colonization.com
Robert Brady (from
KJ#44)
Illustrations by Thierry Le...
History
will record that throughout its long existence Japan was unique among
Asian nations in never having been colonized until around 1996RT (Real
Time), when, as the country's elder rulers were still pondering their
next go stone placement, the nations' key virtual real estate
was being snapped up like free Gucci bags at the Gate of Heavenly
Peace.
These invisible electroincursions began in the form
of Japanese cyberdomain registrations by people all over the world
other than Japan, a virtual international takeover of cyberNihon that
goes on even now.
And who can foresee the result? Will it mean a massive move into romanization?
A general Westernizing of the communication infrastructure? Dotcom
colonization differs from the traditional form in that no one is actually
occupying the colonized territory; they're simply holding it for ransom,
and the Japanese will have to buy it back, if they want to carve out
some cyberterritory of their own.
As any successful
e-trepreneur will tell you, cyberlocation is everything, and there
are whole ginza.coms (owned by a guy in California) now staked
out, entire akihabara.coms (a guy in Korea) held in thrall
abroad, direct correlatives to the real thing, digito-semantic virtual
representatives of very rich actuality, which phenomenon will continue
even after the bubble bursts.
Cybercolonization,
testily called "cybersquatting" by those who got to the party late
and found their colonies colonized (Unfair! Unfair!), began suitably
enough in America (itself rooted in perhaps the most intensive instance
of colonization ever perpetrated), as so many things do nowadays,
and although America.com (recently appraised at $10,000,000)
is not owned by America, it is owned by an American.
When I first entered the domain name game, I thought I'd start at
the top, and checked Japan.com, must be owned by the national
government - no: for some reason it was owned by a guy in Minnesota.
Must be a slipup (slipup.com: owned by a guy in Chicago). The
Japanese would of course get nihon.com: nope, that was owned
by a postoffice box in California; nippon.com, then? A guy
in San Francisco; and so it went. tokyo.com? NYC. osaka.com?
California. nagoya.com? Seoul. hiroshima.com? Korea.
kyoto.com? California. This fact and the unforseeable cyberconsequences
must be ineffably fearful for the old go-players in Tokyo, who have
let Tokugawa down. (As in tokugawa.com, owned by a firm in
Falls Church, Virginia.)
I got into the colonization business back when I naively checked a
few possible domain names for a Japan-oriented website I was thinking
of setting up, and found all my choices available, so what was the
hurry, then when I checked again three weeks later all "my" names
had been registered. That's when I discovered the hordes of cybermarauders
that were ravaging the cyberterritory all about me, and had been for
some time. I managed to reserve a few names that had been overlooked
among the cybersemantic detritus, but there is no japananything.com,
jpthing.com or janywhere.com left worth mentioning,
including hyphens and plurals. And of course around that time ICANN
(look it up on the net) abandoned (temporarily, it was said) their
plan to introduce five or six new top level domains like .firm,
.whatever etc.; then the price of registration was dropped
to 20 bucks a year, and general Macy's basement cybermadness ensued.
Another interesting comparison can be made here. With registration
of a .com domain name now costing 20 dollars for 1 year, with registration
for up to 10 years at a time and registration within minutes via the
net, the Japanese local .co.jp domain costs 50,000 yen ($500)
for two years and applicants have to be vetted, and have a legal presence
here, can be refused, must fill out a paper form and register by snail
mail!! This is the way the old go players do things; how resistant
they are to let information run rampant in the hands of the doubtful,
questionable public!
And in the same vein, in the country's first big venture into the
world of ecommerce, the experts gave it as their opinion that the
Japanese, unlike pretty much everyone else in the world, are loathe
to use their credit cards on the net; the logical thing then, one
would think, would be to educate the general public as to the
utility and safety of general credit card use in this way; but the
Japanese do things differently. The experts will enable the doubtful,
questionable public to select and order a few items on the net, then
go pick them up and pay for them at a convenience store!! Is this
merely how helpless experts think the Japanese consumer is,
or is it actually how helpless the Japanese consumer really is?
