<nettime> rdom for sale

["sebastian.luetgert" <sebastian@rolux.org>]

[re: Facts About thing.net Shutdown]

> PS: Ricardo Dominguez donated the website with the complete
> archives of the EDT for a charity auction at
> http://auction.thing.net.  Proceeds will be split
> between The Thing, Inc. and the Chiapas Media Project.

auction.thing.net:

> Electronic Disturbance Theater
>
> web archive of the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) 1997-1999
> formerly located at www.thing.net/~rdom.
> CD or secure file transfer.
>
> minimum bid: $8,000

the only value of www.thing.net/~rdom was its user value. the idea to take it
offline and sell it on a cd is totally bizarre. this auction is a very strong
statement not only on the actual power structures of the net, but also on the
privatization of public affairs and on the vanishing of political activism into
the art world.

the etoy/etoys conflict is NOT AT ALL a domain name conflict. trademark holders
will get their names dot com, they will get anything that resembles them, they
will get them in other languages and they will even get them retroactively. but
so what? there's still enough space, even in the dot com domain, if you don't
stick to the dictionary. known trademarks can be reversed, xxxxx-whatever.com
should still be available, just campaign for and agree on a prefix and start
registering. your visitors will follow. or wait for new TLDs and see the whole
story repeating again and again.

the etoy/etoys conflict is a conflict between PRACTICES of the net. if it was
business vs. business, noone would have cared so much. but it's business vs.
something different, and the actiual question is if the web of 99 is still a
location for applications that are different from e-commerce. location is not
domain space, that's just the current ideology. location is ideas, concepts
context. location is setting up web pages that produce something else than a
consumer community, that create something else than hits and money, that are
fueled by something else than just the joys of marketing. fighting for web
locations is definitely not fighting for domain names that fit on a tv screen.

auction.thing.net:

> Please note: All transactions are handled by eBay.com. You need an eBay
> account to participate.

really, i don't get it.



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