Nastic Gryzunova. Seine. Issue 65

Russian Magazine / Net-culture / Seine www.russ.ru/netcult/nevod/20000307.html

Seine. Issue 65 Nastic Gryzunova Publication date: March 7, 2000 Review of current online events and publications

Amazon: panic on the ship

As the reader no doubt already knows, a wonderful chess game is currently playing out: Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bizos is playing white, and Tim O'Reilly, president and CEO of O'Reilly & Associates, is playing black.

On February 22, the US Patent and Trademark Office granted Amazon.com's application, registering patent number 6,029,141 for an affiliate program scheme. Last September, Amazon already received another patent - number 5,960,411 - for 1-click purchasing technology (which involves combining the actual order and sending customer data using cookies) and immediately took advantage of it by filing a lawsuit against its main competitor, the online store Barnes & Noble. and even achieving intermediate success: the judge imposed a temporary ban on the defendant’s use of the technology. The February patent concerns a scheme for organizing an affiliate program in which a form for ordering products sold on Amazon.com is placed on the websites of Amazon.com partners, and a visitor who shows a sluggish desire to order something is asked to follow the actual address www.amazon.com and complete the application there. For this trivial service, affiliate program participants receive a certain percentage of the transaction amount. As of February 22, this extremely obvious scheme is the property of Amazon.com.

After filing this second patent, when it became clear that the first was not the result of Jeff Bizos' momentary lapse of judgment, but part of a meaningful and conscious strategy for the company, it became clear that the head of Amazon.com would do well to straighten his brain a little and explain that registering patents on developments, the essence of which follows from the very essence of the WWW, have a detrimental effect on the development of the Internet industry. This honorable mission was taken on by Tim O'Reilly, who on February 29 published in his column Ask Tim! his correspondence with Bizos, as well as the text of an open letter to him. By mid-Friday, the number of people who had signed this letter reached ten thousand, after which O'Reilly decided to stop collecting signatures. The day before, he and Bizos had had an extremely constructive, in O’Reilly’s opinion, albeit objectively fruitless, telephone conversation (the contents of which are also detailed in the Ask Tim column!), but Bizos was not convinced by communication with O’Reilly.

From the comments of the head of Amazon.com it follows that the company feels very uncomfortable in the market. This is not surprising: despite the growth in sales, it has not yet managed to ensure a profit; In addition, competitors have proliferated who can do everything that Amazon can do (among them Barnes & Noble is a special, special enemy). In Bizos's nightmares, Netscape is a company, and the head of Amazon is terrified that his company will repeat Netscape's path in life. Bizos considers registering patents as one of the methods to save his brainchild from such developments.

Watching the love affair between Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble makes us wonder how many more lawsuits of this nature we'll see. According to Bizos, Amazon.com intends to sue only its direct competitors, and the book giant does not intend to touch small independent developers whose activities do not overlap with Amazon’s activities and are not comparable in scale. When asked by O'Reilly to give independent developers a public promise not to put pressure on them, Bizos, however, responded evasively.

The reason for the ineffectiveness of the dialogue is clear. O'Reilly appeals to the basic principles of network ideology, Bizos is interested in the survival of a very specific Amazon.com. From the point of view of these basic principles (of which the concept of open standards is, of course, the first one), it does not matter at all whether individual Amazon.com survives or not. For Bizos, this question is the final point of reasoning. And although both participants in the discussion declared extreme concern about the fate of innovation in the field of Internet technologies, it is clear that for Amazon.com, as for any commercial structure, innovation is valuable insofar as it leads the company to profit. It would be hard to call O'Reilly's argument a utopia, but this is precisely it, or rather, a special case of it. As for Amazon, it's hard to imagine a more vibrant embodiment of commerce. Constructive dialogue continues.

Internet addressing.SUCKS

The Consumer Project on Technology and Essential Information have proposed a new project to reform the existing Internet addressing system by introducing new "thematic" first-level domains. Like all previous projects of this kind, this one has virtually no chance, but it is elegant and worth attention.

