As manic as LTE adoption has been in the US, it could be triggering a full-fledged generational rift in Japan. NTT is cutting prices for fiber-to-the-home internet access by as much as 34 percent in the midst of falling landline subscriptions, and Australia’s Delimiter hears from unofficial sources at the provider that the cuts may be in response to youth being enamored with 4G on their phones. The tipsters believe that many of the younger set are picking one expensive LTE plan, even with data caps, instead of paying for two services; a price drop would be an attempt to keep at least a few of these wireless rebels onboard. Take the assertions with a grain of salt when there’s no official statements to match, but there’s no doubt that 4G demand is booming when NTT’s own DoCoMo just landed its 7 millionth Xi contract. We only wish American wired and wireless carriers would be so accommodating of our temptation to cut the cord.
Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Networking, Internet, Mobile
ICANN anticipated that we’d see the first fruits of its open season on top-level domains (TLDs) roughly a year after the hunt began; sure enough, it’s winding down applications tonight. If you have the $185,000 plus $25,000 per year to make a domain your own, you’ve got until midnight GMT (7PM ET) to get that custom spin on the web. Don’t think that you’ll get the rubber stamp right away, though. ICANN plans to detail the requests on June 13th and consider any objections over similarity or multiple bids for the same name. If all goes smoothly, the first generic TLDs will be active within nine months, while those who face a fight could be waiting roughly one to two years. We’re just hoping someone had the courtesy to pick up .gadget for us — not that ICANN’s worried about a gap in registrations after taking $352 million in fees and over 2,000 applications so far.
ICANN stops taking custom domain names at 7PM ET, details the TLD explosion June 13th originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 May 2012 12:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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CWmike writes “The internet is no stranger to crime, writes corporate investigator Brandon Gregg. From counterfeit and stolen products, to illegal drugs, stolen identities and weapons, nearly anything can be purchased online with a few clicks of the mouse. The online black market not only can be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection, but the whole process of ordering illicit goods and services is alarmingly easy and anonymous, with multiple marketplaces to buy or sell anything you want. Gregg started with $1000 and a took journey into the darker side of the Internet using two tools: Bitcoin and the Tor Bundle.”
It doesn’t look good for Firefox: Almost every month for the last three years, Firefox has lost ground to Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari. For most of 2009 the trend was fairly straight as it fended off Chrome and nibbled away at IE, but between 2010 and today Firefox has lost a third of its market share, from a worldwide peak of around 30% down to 20%.
You can look at this two ways. First, the total number of people on the internet is growing, so while Firefox’s share has decreased, the total number of people using Firefox is increasing. The other point of view is that Firefox, whether you like it or not, is declining in popularity.
I love the Fox as much as the next bearded geek, but the numbers just don’t lie: Chrome is breathlessly decimating Firefox’s userbase at a breakneck rate. It took Firefox more than four years to prise 20% of the market from Internet Explorer; Chrome did it in almost half that, and is fast approaching 30% in just over three years. Internet Explorer’s graph is a little harder to interpret, but it looks like it might have finally turned the corner and stopped hemorrhaging market share.
Compounding Firefox’s losses is the stark reality that it’s unlikely to make any gains. Google has obviously spent a lot of money advertising Chrome, but there’s no way that ads brought it nearly 30% of the web’s two billion surfers. People are migrating to Chrome because of word of mouth: Geeks and power users picked it up first, and they’ve been installing it on the computers of friends and family ever since. Microsoft, too, is using a dollar bill tourniquet, and when Windows 8 tablets roll around with IE10 as the default browser, you can be sure that its market share will climb. Mozilla is adding some exciting new features to Firefox, and Firefox for Android is an interesting enterprise, but I don’t foresee anything that will turn the tide.
But is that really a problem? The entire reason that Firefox was such a success is that it appealed to the geeks and power users who weren’t happy with Internet Explorer 6′s 95% share of the market. Microsoft effectively put the dampers on web innovation for five years. Firefox was conceived with one purpose in mind: To revitalize the web.
In that regard, it has succeeded. The web, with three browsers vying for supremacy, has never been more exciting. Within a few short years of launching, Firefox had shown the world what CSS and a gutsy JavaScript engine were capable of. Firefox triggered the HTML5 revolution. It is because of Firefox that Metro-style Windows 8 apps can be written in JavaScript. And ironically enough, it is because of Firefox that Chrome was created.
If you used Chrome in 2008 and 9, you will remember that almost all of its early adopters were disaffected Firefox users who had grown tired of an ever-increasing memory footprint and sluggish interface. Chrome had almost zero features when it first arrived, but it didn’t matter: When the only two choices were a slow Internet Explorer or a bloated Firefox, Chrome was exactly what the people (and the internet!) needed. Mozilla has spent the last year trying to trim the fat, but it hasn’t caused an upswell of users to return to the motherland. Much in the same way that Firefox cannibalized Internet Explorer, Chrome capitalized on just a single feature — speed — and has been riding the wave ever since.
Despite its ridiculous rate of growth, though, Chrome will eventually reach a zenith. The Big Three all have enough gravitas to ensure that no one browser has the power to monopolizingly choke the web. Even if a browser does get a little too big for its britches, Mozilla will always be there to knock some sense into the community — and, if need be, do the grassroots thing all over again.
What will happen now, assuming Microsoft and Google continue to barrage each other with their full arsenal of cannon, is that Firefox will gradually fade into a position of feared, revered veterancy — kind of like an aging grandfather who sits on a rocking chair in the middle of the World Wide Web with a loaded shotgun. It might even get to the stage where Firefox has to occasionally loose some crazy feature onto the web, just to remind everyone that it’s still alive. Eventually, if Microsoft really is serious about open web technologies and Google does no evil, Firefox might even die.
But, having completed everything you set out to do in life, is death really that awful?