18 Aug
2005

















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     bad language and new metrics

South Korea is recurrently hyped as the most 'wired' economy, appearing at the top of various - and problematical - global connectivity rankings that centre on 'access' rather than 'use' metrics and in claims that dot-kr has the largest number of blogs (whereas there are simply a lot of S Koreans with home pages that often consist only of their contact details).

After recent online vilification of the 'bad girl' who didn't attend to her dog's mess in a Seoul subway carriage - the online community (contrary to claims by cyberidealists who imply that mere exposure to a keyboard makes 'netizens' smarter, democratic and oh-so-tolerant) often has the characteristics of a lynch mob - it is perhaps not surprising to see South Korean authorities indicating bounds for behaviour through an exemplary prosecution or two.

Seoul District Prosecutors have indicted a man for defamation and breaching other information law after a 'joe job' involving posting "indecent writings" on the net under the name of a Seoul National University student. The student discovered last year that 170 entries in "filthy language" had been posted on an site by someone who had assumed his identity.

Those posts - including comments such as "women who hold dirty jobs should be killed and cut in pieces" and "we should have many men like the serial killer Yu Yeong-cheol" - were presumably intended to elicit a negative response, poisoning the student's reputation. He reported to the police that he accordingly received "undeserved scoldings".

The police failed to identify the identity thief but in July this year, while interrogating a man arrested on suspicion of recurrent thefts from Seoul National University library, discovered that the suspect had details of other individuals' names and identity numbers. The thief confessed that he stole the student's number and name, explaining "I did it on purpose to get him into trouble because Kim often reserved a seat in the library even though he didn't study much."

He has now been charged with libel involving a false internet identity in what is claimed to be the first prosecution of its kind in South Korea.

Prosecutors apparently aim to establish a judicial precedent, commenting

Internet users are increasingly getting access to websites and using nicknames to post obscene and dirty entries. We indicted Sohn to set a strict example regarding such acts.

The prosecution involves legislation against an individual who "damages a reputation through deliberate libel by posting false information through communication networks". Potential penalties include up to seven years in prison, fines of up to 50 million won and suspension of civic rights (eg eligibility to vote) for ten years.

The South Korean case is the latest in a long tradition of identity theft for political, personal or corporate smears. In the past, for example, we have seen an opponent disseminate a letter or statement supposedly authored by the entity to be discredited. Such communications in paper formats included fictitious acknowledgements of sexual or financial impropriety (eg US presidential candidates 'confessing' to children out of wedlock or across the colour barrier), endorsement of unpopular causes such as the Communist Party or fake attacks on popular causes.

In the online environment 'joe jobs' as part of the digital intifada or US 'culture wars' have included email messages that purport to come from figures such as Noam Chomsky and Hillary Clinton or from entities such as the Israeli government, Procter & Gamble, the ACLU or World Bank.

The intention of such forgeries is generally to gain media attention (eg encourage journalists to report a "widely circulated rumour"), erode a reputation, reinforce negative perceptions of the subject and provoke email responses (eg counter messages that flood the real inbox or result in blacklisting of messages from the owner of the name).

     speam

The Australian Communications & Media Authority (ACMA) - the federal government media regulatory body that is the successor of the Australian Broadcasting Authority and Australian Communications Authority - has fined two companies a total of $13,200 for breaches of the Spam Act 2003.

ACMA found that the businesses sent over 50,000 commercial SMS marketing an investment scheme for software providing horse racing tips. Global Racing Group Pty Ltd, based in Queensland, received infringement notices with penalties of $11,000 after the ACMA found it arranged for the speam to be sent to Australian mobile numbers between June and December 2004.

A second Queensland based company, Australian SMS Pty Ltd, was fined $2,200 by ACMA for breaching the Spam Act and - more importantly - has given ACMA an enforceable undertaking to abide by the Spam Act. It has also agreed to abide by the Australian eMarketing industry code of practice (here), one of those codes that critics characterise as having the strength of a wilted lettuce. Australian SMS had been contracted by Global Racing Group to send the speam.

