In Palm Springs, California, a man booked a vacation condominium for 44 days, saying that he would be in town on a business trip. After 30 days, he gained rights as a tenant under California law, and refused to pay rent or to leave. When the story broke, he was discovered to be an indie game developer who has failed to deliver a Kickstarter-funded project. That’s when the justice of the sharing economy kicked in. Kind of.
When the owner of the condo where the man is squatting threatened to turn off the electricity, he said that would be disastrous because he works from home, earning $1,000 to $7,000 a day. He is a game developer, apparently, who raised more than four times its $40,000 goal. The game was supposed to be released sometime around now, but no updates were coming. Backers were promised a copy of the company’s next title, called Knuckle Club.
The problem with that? Knuckle Club is still in the funding phase on Kickstarter. Well, it was. Kickstarter has now suspended the project, as of today. Why? Kickstarter isn’t saying, but the negative publicity surrounding the condo-squatting incident and the non-delivery of the other Kickstarter-funded title. Backers of the other projects may have also complained to Kickstarter after someone using the developer/squatter’s account left a comment saying “10/10 would squat again” on the project’s page.
Lesson learned? Use a fake name for everything. No, wait, that’s not a good lesson, or a practical one. The lesson here should be that the Internet never really forgets anything, and that people who invest in your project through crowdfunding expect to get something back in return.
Kickstarter suspends accused Airbnb squatter’s game project [Polygon]
Even people who haven’t flown are pretty familiar with the basics of the safety spiel the cabin crew gives before takeoff — no smoking, buckle your seatbelt and keep it buckled, know where the exits are, don’t freak the f*#$ out when the oxygen bag thing drops, and if we crash into the water and manage to survive, you can float in the freezing water on your seat cushion. The more concise an airline can make these statements, the better. But United Airlines thinks that the best way to make you give a hoot about airline safety is to make you watch a 4.5-minute video that tries to tickle your funny bone.
It takes a full 20 seconds of United staffers greeting you in different languages and your “pilot” finishing up his coffee at some presumably French bistro before it finally makes even the first mention of the rules.
Then there’s a huge pause as the pilot admires a Parisian on a unicycle, mangling “Rhapsody in Blue” while carting fresh-baked bread in a bag on his back.
Followed by another long stretch of nothing worth watching as a flight attendant hails a cab in NYC, all so she can eventually show you how to buckle the seatbelt.
It’s worth noting that the saxophone playing loudly over this part of the video is eerily reminiscent of Bernhard Herrmann’s score for Taxi Driver. Probably not the association that United was hoping to make.
Now it’s off to Japan, where a flight attendant makes… an origami plane, complete with CGI exits, and emergency slides.
It goes on… and on… and on like this. Traveling to Las Vegas to watch a United staffer drone on about sitting in exit rows; the Swiss alps, where all this boring talk of safety is interrupted by a brief James Bond-like clip of a fist fight on top of a gondola.
Keep in mind, we’re only halfway through the video at this point. It’s likely taken you less time to read this and think of the hate mail you’re going to send me than it would have to watch just this portion of the mini-movie.
We won’t even get into the remaining segments of the video that linger too long on kangaroos and flamingos because we can already feel you getting angry and don’t want to have to return to the gate and kick you off this flight.
All the safety stuff you already knew is finally over around the 4:15 mark, but United has to crank up the Gershwin full blast to waste another 15-20 seconds of your time with people you will never meet telling you how much they appreciate you.
“We’re taking an approach of sophisticated humor that reflects our brand,” a rep for the company tells the Chicago Tribune.
We’ll disagree that the video is sophisticated or humorous, but we do agree that the bloated, stagnant, and overlong clip does indeed reflect the United brand.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the organization that, basically, makes sure the whole world’s internet functions more or less the same way and stays compatible with itself. ICANN is based in the United States, but is not an American organization. In fact, certain functions of internet management that were under the control of the U.S. government in years and decades past have been making a transition over to ICANN.
This particular question of ownership all began with a series of lawsuits. Several victims or families of victims of terrorism filed lawsuits against nations they claimed had sponsored the terroristic acts: Syria, North Korea, and Iran. The plaintiffs won their various suits against the three countries. Now, they’re trying to collect on those judgements, and actually get some money in hand.
That is, of course, far easier said than done. None of the three nations are particularly interested in handing over a pile of damages to the Americans who sued them. So among the assets the plaintiffs are trying to collect from these three nations are their country code top-level domains (ccTLD), and they subpoenaed to ICANN to help make it happen.
A top-level domain is the extension at the end of a website name — like the .com, .edu, and .org we all type a zillion times every day. Country code top-level-domains are two-letter top-level domains assigned to nations or sovereign territories. Two of the most commonly-seen are .us and .uk, but there are over two hundred others like .fr (France), .jp (Japan), and .za (South Africa).
Some ccTLDs have citizenship requirements for anyone trying to register a site under them, but there are plenty that permit worldwide commercial use. For example, the .ly in bit.ly is the ccTLD for Libya. The .tv TLD belongs to Tuvalu, which makes a fair bit of money leasing it out, and Google itself has registered youtu.be — using Belgium’s .be — for video URL shortening.
The three ccTLDs the lawsuit winners are trying to seize are the ones that belong to the countries they won their cases against: .ir (Iran), .sy (Syria), and .kp (North Korea).
So if a ccTLD is something that can be bought, sold, leased, licensed, or traded, clearly it has some value. But, ICANN says, it isn’t actually property, and cannot be owned or possessed by anyone, including ICANN. And if it’s not a thing that can be owned, then it’s not a thing that can be seized.
If the internet is the superhighway that the 90s told us it was, then, the argument goes, domain names and the system behind them are the addresses on that road. And an address isn’t exactly transferable or a thing you can possess.