Attempts to expand Internet addressing not quantitatively (by increasing the number of characters in a domain name, as is done now: from 26 to 67 characters), but qualitatively (by introducing new first-level domains) have been made for at least five years, and so far to no avail. The company Image Online Design, which has been fighting for the introduction of the .web domain since 1995, during this time managed to file and withdraw a lawsuit against the Internet Ad-Hoc Committee, periodically made a terrible noise, but still has not received the .web zone. The same fate applies to other alternative first-level domains, the registration of which was offered at different times by different organizations - .firm , .shop , .arts , .rec , .info , .nom , .per , .sex and .xxx . And now a dozen new proposals have been added to this top ten.

On March 1, Consumer Project on Technology director John Richard and Essential Information director James Love sent a letter to Esther Dyson, chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The letter contains a proposal to register ten new first-level domains: .consumers, .complaints, .ecology, .isnotgreen, .isnotfair, .shareholder, .taxpayer, .unite, .union and .sucks. The idea of ​​the project's authors is to provide separate domain zones to public civil initiatives: .customers - consumer protection societies, .ecology and .isnotgreen - environmental groups, .isnotfair - human rights activists working on discrimination issues, .taxpayers - taxpayer organizations, . union - to trade unions, .complaints to be dedicated to various complaints, .shareholders to be given to religious organizations appealing to the conscience of the boards of joint-stock companies, and .sucks to projects like “Microsoft sucks”, “Netscape sucks”, and also, of course, “Life sucks”. Domain registration fees in the latter zone will be used to support the Dot Sucks Foundation for online free speech.

The next ICANN meeting will be held in Cairo from March 7 to 10, and it will be there that the possible registration of new domain zones will be discussed. While this organization’s opinion on the new project is unknown, it has already attracted attacks from independent critics. Critics fear, firstly, that if a .sucks zone formally intended for criticism appears, then this criticism may be prohibited in projects whose domains are registered in other zones. In addition, the authors of the project propose to control the registration of domains in new zones so that, relatively speaking, they are administered not by those criticized, but by those who criticize. It is impossible to guarantee this without obtaining detailed information about the potential domain administrator - and this, in turn, contradicts the concept of privacy. Trademark owners are not particularly delighted - however, they are not at all enthusiastic about the idea of ​​​​introducing any new domain zones, since the more zones, the more unstable the network position of the trademark as a phenomenon.

Holographic nightmares

Taking advantage of the position of the author, whose obscure comments are read by a number of people, I will allow myself some digression of a personal, fantastic nature.

Let's start with a story. You see, I have nightmares that are incredibly plausible and have a suspicious influence on my more than real life. A couple of days ago I had just such an incredibly real nightmare (for some reason the main plot was about my school, from which, after the sixth grade, I escaped to another, feeling like a freed prisoner of Auschwitz, and since then I’ve been trying to forget like a bad dream). Among other things, there was a certain moment in this dream that struck me to the core - for the sake of it everything is now being started. We communicated on ICQ with Linor (Beavis, where are you?), but it was some kind of strange ICQ. Attached to the computer was an unidentified piece of hardware that resembled, but was not, a Courier V.Everything modem, and this piece of hardware was designed to project a holographic image of one of the interlocutors to where the other was located. In general, there was a completely alive Linor, who was a hologram, sitting on a chair in my kitchen.

I outlined the plot of Linor; After reasonable reflection, she and I came to the conclusion that Silicon Valley in its entirety is as far from us as it is from the sky. The idea, in my opinion, is rich. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of communicating online with people without any hint of an image and without the hope of seeing the originals over the next few months, or even years. If some kind person can describe to me at least approximately the concept of combining any online means of communication in real time, not necessarily ICQ, and the method of projecting holographic images, I would be terribly grateful to him. The more kind people there are, the better. It will be possible to organize a general parade of ideas later. I understand perfectly well that everything that can be invented here lies more in the realm of fantasy than existing technologies or trends in the development of existing technologies, but this, in my opinion, should not hinder us at all. In this regard, please write letters .

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