Internet Black Markets : Part ONE

Sun Aug 02 00:00:00 IST 2009, by Abhishek Mehta

Internet is an ocean of data with no boundaries; it does not begin anywhere and ends at nothing. By very nature Internet is uncontrollable, just like flowing water and air traveling from one country to another without passport. There is one glitch though, Mother Nature controls the water and air but Internet is human invention. However, wherever and whenever human touches something they always leave behind the traits of mankind. Worst one is of greed. This latest blog of mine is study of such greed (Part 1, 2, 3, 4) and manipulation of Internet through black markets, threatening the very existence/quality of our Internet.

Domain Markets Places

Can anyone own a domain? Yes.
Can you own any domain? No.

The reason is lesser of copyright or trademark issue and more of domain hoarding. Not even a single reasonable domain is available for anyone to own. Searching for a domain name, one will be disappointed to know that its been taken. But when one visits the domain, its up for sale at an absurd price. Price can range anywhere between100 to 100000$ depending upon the demand of the domain name or wish of the seller.

Individuals, resellers and domain registrars appointed by ICCNA are all part of this domain hoarding game. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) helps big companies like Google, Infosys to protect their domain names against misuse and gives them priority in getting the domain name locale to any country but for you and me it is a no gainer. Even the domain registrars hold on to the domain names when past owner has lost/expires his claim. Logically such domains should be floated back to the market but the greed of reselling at higher price by hoarding the domain name is too big to resist.

There has to be stricter law in domain registration and hosting areas, say if a domain is not hosted under a year it comes back to the pool. Or Website is not up and running more then half of days in year it goes to junkyard. ICCNA tried to solve this problem by putting out more domain extensions like ".mobi" or ".name" but the main problem is the cheap price of the domain and poor laws regulating the allotment process.

Social to Antisocial Networkers

Blessing in disguise or a disguised curse. It certainly can be both, depending upon what one wants to do with it. Social networking has not only become a mouthpiece of companies to advertise but it has also become playground for fast mover and weird people for legal blackmailing. Once a website seems to be promising, teams of username hoarders attack them piling up hundred of thousands of usernames. This business case Sounds strange but this has a reasonable black market value if website becomes a hit like Twitter. Some people will not mind paying 10---000$ for a smart looking username when the available usernames are too weird to remember yourself.

After username another important thing on the social networking website is the "Network". Would you care for buying friends? May be not. But would you care for buying followers? Maybe yes. Genuine networkers will not even care for this but those who wish to market the product or work as sub agents to promote product online would love to have thousands of people in their network waiting to click on promotional links.

Groups on any networking site are for like-minded people to come together and share views/opinions on the subjects. Groups are started on name of companies, products and followers are pulled in. Creator of the group being a moderator himself can drive the flow of information on these groups as per his own interests. These services are sold to companies and competitors in Internet black markets for aligning or maligning brand images. (Know More...)

Propaganda Markets

Want to promote someone or something; there are people online who can help you. Promotion, demotion, products, tools, personalities and politicians they play with all.

Techniques of Cybersquatting, Typosquatting, name-jacking, derogatory registration as the usernames on social-networking and microblogging sites can harm products, individuals and their interests. Typosquatting, also called URL hijacking, is a form of Cybersquatting which relies on mistakes such as typographical errors made by Internet users when inputting a website address into a web browser. Yet another approach is "name jacking" which is accomplished by purchasing an individuals name as a second-level domain name. A growing trend is the increasingly common use of "derogatory registration". Want to defame the name of some organization start writing bad about them by using a domain name Crap.com or Sucks.com. (Know more...)

These techniques along with domain name registration and social networking usernames, groups can be used to malign your image and it can be done for good also. Brittany spears has millions of fans on Twitter if that account can be hacked and messages send out to the followers asking for money for undernourished kids of Taliban effected countries. Gosh! there will be millions collected in hours. Or how about using hacked accounts for promoting a website or propaganda.

Counterfeit Products

This market has existed for ages and is not going to cease. Flat world, Internet penetration, greed and non-uniformity of online laws across the globe are adding fuel to this fire. If you are Mr. Perfect, have never opened a spam even by mistake then ask website administrators, whose web pages receives such offers daily in hundreds, as comments to the articles.

From counterfeit Indian Attars to Hugo Boss watches to Viagra to Electronics, they got it all. These are all counterfeit product market places but with reasonable good moral values. Moral values are for the buyers; caveat - not to copyright owner. They take money upfront or on delivery and product can be delivered to your doorstep from Shanghai or New York. Handbags, exotic animals, arts, performance enhancing drugs, you name it, they got it.

In upcoming blogs on "Internet Black Markets" I will be diving into more issues related to parallel economy, which exist on Internet and is harming the everyday user. This harm can be as direct as child pornography and as indirect as counterfeit products.

Part 2/4 of this series of "Internet black markets" fraudulent activities of online money earning will be explored, which include SEO, Traffic generation, plagiarism and click frauds

Part 3/4 of this series "Internet black markets" contains the detailed information about Spamming, Phishing, Personal information market places and pirated software

Part 4/4 of this series "Internet black markets" the biggest market places of EBay, Twitter, race crimes and online dating will be explored

Courtesy:

Free Stock Photos for websites - FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Posted at 12:00AM Aug 02, 2009 by ABhi in Trends  |  Comments[0]