Juicy TLDs not being eaten

I often think of web services I’d like to be able to use. Often these services don’t exist (yet) or aren’t easy to find if they do. While trying to find these services, I ask myself what I would call the service if I had created it - or if I were to create it. The reasoning behind this is, of course, that if the service exists and has an obvious name, which I have guessed correctly, I will find it quickly.

Thinking along these lines yesterday, I realised that several obvious domains for these services could make good use of TLDs other than the usual .com, .org, .net, and so on. Specifically, they could have benefitted from .ly or .ng . So I looked into registering domains with these and discovered that in the first case it wouldn’t be affordable for me and in the second it wouldn’t be straightforward.

.ng is the Nigerian ccTLD, and although there exists a Nigeria Internet Registration Association with a form to help potential registrants register their “domains”, it in fact only allows the registration of subdomains below .com.ng, .edu.ng, .gov.ng, .net.ng and .org.ng . So even if I had the most interesting site in the world, I couldn’t do something cool like host it at http://interesti.ng .

I think that’s a little crazy, because Nigeria could start making quite a healthy income from registrants who would be willing to pay for domains like that.

There’s another snag too: .ng is what’s known as a “closed” ccTLD, meaning that it’s supposed to only be used by organisations based in, or with a presence in, Nigeria. There has been high level criticism of the concept of “closed” ccTLDs for some time now, and I think much of it is valid. After all, what counts as a “presence in Nigeria” - or in any other country, for that matter? The registrar and hosting provider Web4Africa gives some guidance, and so do other sites, but it’s very vague. If I use a DNS server in Nigeria to host my domain, does that count as my having a physical presence there? I think it should, just as if I were renting an office there. But it’s not clear if it does. What is clear is that checking whether or not I have a physical presence in Nigeria is done manually. This means that Nigerian domain registration can’t happen quickly. That in turn means that there won’t be a Nigerian Go Daddy any time soon. Go Daddy is the largest domain registrar in the world by some margin, at the time of writing. It has built its business in large part, if I’m not mistaken, on its ability to perform automated domain registration. This is an opportunity that’s effectively denied to Nigerian registrars because of .ng’s closed status.

I should note at this point that I’m not a fan of all Go Daddy’s moral principles - here’s why - and for this reason, I avoid using Go Daddy (currently, I use Dreamhost and 123-reg for domain registration, but there are plenty of other good registrars about). But I do not believe that those ethics were necessary for the success of the business. What was necessary was a legal and technological infrastructure that permitted the automated registration of domains. This, and the ability to register whateveryoulike.ng, is all I am proposing herein that Nigeria should provide.

Another name I had in mind for a web service ended in .ly - the Libyan TLD. Here, the state of affairs is more promising, but still not quite ideal. There seems to be only one .ly registrar with a working web site in English: the intriguingly-named Libyan Spider Network. It seems that I could register whateverIwant.ly without too much trouble. The biggest snag is the price tag: $150 per year (for comparison, a .com typically costs $5-$15 per year). Clearly, what’s needed here is some competition. With a few more registrars in the marketplace, that price would likely fall to something a pauper like me could afford for a fledgling, unfunded web service.

Is there, you ask, a ray of sunshine in the ccTLD domain business? Well, yes. ccTLDs like .us, .uk, .jp, etc, are available through vast numbers of registrars. Competition keeps the prices low and the service reasonable (although there are opportunities to be fleeced if you’re foolish). But there are some great success stories from non-developed economies too. Tuvalu’s .tv ccTLD is wildly popular and widely available. Another island state with a thriving domain name business is São Tomé, whose .st TLD is modestly priced and available through a very efficient-looking site.

These cases highlight the shortcomings of Nigeria’s system. I don’t know why Nigeria doesn’t follow these other countries’ examples, and I wish it would.

Pearl Jelly

I like many of Pearl Jam’s principles and many of their songs, but I’ve felt uneasy about the band - and haven’t felt much like a fan - since around ‘94-’95 (it shocks me that that is fourteen years ago, as old as I was at the time). After the majesty of Ten, and the experience of feeling Vs. hook deep into my psyche, I was disappointed by Vitalogy. On paper, it looked like a good record: it was very attractively packaged; literally, the paper the sleeve was printed on looked good. It featured some beautiful, tender songs. But it didn’t swing; it didn’t groove. Not the way it should have. I found myself skipping tracks while playing it, because some of them were annoying to listen to.

