<div>Thanks AR.. amazing..and interesting round-up at end.</div>
<div>s<br><br> </div>
<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 17/06/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Anne-Rachel Inné</b> <<a href="mailto:annerachel@gmail.com">annerachel@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid"><a href="http://www.africanpath.com/p_blogEntry.cfm?blogEntryID=1060">http://www.africanpath.com/p_blogEntry.cfm?blogEntryID=1060
</a><br>Dibussi Tande<br>Technology: How Cameroon Auctioned Its Internet Namespace<br>June 16, 2007 11:40 AM<br>"It's an odd scene to picture: a domainer's reps in a sit-down with<br>Ephraim Inoni, the prime minister of Cameroon, to discuss the power of
<br>type-in typo traffic and pay-per-click ads." CNN<br>Early in August 2006, the Internet was awash with reports of a<br>"typo-squatting" scheme involving Cameroon. According to these<br>reports, "Internet authorities in in the West African nation that owns
<br>the .cm top level domain (TLD) have been accused of authorizing a DNS<br>wildcard that has the effect of redirecting all accidental .cm traffic<br>instead of returning an error."<br><br>In layman's terms, Cameroon Internet authorities were redirecting all
<br>misspelled .com addressed (e.g. <a href="http://www.dibussi.cm">www.dibussi.cm</a> instead of<br><a href="http://www.dibussi.com">www.dibussi.com</a> ) to an advert-based website (<a href="http://agoga.com">agoga.com</a>
), where they<br>were making millions of dollars in pay-per-click advert revenue<br>(Pay-per-click is an advertising system where advertisers pay an<br>agreed amount for each click delivered to their site).<br><br>While not technically illegal, since the misspelled domain names are
<br>not being registered but simply redirected to another site, these<br>actions raised serious ethical concerns.<br><br>To many observers, it was obvious that this was too creative a scheme<br>to have been hatched by Cameroonian authorities alone. Some even
<br>believed that the wildcarding of non-registered domains within the .cm<br>Top Level Domain may have been done without the official consent of<br>Cameroonian authorities. For months, therefore, attempts to identify<br>
the real faces behind the mask became a veritable whodunit saga.<br><br>This week, CNN finally revealed the person behind the .cm mystery in<br>an article titled "The man who owns the Internet". According to the
<br>article, the brain behind it all is Kevin Ham, described as "the most<br>powerful dotcom mogul you've never heard of". Based in the Canadian<br>city of Vancouver, Ham's empire is worth about 300 million dollars.
<br>Even more interesting, the article revealed that Cameroonian<br>authorities were active participants and partners in the<br>typo-squatting scheme, and that a cut from the adverts revenue<br>(estimated by some to be at least three million dollars a year) goes
<br>to "the government of Cameroon" – yeah right!<br><br>Here is an excerpt from the CNN story:<br><br>"Ham makes money every time someone clicks on an ad -- as does his<br>partner in this venture, the West African country of Cameroon. Why
<br>Cameroon? It has the unforeseen good fortune of owning .cm as its<br>country code -- just as Germany runs all names that end with .de. The<br>difference is that hardly any .cm names are registered, and the<br>letters are just one keyboard slip away from .com, the mother lode of
<br>all domains. Ham landed connections to the Cameroon government and<br>flew in his people to reroute the traffic.<br><br>…<br><br>Over a series of conversations a few weeks later in Vancouver, Ham<br>shares some details about a deal that, despite his innate reticence,
<br>he's clearly proud of. About a year ago, he says, he worked his<br>contacts to gain connections to government officials in Cameroon. Then<br>he flew several confidantes to Yaoundé, the capital, to make their<br>pitch. His key programmer went along to handle the technical details.
