Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

Just four days ago I wrote about how a controversial new indirect taxation would affect thousands of .GR domains and their cash-starved operators; most of them Greek entrepreneurs operating portals, news web sites and forums.

That indirect taxation – called “aggeliosimo” – was meant to be an extension of the current taxation implemented onto press (magazine, newspapers) radio and television advertising.

The good news is, that by some unexplained reasoning that particular article was removed from the massive law up for voting this week at the Greek parliament.

Therefore, aggeliosimo no longer applies to Internet advertising.

Surely the backlash was enough for the law-drafting pencil pushers to realize that the introduction of the aggeliosimo tax was not only unethical, but also impractical to collect: Good luck with collecting that 21.5% aggeliosimo from Google Adwords advertisers.

It’s unfortunate that a lot of things in Greece are done under pressure and without much planning, when it comes down to technological progress. This is a lesson in provisioning laws according to their impact to society and business, not simply to collect a few “drachmas” here and there.

What is worse than having inept leaders?

To answer that question, one has to take a look at the number of anti-social measures stacked together onto a gigantic law up for vote this coming week at the Greek parliament.

Hit by a ballooning debt that was inflated by financial games played upon the back of state-issued bonds, the Greek government – elected under the socialist flag and led by American born George Papandreou, son and grandson of prime ministers – has shocked the Greek social strata by introducing a number of changes Greece hasn’t seen since the era of Dracon, 28 centuries ago.

The introduction of multiple layers of taxation, pension cuts and elimination of benefits for the elderly and women with children is about to alter Greek society for good. Wages in Greece, already at the bottom of the European Union with a monthly 700 euro average, are about to shrink even lower, due to immediate and secondary taxation layers.

Those that accused Greece of “partying” with loaned money need to have their facts checked; Greece is at the bottom of fund-absorbing countries in the EU, due to the sheer amount of red tape and the ever-changing direction of every elected government; the primarily bi-partisan system often leads to changes of power, much like Democrats and Republicans in the US. Debt ballooned primarily through the raising of interest rates and the bidding of international hedge fund managers such as Goldman Sachs against the Greek debt. At the same time, tax-evasion became the national sport thanks to the ineptitude of the government to police its own tax-gathering system.

Surely there is a number of healthy elements in this ongoing chaos, where those working in the public sector – a large, bureaucratic beast – grew, fed and multiplied sapping the energy of the much healthier private sector and the entrepreneurs.

Since its introduction in the early 1990′s, the Greek Internet has remained a relatively untapped territory with regards to government intervention; with the ever-increased globalization of services and the proliferation of web portals serving news and information via blogs, the government is now seizing the opportunity to add yet another level of taxation – simply because they can do so.

Enter, the aggeliosimo.

Starting July 1st, a special taxation of 21.5% referred to as “aggeliosimo” (literally: announcement tax) will apply to all advertising that Greek-based web and Internet portals engage into. In other words, operators of web forums, portals, news or information web sites in the .GR realm will have to collect an additional 21.5% from their advertisers and submit it to a special fund set aside for the Social Security Fund of journalists.

It is not clear which government pencil-pusher is the brilliant inventor of this incredible manifestation of entrepreneurial strangulation. Effectively, the 21.5% taxation will immediately strip thousands of .GR sites that carry advertisements of their source of income, as it will surely lead advertisers to portals outside of Greece.

No entrepreneur or corporation in their right mind would want to spend 21.5% more for the same amount of advertising, just because the Greek government wishes to expand its reach into untapped territory, particularly when the funds collected would benefit a well-established Social Security fund.

At the same time, the same legislation forces web portals that present a constant feed of news and information to insure their personnel under new, more expensive pension groups that would increase the piece of the pie ending into the hands of the Greek IRS.

It is uncertain how this will affect PPC companies that appear on parked .GR web sites along with major other advertising channels, such as Google Adwords. It would be interesting to see how the Greek government would enforce the collection of a 21.5% fee from Google, for ads that are displayed on .GR web sites. The process is clearly impossible and it will lead to the collapse of advertising on .GR web sites.

Overall, the decision to stifle the entrepreneurial spirit and technological investment in Greece is a clear shot in the foot of a government and the nation it’s supposed to represent.

As the Greek Prime Minister, Mr. George Papandreou is clearly incapable of retaining a clear, honest and effective control of the situation and is leading the country into social unrest, financial turmoil and towards the technological Dark Ages.

Today’s lesson is about realizing your limits and restrictions. It’s about knowing when you should zip it and listen instead of talking. It’s also about not letting white noise change your state of mind through some promised magic.

It’s about putting down the domainer ‘crack pipe’.

So you were told you will make a fortune with domains, a killing – unlike in any other market. They sold you the eBooks and the seminars, they gave you free accounts at PPC providers.

You read the eBooks and attended the seminars, then you parked your domains and did your very own mini-sites. Then waited patiently for the golden shower from heavens to arrive.

It never did.

Exactly what is the domainer ‘crack pipe’ and who is smoking it?

There are a lot of domainer ‘crack pipe‘ smokers – they promise to make you rich overnight. Do a simple check about their personal achievements and domain portfolios and think for  a second: if they were as successful as they professed, would they really pass the riches on to you?

