thwarted 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Amazon To Run CDNow

    thwarted ( profile ), 26 Nov, 2002 @ 09:01am

    No Subject Given

    As Amazon starts running the backend of more and more e-commerce sites, it makes you wonder how much "choice" people will really have. There's not much price competition when everything goes through Amazon.
    My company has looked into selling through Amazon, they have a nice XML/SOAP interface to their frontend, but the individual retailers (like Target, Toys R Us, etc) I believe still have to provide their own backends and warehousing and fulfilment. Although, being the powerhouse in retail that Amazon is, they could eventually begin shipping all that stuff themselves solely (and perhaps have already done this with some retailers). I think it's the same traditional fear of monolopy, lack of choice that results, and being bad in the long term for the consumer, that comes into play here, not anything different just because it's Amazon or the Internet.

  • On the post: Web-Inspired Ads Coming To TV

    thwarted ( profile ), 19 Nov, 2002 @ 01:43pm

    No Subject Given

    Ads that are entertaining are worth watching.
    Is entertainment that is advertising the same? Product placement of Chandler drinking a Pepsi during an episode of Friends is one thing. Chandler getting a job at a Pepsi bottler talking about how great Pepsi is as part of the plot is another.

  • On the post: How The U.S. Can Stop Internet Censorship

    thwarted ( profile ), 13 Nov, 2002 @ 11:21am

    Re: No Subject Given

    Personally, I'd rather err on the side of nothing being censored rather than err on the side of the wrong things being censored. Once the wrong things are censored, how do you know?

  • On the post: ICANN Deems Us Worthy Of Three New TLDs

    thwarted ( profile ), 11 Nov, 2002 @ 02:54pm

    infinite top level domains

    Is there anything technical stopping creation of infinite top level domains? Not really.

    But just because we can do something, doesn't mean we should. Look at USENET. There's what happens when people can create whatever names they want -- thankfully, it's been somewhat curbed due to the newgroup top levels (comp, sci, alt, etc.), but since nearly everything ends up in alt., the existance of a alt. TL entry is meaningless (fortunately, nearly everything outside of alt. has some redeeming value).

    It would be nice if the "people in charge" of this kind of stuff weren't corporate whores, or if the domain customers concentrated on helping people find what they want rather than crapping their name all over the place (wow -- it would be neat if all pr0n sites were in .sex, and all commerical sites were in .com, etc; what a concept!)

    Sorry for this rant.