Then Pearl Jam fired Dave Abbruzzese. Dave’s Unplugged performance hypnotised me when it was aired, and his drumming on Vs. still inspires me to listen ever more closely to that album - if not to pick up some drumsticks and start playing on the furniture, or simply to bop around. It is paradigmatic drumming for me: an actualisation of a Platonic ideal. I cannot think of another album by any heavy rock band whose drumming surpasses this one in musicality (but I’ve heard a few that come close: Awake, The Need to Change the Mapmaker, Mötley Crüe, Return of Saturn, Infernal Love, The Colour and the Shape, H2O, Built to Last, and the Deftones albums spring to mind). Since Dave had been the most compelling reason of all for me to listen to Pearl Jam, his departure felt like the last straw. If Vitalogy was evidence of the band’s decreasing ability to assess the musical merits (read: release-worthiness) of their recordings, then Abbruzzese’s firing suggested it had also lost the ability to assess the musical talent of its members. My expectations of Pearl Jam dropped off the scale and I lost all but a peripheral interest in their subsequent work.

Today, I listened to Vs. and, while doing so, tried to find out a little more about it, and about the band. I stumbled across this compilation of interview excerpts, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that whatever they may have lost at one time or another, Pearl Jam remained inspirational in other regards (at least, until the time that article was compiled - in 2001). They seem, like Dave Grohl - who was very down-to-earth when I met him at a Rocket From The Crypt show many years ago - to have mastered the rare art of being rock stars while keeping their priorities as thoughtful human beings more-or-less intact. And since their priorities were typically commendable, this is a praise-worthy and inspiring achievement. I’ve seen good musicians in other bands lose perspective under much less pressure, and once or twice I’ve been among them.

Here’s to keeping your head when all around you are losing theirs, and to respecting human art above artifice.

Deathics

The politics of death form a large part of the politics of veganism. A central aim of veganism, as I understand it, is to avoid responsibility – direct or indirect – for creatures’ deaths. But why is this considered a worthwhile aim? I would suggest that it is considered worthwhile based on the assumption that the acts of killing and of being killed are, all too often, painful for the participants. (Incidentally, I think this assumption is correct.)

So the desire to avoid killing stems from the desire to avoid inflicting pain.

Why do we worry about inflicting pain on other animals? Not all creatures do.

Does a lion, for instance, as it sinks its teeth into the throat of an antelope, pity the antelope for the pain caused? If so, the pity does not show (at least, not to us). Should we feel any more pity for a cow being slaughtered than the lion feels for the antelope? If so, why?

Because we have a choice about whether or not to cause the pain, that’s why. The lion knows of no other means of sustenance than to eat the creatures it kills. We do: we can kill plants to eat, instead of killing creatures to eat. Among the crops, animals will still be killed, but not by us: arachnids will still eat insects; certain birds will still eat arachnids; snakes will eat mice. Some or all of these creatures may experience pain as they are predated among the crops, but it will not be our fault. We will not use insecticides. Our fungicides will prioritise the life of the plants we need to preserve for our survival over the lives of parasites that would kill them, and we will be careful to use fungicides that are animal-safe.

So far, so consistent.

But why do we think pain is worth avoiding? Not all cultures do.

The fact that we instinctively find pain unpleasant when we experience it ourselves means that we normally wish to avoid it ourselves. But it does not follow from that that we should wish to avoid inflicting pain on others. After all, we cannot feel their pain.

Perhaps this needs examining by breaking the problem into sets of cases.

It’s obvious that if we inflict pain on a creature capable of remembering it and of understanding that the pain was inflicted intentionally, then the creature will tend to avoid voluntarily helping us for as long as it remembers the incident. This could be a problem if we want to collaborate with that creature: a horse we want to ride, for instance, or a human being we want to work with. So in this set of cases, we want to avoid inflicting pain, but not for altruistic reasons.

But why else would we want to avoid inflicting pain? Why does it make us uncomfortable to see another creature in pain?

I don’t ask this idly, because whatever it is that makes us altruistic about inflicting pain is weak enough to be over-ridden (in cases where is present at all) regularly, in war, in the meat industry, and in various entertainments (hunting and bull-fighting, for instance). If we can deduce what is being over-ridden, we might learn how, and thus prevent it. Or we might decide – but consciously - that there’s no need.

Where’s this going next? Over to you.