Will they rise up in the dotcom experience and do their own thing,
or will they forever go down to the combini to pick up their
mail order? Stay tuned.
Despite these efforts at control, however, Japanese businesses are
starting to break ranks and go for dotcom addresses, because .com
has by default become the international business address, and
is recognized as such around the globe. The Chinese, as I soon found
out, were well aware of this. Back in the indianajones.com
days when I first ventured into Japan domain name territory, it was
like King Tut's tomb; I got the feeling that someone else had been
here a long time ago; in this case, the marauding band of non-Japanese
e-preneurial barbarians that had rampaged through, picking up the
finest treasures and moving on to the rest of Asia, leaving behind
some pretty decent pickings though, things that would be known but
to foreigners who had lived here for a while, and not in San Diego
with a dictionary. The Japanese themselves were still asleep to cybertime,
though a few brash youngsters were snapping up domains like hellokitty.com,
and kinkikids.com. (One of many oddities in this vein: Japanese
animal names have predominantly been registered by tech companies
abroad, e.g. kitsune.com, usagi.com, uma.com.)
China's
domain name scene, by contrast, was a chaotic maelstrom; I could cybereally
feel the Chinese billions peeping through the few available Windows
95s of new freedom and opportunity, their hunger and quest at this
taste of virtual freedom surging all around me, seeking English domain
name gateways to invest in on spec, or as future portals to business
and riches via the world market: chinathis.com, cthat.com,
cEwhatever.com, sinome.com, sinayou.com, plucking
them up right at my cyberfeet as I stood there gaping ethereally;
a foreign explorer had to move fast to get anything, even chinahockey.com
was gone, as were chinamoon.com, chinastar.com and chinasun.com.
And this in contrast in the US domain realm, where by now it's like
leftovers from a massive etymological garage sale held five years
ago, all first-tier and many second-tier domains sold right down to
the .org, whereas in the Japan domain realm, still mainly snailing
along on .co.jp, nothing much was gone beyond the prime names
(which made it hard to perceive the value of what remained, no doubt
like the guy back in '95 or so who had so many to choose from and
finally dared to splurge a hundred dollars on a single word — business.com).
In cyberchina, on the other hand, just about every .com you
can think of is gone, but usually only the .com. It costs money,
after all. But it's interesting that 90% of those goners have been
purchased by Chinese, either in China or expats, perhaps because they've
had it up to here with colonization.
Mad futuristic
scrambles have always been the sphere of the young and upwardly dream-mobile,
and the one or two elders who manage to survive that way. In any case,
one soon discovers the three commandments of the domain name game:
1. Be there first.
2. Think of it first.
3. Register it first.
And it must be
said there is more than commerce involved; there is a kind of poetry
to it as well: a good domain name has a bit of the frisson
of a good haiku. A microhaiku (btw, microhaiku.com is
available). Consider greenfairway.com, killershops.com,
findyourhome.com, hotclicker.com, fewerbills.com.
It's a whole new kind of reading, too. There are short URLs: 1.com.
And long URLs: http://www.tax.taxadvice.taxation.irs.taxservices.taxrepresentation.
There are concise URLs: zitz.com, and there are obfuscatory
URLs: 4q2.com.
And for the first time since the big bang, words are going solo. People
have word collections: finance words, cyberwords, medical words, business
words, mad neologisms (gasm.org); there are three-letter domain
collectors (ibc.com is currently selling for 50,000 dollars).
This is a revolution of a new and fundamental kind. For the first
time, a person can look at a word and literally see gold.
Never before in the history of language has the single word 'the'
been worth a fortune, never before have a half-dozen disparate words
been hawked around the country and sold at a hefty price by someone
selling their 'collection'; never before has 'about' stood alone,
replete in the grandiloquent value of its true and absolute meaningfulness,
as it does in about.com.