Someone can own a property at 1 Main Street, and build a house there. They can sell or lease that house or the land it’s on, and if they commit a criminal act or lose a lawsuit then law enforcement can seize the house. But even if the authorities take and resell the property, they can’t seize the name “1 Main Street” and reassign it to the guy on 73 Maple Lane who sued you. 1 Main Street stays where it is, even if the property changes hands and the house there gets razed.
ICANN also pointed out, in their response, that taking the ccTLDs away from the countries that currently use them would pretty much strip them of their value, making them worthless assets to seize anyway. Even if they could be seized, which they can’t.
John Jeffrey, ICANN’s general counsel, said in a statement that “ICANN’s role in the domain name system has nothing to do with any property of the countries involved.” He added, “Country code top-level domains are part of a single, global interoperable Internet.”
ICANN filed its response in federal court on Tuesday. It remains to be seen whether the court agrees with the organization, or whether three entire nations can have their internet identities assigned to someone else.
The documentation — the writs and subpoenas, and ICANN’s responses and motions to quash — is all available on ICANN’s website.
If you’re one of the hundreds of millions of consumers who use a debit card you’ve likely found yourself on the receiving end of an overdraft fee when your account balance just wasn’t quite enough to make a desired purchase. While consumers might not necessarily question the occasional overdraft fee, a new report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau puts the fees into a disconcerting perspective.
According to the report [PDF], a majority of the $32 billion in annual debit card overdraft fees are incurred for transactions of $24 or less, and the majority of those overdrafts are repaid in three days.
That doesn’t sound too bad, right? Wrong. The CFPB did the math and if a consumer borrowed $24 for three days and paid the average overdraft fee of $34, that would mean their “loan” comes with an interest rate of 17,000%.
That seems outrageous. But we’re not done. Consider the fact that consumers are twice as likely to use their debit cards as their credit cards and that the average debit card holder uses their card 17 times each month, giving ample opportunity to run up those overdraft fees.
In fact, the report found that more than half of consumer checking account income is from overdraft fees – often the costliest of all banking fees. That’s a problem the CFPB is looking to tackle as it works on creating necessary consumer protections for overdraft and related services.
“Overdraft fees should not be ‘gotchas’ when people use their debit cards,” CFPB director Richard Cordray says. “We need to determine whether current overdraft practices are causing the kind of consumer harm that the federal consumer protection laws are designed to prevent.”
The CFPB study examined nearly two million consumer checking accounts and found that approximately 14% opted for overdraft protection.
On average, those customers paid about $260 a year in overdraft and non-sufficient fund fees. That means that a consumer would have at least 10 overdraft occurrences in a 12-month period.
On the other hand, consumers who did not opt-in for the plan paid just $35 in annual fees.
One concern regulators encountered when reviewing the study data was the way in which banks organize transactions. Some banks were found to have maximized overdraft fees by processing transactions not in the order in which they are made, but in a way that results in a larger number of overdrafts.
The practice, often called stacking, has been criticized by a number of consumer groups, including Pew Charitable Trust which has studied the overdraft process extensively.
In a June report on overdrafts, Pew found that reordering only inflates the issue of overdrafting and in the end consumers pay significantly more.
Pew reports that while banks have employed additional policies that can help limit the impact of overdraft fees, including reordering only certain types of transactions, implementing a threshold amount to trigger an overdraft, and not charging an extended overdraft fee, more attention is needed for this often unfair practice.
Just last month, Wells Fargo announced it would put an end to the practice for its checking customers. The bank previously stopped reordering debit card transactions and ATM withdrawals.
While Wells Fargo’s move is a step in the right direction, issues concerning overdraft fees continue to be prevalent, even though some federal regulations were put into place over the last five years.
Not too long ago, consumers were often unaware of overdraft fees until they appeared on their statements. That changed back in 2010 when federal regulators mandated that banks use an “opt-in” requirement. That mean institutions had to obtain consumers’ consent before charging fees for allowing overdrafts on most ATM and debit card transactions.
While the mandates meant that consumers were more aware of their accounted being enrolled with overdraft protection, that doesn’t mean they fully understand the program or realize the amount of fees they’ll actually incur.
Around the same time, some banks updated their policies to allow customers to not be charged if they are only overdrawing their account by a small amount, such as $5. Additionally, some banks began capping the number of overdraft and NSF fees charged on an account on a single day.
Cordray says that today’s report doesn’t mean banks should stop offering overdraft coverage, it just means there needs to be a determination of whether current practices are causing consumers more harm than good and if consumers have a clear understanding of the plans to begin with.
Iliad is apparently becoming known as a disruptive force in France for undercutting the competition on price, and it looks to be trying that same tactic with its offer for T-Mobile USA; the $15 billion offer is nearly $10 billion less than T-Mobile’s current market value.
And the Iliad offer is only half the size of the reported $30 billion deal that Sprint has been trying to hammer out with Deutsche Telekom for months.
While it’s unlikely that DT would ever accept such a low number, U.S. regulators would probably be much more willing to approve the sale of T-Mobile USA from one European company to another, rather than seeing the nation’s third- and fourth-largest wireless providers merge into a company that still wouldn’t come close to being able to compete with AT&T or Verizon.
After all, it wasn’t T-Mobile or AT&T that backed out of their attempted merger. It was both the FCC and the Justice Dept. who moved to block the deal, arguing that further consolidation of the U.S. wireless market would lead to higher prices and slowed innovation.
But regulators didn’t have much problem when Japanese telecom SoftBank became the majority owner of Sprint in 2013.
So perhaps an improved offer from Iliad or a reasonable bid from another European or Asian company would be enough to shake the idea of a Sprint merger.
T-Mobile has confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that it received the offer from Iliad, but isn’t saying anything else.