<br><br>"Hey," Ham says, flagging his techie down near the office elevator.<br>"Didn't you meet with the president of Cameroon?"<br><br>"Nah," the programmer says. "We met with the prime minister. But we
<br>did see the president's compound."<br><br>...<br><br>It's an odd scene to picture: a domainer's reps in a sit-down with<br>Ephraim Inoni, the prime minister of Cameroon, to discuss the power of<br>type-in typo traffic and pay-per-click ads. And yet, as with most of
<br>the angles Ham has played, the Cameroon scheme is ingeniously<br>straightforward.<br><br>Ham's people installed a line of software, called a "wildcard," that<br>reroutes traffic addressed to any .cm domain name that isn't
<br>registered. In the case of Cameroon, a country of 18 million with just<br>167,000 computers connected to the Internet that means hundreds of<br>millions of names. Type in "<a href="http://paper.cm">paper.cm</a>" and servers owned by Camtel, the
<br>state-owned company that runs Cameroon's domain registry, redirect the<br>query to Ham's <a href="http://Agoga.com">Agoga.com</a> servers in Vancouver.<br><br>The servers fill the page with ads for paper and office-supply
<br>merchants. (Officials at Yahoo confirm that the company serves ads for<br>Ham's .cm play.) It all happens in a flash, and since Ham doesn't own<br>or register the names, he's not technically typo-squatting, according
<br>to several lawyers who handle Internet issues.<br><br>The method is spelled out in a patent application filed by a Vancouver<br>businessman named Robert Seeman, who Ham says is his partner in the<br>venture and who also serves as chief adviser at Reinvent Technology...
<br><br>Ham won't reveal specifics but says Agoga receives "in the ballpark"<br>of 8 million unique visitors per month...<br><br><br>Click here to read the complete story<br><br>"A disservice to Cameroon"
<br><br>Like most deals that African government officials sign with business<br>interests in the West, the typo-squatting deal is not such a sweet one<br>for Cameroon, even though a handful of individuals might be reaping
<br>huge benefits.<br><br>As one blogger pointed out back in February, Cameroon could legally<br>use the .cm error to generate legitimate funds destined for internet<br>development in the country:<br><br><br><br>Setting aside the ethical issue with basically typo-squatting the
<br>entire .com domain space, this could be a great way for a poor African<br>nation to raise some money. However, they could easily boost their<br>revenue by building customized landing pages for the most frequently<br>accessed domains. For example,
<a href="http://amazon.cm">amazon.cm</a> should either redirect to the<br><a href="http://Amazon.com">Amazon.com</a> affiliate links or a page targeted towards ecommerce. I<br>can't even imagine how much money they are leaving on the table. The
<br>folks at NameView.com, who appear to be providing the landing pages,<br>are doing them a huge disservice here.<br><br><br><br>Even more critical has been Enow Ebot Godwill, a Cameroonian<br>performance analyst based in Denmark, whose analysis of the Camtel
<br>deal has been widely distributed on the Internet in the past couple of<br>days:<br><br><br><br>"If CAMTEL can make money from people mistyping their domains, I'm all<br>for it. The problem that I have is that the situation has led to a
<br>perverse effect with CAMTEL making NO EFFORT to manage the .CM<br>registry and promote a real development of the Internet in Cameroon.<br>The "quick buck" mentality has prevailed once again. Well known<br>Cameroon-centric websites such as
<a href="http://Cameroon-info.net">Cameroon-info.net</a>, <a href="http://postnewsline.com">postnewsline.com</a>,<br><a href="http://camerounlink.net">camerounlink.net</a>, <a href="http://camfoot.com">camfoot.com</a>, and dozens of others who are the real
<br>actors of Cameroon's presence on the Internet are priced out of their<br>own country's .CM which costs a whopping $400 to $800/year while one<br>can register a .COM name for less than $10 or even get it free with
<br>hosting...<br><br>As a result, the .CM domain is virtually absent in cyberspace, just as<br>if Cameroon didn't even exist! The reality is that, with CAMTEL making<br>money from unregistered .CM domains, it has no incentive to increase
<br>the number of registered .CM domain names. The majority of emails<br>originating and terminating in Cameroon are hosted on .FR, .COM and<br>other registries because no alternative is being developed in the<br>country. Again, when you redo the math, the cost in bandwidth to the
<br>country for email traffic hosted outside far outweighs any gain CAMTEL<br>might have from its .CM shenanigans.<br><br>This literally means that the shameless sale of Cameroonian patrimony<br>has extended to cyberspace the same way other Cameroonian assets are
<br>being often ILLEGALLY disposed of by those in charge of developing<br>them. In the meantime there is no serious Internet policy in Cameroon<br>more than 15 years after the creation of the world-wide-web.<br><br><br><br>
Definitely another black eye for Cameroon...<br><br><br><br>Read Ham's feature on Business 2.0<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>AfrICANN mailing list<br><a href="mailto:AfrICANN@afrinic.net">AfrICANN@afrinic.net
</a><br><a href="https://lists.afrinic.net/mailman/listinfo.cgi/africann">https://lists.afrinic.net/mailman/listinfo.cgi/africann</a><br></blockquote></div><br>