What does it bode for meaning? For language? For literature? There
are words now that cannot be bought. Of course underneath the letters,
and so the words, it's all numbers, like everything else, quite 199.2.210.241,
really; it looks a lot like chaos if you take god's point of view,
which can be a strain if you're offline, but there is a madness to
the method. While in another sense and at the same time it all has
that sci-fi patina that comes with word dealer names like zoomboy,
tensionD, z598, roduk, weboid, choppie
and scraver, already cruising the darkly neoned steamy streets
of Bladerunner. For, though poetry is all well and good, that's not
really a cash market, now is it?
Merely pretty, inventive stuff will get you nowhere at a cyberlogo
auction. Lots of nice inventive stuff around. The stuff that sells
though, apart from the earlybird gold, is clunky, arcane, cryptic,
often almost incomprehensible to the e-tyro: easycc.com, directrates.com,
urun.com, wyke.com, instanttaxes.com, erude.com;
fast sellers. It takes a special mind to foresee what cannot be seen.
And this is all geek to the non-English-speaking world, particularly
Japan. The internet and the traditional Japanese personality are at
odds with one another because the Japanese are a collective people,
and speak little English; but on the internet you are and act
alone, and 90% in English at the moment, though that will change somewhat.
Choices must be made solo, often in a foreign language. Daunting.
The Chinese, Koreans, Singaporeans, et al., have no trouble with this.
That's why they now own so much of cyber-J, in a major, but as yet
unsung, historic reversal. The whole domain name megabyte melange
is more than simply microcosmically colonial; it is the world's first
international electronic commercial imagination marathon open to all,
with cash prizes for those who aren't too intellectual about harvesting
the unclaimed virgin forests of words.
And then there's
the semantics of it. At the time of this writing, the big sale is
mad.com, which is expected to go for somewhere around 200,000
dollars. Madder is not for sale, nor is maddest, which, though superlative,
would be less valuable for being longer. Then there's madding.com,
snapped up at the time as one of the few 'real' words still available,
and the only decent verb in the bunch, and so maybe worth a fair chunk
of mazoola somewhere down the etherbrickroad, who can tell in this
borderless world, this oklahomadomainrush.com. Anyway, we're
definitely not in Kansas anymore.
In neoocolonialism one can lay virtual claim to anything that can
be spelled. And if in a sense to name is to create, then the neogods
have arrived. Blake would flip if he could see this. All the poets
are here, you can feel them and their echoes, from eecummings to Shakespeare
(tobeornottobe.com, VA). I saw Byron there, in fact registered
part of one of his lines (shewalksinbeauty.com), and does it
feel strange. Feel strange you say? Yes, it feels strange,
to have any rights to half a line of Byron, which is in fact
worth little as a domain name because it's too long; or say to another
name, such as bogie.com or elvis.com. How can such compare
with abg4@ebdg9jt/circu/.osk4.ne.jp? You can see the poetry
level operant here. Or how about usex.com? Pretty eecummingsy.
And expensive.
This is where neopoets and cyber49ers are flocking, where it all boils
down, where the word at last, after all these millennia, interfaces
directly with the gold. Here is no place for the merely squeamish,
or the unimaginative, this is where it gets serious, right here at
the bidding edge, where a word, one word can, and has, fetched millions
of dollars. And they're still out there, in virtual safe-deposit boxes,
those million dollar words, 'business.com,' 'cars.com,'
'loan.com,' 'commerce.com,' etc. etc., all exclusive
Beverly Hills words now, seen only in the finest syntactic company,
and only a few years ago registered on whims for a few dollars and
now all owned by huge conglomerative enterprises or rich word collectors.
These are strange times we live in, where one word earns more than
a bookfull, and is guarded with flocks of lawyers lest anyone use
the word inappropriately.
In the beginning was the word too, like the man said, but at least
at last we are touching upon the intrinsic worth of words, the value
that prophets and poets have always hinted was there and did their
work with, the value that shimmers with the truth that glows deep
within every single word, like the value in a single life.
Robert
Brady is KJ's Ramble writer and poetry editor, variously a.k.a. as
jtrader, elsewhere and web29, et al. Author of 'Further on this
Floating Bridge of Dreams' (Katydid); has two tapes out: Rambo
Gets the Mail and Dining with the Beast