Lyn Maddock of ACMA noted that an overseas operator was engaged by Australian SMS to send the messages.

However, even though the actual sending of the messages occurred outside Australia, the ‘Australian link’ provision of the Act still applied because companies centrally managed in Australia authorised the messages to be sent and the messages were received in Australia.

Global Racing Group has advised ACMA that it has stopped sending SMS advertising; Australian SMS has "overhauled its practices to comply with the Spam Act".

ACMA has reminded Australian businesses that they are required to comply with the Spam Act, "no matter how large or small their marketing activities". The legislation requires that commercial electronic messages only be sent with consent, that they include accurate identifying information about the sender and that they include a functional unsubscribe facility.

Since the Act came into force in April 2004, ACMA has required 200 businesses to amend their practices to comply with the Act. Fines totalling more than $20,000 have been issued to five businesses. Three businesses have provided enforceable undertakings.

Court action is currently underway in the Federal Court in Perth against an alleged global spammer. In June 2005 the ACA announced action in that court after allegations that Clarity1 Pty Ltd (which used the trading names Business Seminars Australia and the Maverick Partnership) and managing director Wayne Mansfield sent at least 56 million commercial emails during the year after commencement of the Spam Act 2003. Most of those messages are "believed to have been unsolicited and in breach of the Act".

Clarity1 was listed by anti-spam watchdog Spamhaus as allegedly one of the world's top 200 spammers..

     gTLD metrics

The latest Verisign Domain Report (PDF) and Domain Name Registrant Profile (PDF) offer information about gTLDs - 'generic' or 'global' top level domains such as dot-com, dot-net, dot-org, dot-museum and dot-info.

For people outside the industry - or those constructing 'e-readiness' rankings (per capita access to broadband, number of 'wired' businesses, per capita domain registrations) - such metrics are largely academic.

Others approach them with caution, as registration does not equal a site online (upwards of 12% of dot-com and dot-net names are 'parked', with a higher percentage in some other gTLDs), most registrations are not renewed, some statistics are aggregate and thus fail to differentiate between all and current registrations, a mere address in cyberspace is only a rough indicator of use by a site publisher/audience ...

The Domain Report indicates that over 8.1 million new domain names (across all gTLDs and ccTLDs) were registered in the second quarter of 2005.

VeriSign comments that "continued acceleration of using domain names to generate Pay-Per-Click advertising revenues was a big driver of the new unit growth", as was discounting (now down to US$0.75 for Indian registrants of dot-info) and promotional deals such as a 60 day trial period for bulk registration of dot-name addresses.

Presumably many of those names will not be renewed; many do not resolve to discrete sites. Thin margins for registrars and increasingly desperate efforts to persuade people to register names in some of the more marginal gTLDs have been reflected in the register.com sale noted earlier this month and concern that ICANN has been too laissez faire in supervising rule bending by some registries.

Dot-com remains the largest domain name space (with 46% of all registrations), followed by ccTLDs in aggregate with 20% of all registrations. Dot-de, the German national space, supposedly accounts for 11% of all registrations, followed by dot-net (7%), dot-uk (5%), dot-info (what one critic sniped is 'giveway heaven' has 4%) and dot-org (4%). There were 44.2 million dot-com and dot-net names at the end of the 2005 second quarter, with 4.2 million new names being registered in that quarter.

The Registrant Profile argues that 75% of dot-com and dot-net names are registered by business, with 22% by individuals and 3% 'unknown'. Supposedly North American SOHO registrants are predominantly more female, older and poorer than counterparts elsewhere in the world.

North American and European registrants have reportedly been online for 7.2 years and 7.4 years respectively, compared to 5.8 years in Brazil and 5 years in Asia. The 'average registrant' has registered 1.6 domain names, with 71% supposedly intending to renew.