue of Wired Magazine, you’ll see an ad on pages 55-56 that is a Q&A with Network Solutions CEO Champ Mitchell. In it he says:

“One of the worst problems was our poor customer service. Customers were on hold for long periods of time…many never made it [to a rep] because their calls were dropped during the transfer…some customers ended up talking to poorly trained, unfriendly people who were not really interested in helping them solve their problems…none of our internal systems worked properly…”

It takes a lot for a company to admit this. But it was big enough of a problem for NetSol to confront it. They fired just about all of their managers, closed a number of their call centers, and opened revamped call centers.

To be honest, I don’t know much about their customer service now. They lost my business a long time ago because of poor service and high prices. They might have fixed the poor service, but I have no reason to pay 5x to register a domain with them.

According to the recent sales list at Afternic.com, SY.net has sold for $15,000. The buyer originally offered $3,500, but eventually settled with the seller at $15,000.

Just a few weeks ago Afternic sold a two character .com, EQ.com, for $100,000. (See EverQuest site paid $100,000 for EQ.com).

Ever since Afternic posted a sale of $100,000 for the domain EQ.com, I’ve been curious about who ponied up that cash for the domain. The answer is in your browser: EQ.com forwards to IGE.com, a company that facilitates buying and selling of virtual goods from massively multiplayer online game (MMOGs or MMPORGs). EQ stands for EverQuest, one of the most popular MMOGs of all time.

The previous owner was Laserlight Publishing, which marketed a book called The EQ Factor. EQ stood for Entrepreneurial Quotient.