Companies offload dot.com titles to stay afloat

The panel on Today FM's Sunday Supplement news show recently all agreed: the only way the Progressive Democrats could revitalise the party at this low juncture would be to change the party name and add .com at the end. But the PDs may not want to take that advice. According to the latest evidence, becoming a dot.com (literally - as in having your formal company name include .com at the end) is rapidly becoming a liability, a sign that at any moment the firm is about to plunge over a cliff, then burst into flames.

So a rash of dot.coms, including some fairly high-profile ones, have been busy legally changing their names to plain old bricks-and-mortar sounding titles.

Among the newly-rechristened listed by Forbes magazine are About.com, now to be referred to as About Inc.; JFax.com, henceforth named j2 Global Communications; ScreamingMedia.com is ScreamingMedia Inc; and InfoSpace.com is now simply InfoSpace. More mysteriously, H-Net.com is H-Net.net. Dot.nets? Doesn't quite have the same vigorous "show me the options" ring as dot.coms, does it? At one time, no one wanted a .net suffix because it indicated you hadn't moved fast enough to snap up the dot.com version of your business name.

Of course, there are deep ironic pleasures to be gained from looking upon the once seemingly unassailable dot.com young turks slinking back to hide behind non-virtual world names. Whether being dot.comless will help such companies survive into the next round of funding remains to be seen. Simply turning Hubris.com into Hubris doesn't address the deeper issues that plague many of these companies - from silly corporate "culture" and a dearth of perspective to lack of business sense.

Online privacy remains in the news, despite some industry magazine attempts to make the whole issue a non-issue. Most recently, a writer in Interactive Week last week argued that almost nobody clicks on privacy policies on websites and people continue to buy online; thus, he concludes, no one really cares all that much about how their personal information is used, despite what they might say in public polls.

This is ridiculous reasoning. Almost no one reads those lengthy software licensing agreements either. But nearly all of us click "I accept" and install the application into our machines. Privacy policies are most frequently written in legalese every bit as baffling as a software licensing agreement.

In both cases computer users surely feel there's little point in reading the details when you have no idea what the actual implications are, and - more depressingly - you feel you have little choice anyway.

Also, very few people have any understanding of just how much information can be gleaned about you while you surf, without your knowledge. Curious? Pay a visit then to www.anonymizer.com, where you can run your browser through a quick checkup. The results are pretty scary.

Nonetheless, the US Federal Trade Commission this summer seems to have decided to let US corporations self-regulate online when it comes to how they gather, use and share personal data from consumers. This is despite the fact that the commission has consistently found in its own extensive surveys that few online businesses comply with more than one or two of the agency's own guidelines on privacy.

Then comes news last week from another US government study that the commission's website doesn't comply with its own privacy guidelines, nor do the vast bulk of American government sites.

But Americans resoundingly say they want better protections for the way their personal information is gathered and used, and discipline for privacy-policy violators. A new report by the widely-respected research foundation, the Pew Research Center, notes that 86 per cent of American Net users want to be able to "opt-in" if they want to give up their information to a website. Amazingly, the Federal Trade Commission has just decided the reverse, that users must actively "opt-out" of such activities.

Some 54 per cent believe websites' tracking of their activities is harmful and a violation of their privacy. And an overwhelming 94 per cent of users want privacy violators to be prosecuted. Why do sites have such a hard time realising that good customer service means you don't sneak around "harvesting" your customers' personal data, but ask?

ONE of the true lunacies of last week's Eircom a.g.m. was hearing many speakers from the floor demand a new board with telecommunications and technology industry expertise (ignoring the fact that many of them do have this already), while at the same time rejecting what was in effect a fairly hard-to-meet and conservative share incentives scheme. Hello? This is the technology industry, in which generous share schemes are one of the chief enticements - read: the norm - for ALL employees, including clerical and non-technical staff, not just directors, CEOs or those with rare skills.

Many attendees I spoke to at the Entrepreneur of the Year awards dinner, held on the same day as the a.g.m., expressed astonishment that shareholders did not understand that Eircom will never attract capable employees and management, much less board members, without a competitive shares scheme. As one man behind a new start-up, a spin-off from one of Ireland's better-known indigenous companies, told me: "If I had to go out and hire employees in the current market and could only offer them shares at the company launch price, the company would be doomed."

He noted that his own former employer's shares, launched at a good opening price, rose swiftly, then soon sank to nearly 25 per cent below offering and held there for a full year. He doubts the company would have survived had it been restricted to the scheme of paying full launch price for shares that many of the disgruntled wished to impose on Eircom.

Of course people at the a.g.m. had plenty to be irate about - and many voiced their concerns eloquently and movingly. What a shame that so few seemed to understand enough about the business they willingly invested in to stop fuming about the directors, realise their company needs a sound incentive scheme just like every other company in the telecommunications and technology sector, and actually ask substantive questions about where the company is going.

For example, could Eircom please explain its Internet gameplan, and why so many key initiatives like flat-rate access and high-speed digital subscriber line Net access have been sidelined or endlessly delayed, and clarify what markets and businesses Eircom might choose to move into and why?

Since the company's privatisation we've had no sense of purpose or vision or leadership in such areas. Sadly, these are all areas in which even its detractors believe that Eircom could at one time - within the past two years - have taken a leadership role in Europe.

klillington@irish-times.ie.