The genius of glitch

Lovin' this new "glitch" thing. It's a fab way of making light of a tricky situation. It makes you wonder why others don't adopt it as a way of lightening the mood.

For example, ever since this global financial glitch started in 2008, everyone's been moping around, unhappy with their lot. Which is a lot of fuss for a glitch. Cheer up, it's only money!

To get a better sense of the inspiration behind the glitch moniker, I asked ICANN for information about how it came about. As one of the most transparent and accountability organizations the world has ever known, the legal team were only too keen to oblige and happily released a transcript of their discussion held at their headquarters in Marina de Lay just days after their application system was pulled offline.

 15 May 12
Secret pLD domain program revealed

Filthy with cash from incoming new gTLD applications, ICANN is secretly working on a new “penthouse-level domains” project.

The program, detailed in leaked emails [pdf] between senior ICANN executives, will open up the space to the right of the final, overlooked dot in a fully-qualified domain name.

The new “pLD” project will allow brand owners, for example, to apply to run a domain name to the right of their newly acquired dot-brand gTLD, creating new marketing opportunities. Penthouse-level domains are believed to be the brainchild of outgoing CEO Rod Beckstrom.

“I figured I may as well torpedo the whole joint on my way out,” he said, stuffing ICANN’s air-conditioning system with three-day-old sushi.

Officially, ICANN expects the program to be warmly welcomed by the trademark community. “The most common complaint we hear from dot-brand gTLD applicants is that they have no idea what to put at the second level,” said ICANN spin doctor Brad White.

Shoot

 1 Apr 12
ICANN legal team disappears up own [bleep]

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers," wrote Shakespeare in Henry VI, although he wisely put the words in the mouth of Dick the butcher.

Dick's solution must have seemed pretty attractive to ICANN's communications team earlier this week when it's first podcast in over nine months was duly censored by its legal department for containing the word... well, I can hardly bring myself to say it... the word "Nike".

What's even worse is that the name of the company is used in the most damaging of contexts: talking about shoes. And Nike is a shoe company. You can only imagine the fallout had it been allowed to go ahead.

And so ICANN's crack legal team, who have nothing better to do than read and now listen to every single piece of information that the organization produces and beat it to death did the logical thing and bleeped out the word, leading to the unintentionally hilarious clip you can listen to at the bottom of the page.

 20 Dec 11
Dear minister, here is the process we followed to build a complaint about our stay in a hotel in your country

Update: ICANN has pulled the complaint letter from its website. Another few hours well spent. Download it here.

One of the documents doing the rounds at the recent ICANN meeting in Dakar was an online survey about one of the hotels that community members - in this case the At Large community - were staying it.

By all accounts, the Hotel des Almadies was not an experience anyone would willingly pay for, in Dakar or anywhere else. A huge number of At Large people complained and were met with a variety of excuses but seemingly little action.

 30 Nov 11
Is Beckstrom tiring of his one-man world tour?

So you've got $400,000 and four months to spread global awareness of new Internet extensions. Do you...

  • Hold a competition with big prizes?
  • Start an online advertising campaign?
  • Provide materials to the 2,000 international attendees at your meetings and get them to spread the word?
  • Join up with companies already promoting the extensions?
  • All of the above?

Or... do you think like a starfish, scrap all this proven marketing nonsense, and spend the money sending your lame-duck CEO on a five-star world tour so he can spend a few hours in total on stage soothing his bruised ego?

It's a no-brainer! Literally.

But, what's this? Has even this extravagant gold-lined exit started to tire ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom?

 13 Oct 11