The Greatest American Lawyer

Should ICANN be Responsible for Registrars such as RegisterFly?

For those of you who don’t know, RegisterFly is an ICANN accredited registrar which has tumbled into chaos.  The two owners have been fighting including in court.  One owner turned off the website for a period of time last Monday.  Registrants are scrambling to move their domains off of RegisterFly.  For more information, check out the Traverse Legal Cybersquatting blog here.

[update] ICANN has really turned up the heat on Registerfly in what is turning out to be a huge test for ICANN's enforcement and accreditation standards.  This is the first registrar to melt down in full public view, placings tens of thousands of domain names at risk.  Learn more at the registerfly investigation page here.

It's Amazing What People Will Say in the Blogosphere

It has always amazed me how many bloggers come right out and say pretty darn close to what they think about family and friends. Our society is becoming more "reality" based. I’ve always believed that the industrial age was built in part on maintaining pretenses and illusions. Many of our social norms made no sense. But that didn’t stop society from providing disincentives from anything that deviated from the norm.

Virtually every other show on TV is some sort of reality program. Blogging has generated the interest of, by some estimates, 16 million people.

Our society is evolving from the industrial age to the information age. It is my hope that the information age is based on people making rational, conscience and intelligent decisions based on reason, rather than dogma.

Let's Embrace the Anonymous Blogger

Damn it. Why have we not seen this before? How could it have been right in front of our face and just left it sitting there all this time?

Why isn’t the blogosphere, at least that part of it devoted to change which the majority of us believe is substantial, promoting people to be anonymous. Being Anonymous Rocks. Let’s face it people. We rarely say exactly what we think in life. Yet virtually every bulletin board system and many blogs require registration. This requires a valid email address put in someone else’s hands.

The point is this, we need to lower the barriers for people to speak anonymously. We need to encourage people who really have something to say to speak out.

Who Am I Really

I had an interesting thought the other day. Do you really know who I am by simply learning my name and the name of my law firm?

Through all the controversy about anonymous bloggers over the years, I have to say that on the eve of coming out that anonymous blogging is critical to the continue success of blogging in general. You know me better because I was anonymous. You know me better because I was anonymous from the get-go. You know me better because I thought I could say whatever I wanted to say, directly from the heart.

What is lost in accountability is gained in candor. But the most compelling thing to me is this. How many people don’t blog because they would never want their employer, their friend, their associate, their partners, there family, their community, etc., etc., etc., to know what they really thought?

What if anonymous blogging was embraced and promoted. I envision an army of tens of thousands of employees and partners working for big corporations telling their story.

So let’s rethink our ambivalence of the anonymous blogger. Yes there will be those like Jeremy Blackman at the Anonymous Lawyer Blog to fool us. But there will be more of us who recount life at a personal level that would otherwise be lost for lack of a forum.