What they pass on is the domainer ‘crack pipe‘ – the illusion of success and grandeur. Which is fine, as long as they pull those blinds over people that have nothing better to do with their time.

But your time is valuable and you should be able to be successful without all this noise and second hand smoke. And since I mentioned smoke, beware of the mirrors as well – they go together in a seamless pair.

It’s very easy to fall prey to domainer ‘crack pipe‘ smokers: the promises alone make you stop in your feet, all while you were casually strolling downtown Domain Avenue. And sometimes, while looking around the marketplace with all the peddlers yelling their wares you can lose both your wallet and shirt in mere minutes.

In a nutshell: be vigilant. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Take what is promised to you with a pinch of salt. Add your own spices in whatever you do. Acquire chameleon skin.

And most importantly, don’t smoke the domainer ‘crack pipe’.

It’s no secret that when things go wrong with Sedo – or any other service-oriented company – I tend to run my mouth a bit; out of frustration about the things that go wrong. But I’m also the one that praises them when things go right, or when wronged things get fixed pretty painlessly.

In light of this “brand new me” – since it’s a brand new year, 2009 – I decided to post a few tips that have worked for me, when it comes down to ironing things out with Sedo-related issues.

• Respond to each notification email by explaining exactly what you did at that step. E.g. “Domain xxxxx.com was pushed to the Sedo account, abc123, with GoDaddy.” This way there is a tracking record in the transaction agent’s mailbox and yours.
• If you’re the buyer, pay for the domain you won immediately after. If you are the seller, push the domain immediately after you’re asked to do so – don’t put things off! This way, you’ve done your part and you encourage and prompt the other party – and Sedo – to act accordingly.
• Keep a personal, friendly relationship with the Sedo personnel and the agent that handles your transaction. Personalize all communications by signing your emails with your full contact info.
• Call Sedo’s offices on the phone as needed, to ensure a transaction’s status is updated the same day. E.g. if you paid for or pushed a domain, give them a call at the closest location to you. Your agent might be in Germany or the UK but if you are in the US call the US office; they have the ability to sync transactions.
• Give them credit when credit is due; they are people that have jobs like everybody else. This seems to be the most neglected issue on the list.
• For the most part, avoid PMing them on forums, especially for support matters, although they seem to offer this type of feature. Use their support/ticket system, email or phone to resolve matters, in order of importance.

My next blog post will be about a large domain sale that Sedo assisted me with – don’t miss out!

Less than 24 hours after introducing a series of features that exposed seller data to anyone with the will to acquire it and basic scraper-scripting skills, Sedo.com changed the way the “Meet the seller” link functions.

In a dry and short statement issued on DNForum, Sedo’s Customer Relations Associate Monica Ibrahim said:

“As a quick FYI, our tech team has made sure to remove all personally identifiable member ID data from the Seller’s Activity Index. We apologize for the initial issue. Please note that member IDs are not present in the Seller Activity Index or on the Domain Portfolio Links (which can be deactivated if you wish as mentioned earlier)”

Prior to this statement, Sedo vehemently denied that any privacy breach had taken place while maintaining their position that the newly introduced features will benefit the sellers and buyers that use Sedo.com as their domain marketplace.

Indeed, Sedo programmers scrambled to change the database interfacing from using an open sequential id to a hashed (encoded) string unique for the period of time the user clicks on the “Meet the seller” link. Upon my suggestion that Parked.com should offer assistance to the Sedo.com programming team, Donny Simonton exclaimed:

“I wish we could offer some help. As a programmer I do understand what they are trying to do. They are being lazy, been there many times. I would think they could easily change it to a md5 hash of the id + the domain or something similar. Something that can not be reversed.”

Despite the fact that these changes were quickly implemented upon my public announcement of how exposed the seller info has been, Sedo has yet to fix the way their auctions are referenced, using the same non-hashed open id. Currently, all 39,000-something completed and on-going auction pages are exposed to scraping by data miners.

Most importantly, Sedo has not changed the way the new features are utilized under a user’s profile: the user’s country location, seniority at Sedo, arbitrary ratings (zero to five stars) as a seller and a buyer and how long a particular domain has been at Sedo – all these are openly available to any logged-in user, without permitting the account holder to turn these features off.

Sedo has so far kept a low profile on the matter, but the reaction of the serious, active traders has been sharp and full of negative criticism towards the way that Sedo has decided to shove down the throat of users these new features. With offices in the UK and Germany, Sedo is challenging a series of strict laws protecting the privacy of individuals and corporations; stricter than US regulations about personal data safekeeping. Meanwhile, Sedo has stated that if a user decides to leave the Sedo selling platform and delete their user profile, their data remains with Sedo indefinitely. This has serious implications for any potential data breach in the future: user accounts contain a lot of financial and other private information and Sedo’s programming methods reveal a lax approach to security.

Keep contacting Sedo via the email support@sedo.com and their support hotline at (617) 499 – 7200 (keypress 3) to voice your opposition to the lack of an ON/OFF switch for the newly introduced features.