Well, the good news is that GoDaddy gained more domains than it lost on Move Your Domain Day (MYDD). MYDD was a reaction to the company’s former support for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). According to DailyChanges, the combined domain transfers in and new registrations outstripped transfers out by a large margin, which you can see later in the image below. The numbers were definitely big enough for GoDaddy, who went on record as opposing the SOPA midway through the day.

The GoDaddy boycott began December 21 on reddit because of GoDaddy’s suppor for SOPA, which is itself an act that has been “derided” by opponents for its potential to infringe on First Amendment rights. GoDaddy backed off its support of SOPA only two days later, December 23, but refused to make any official statements. Midway through Thursday, the company officially announced its opposition of the act in response to “a spike in domain name transfers,” said Warren Adelman, CEO of GoDaddy.

Although hopping back and forth may seem risky, it seems to have worked out nicely. 43,304 new domains were registered with GoDaddy (domaincontrol.com) in the 24-hour period after 1AM PST on December 30, while 14,492 were transferred out. 35,907 domains were deleted, 27,843 domains were transferred in. After all is said and done, GoDaddy made a net gain of 20,748 domains. While currently having over 32 million domains, the gain represented a 0.06% increase.

After taking into consideration the $10 per year registration fee, the deletions and transfers out constitute a yearly revenue loss (not counting the gains at all here) of over $500,000 for GoDaddy. While not all can be blamed on MYDD, it certainly had an impact. In an attempt to keep customers, and cash, flowing in, GoDaddy has launched a new ad campaign over the last week, featuring a nearly-nude Danica Patrick.

Source: Ars Technica

Artist representation of Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been trying to tighten copyright enforcement for quite a few years. In 2008, they pushed the PRO-IP Act, which allowed the federal government to seize domain names used for copyright infringement and created a new federal copyright czar. This year, 2011, the MPAA is a leading force in the campaign for “rogue sites” legislation, which would give the federal government powers to target sites with minimal judicial oversight.

Viacom, whose Paramouth subsidiary is an MPAA member, told the Wall Street Journal that “a new wave of digital piracy could threaten the US media business” if they lost their copyright infringement case against YouTube. The MPAA has argued that “when profits are reduced, the studios have fewer dollars to invest in movies, and when there is less money to invest they make fewer movies and the diversity and variety of films we love become more limited.”

CNN recently released a story on the top 20 biggest CEO pay raises. Want to know who was at the very top of the list? You either read the title of the article, the last paragraph, their story, of you have psychic ability. Viacom’s CEO Philippe Dauman. He received a pay raise of $50.5 million in 2010 from 2009. This increase is a 149 percent pay increase from his 2009 compensation of $34 million.

Dauman isn’t the only CEO that is rolling around in money made from the record-breaking box office results. Disney CEO Robert Iger made $29.6 million in 2010. While the US economy has been in a pretty nasty recession, these CEO’s have been sitting around without any trouble in the world.

While you must understand that this raise isn’t really primarily in the form of cash, but stocks and stock options, it is still a huge increase in compensation. Viacom’s shareholders are pretty much the ones that made this possible, so perhaps he earned it. Since stocks fluctuate, for all we know, that $50 million could tank in future years.

The underlying problem is this. They and other companies are trying to get taxpayers to spend more taxpayer dollars to better protect copyrights, especially in the case of Viacom copyrights. Making movies seems to already bring in millions of dollars. It seems strange that a company that is complaining about losing money to pirating and needing money to protect against it would up compensation of the CEO, one person, by $50 million.

Source: Ars Technica

VeriSign has requested to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that they should be able to enforce a new “anti-abuse” policy. With this policy, they would be allowed to terminate, lock, or transfer any domain under its registration jurisdiction under quite a few circumstances that they provided. One of these circumstances listed was “requests of law enforcement.”

VeriSign proposed this request via ICANN’s Registry Services Evaluation Process, which was done on October 10th. They also proposed a malware scanning service for domains besides this anti-abuse policy. “All parts of the internet community are feeling the pressure to be more proactive in dealing with malicious activity,” Verisign explained. “ICANN has recognized this and the new gTLD Applicant Guidebook requires new gTLDs to adopt a clear definition of rapid takedown or suspension systems that will be implemented.”

The aim of this policy will be to empower VeriSign to act as quickly as possible in order to take down sites that contain malware, launching phishing attacks, or launching any other attacks across the Internet. The malware scanning service would scan all sites on .com, .net and .name sites for recognized malware, and then proceed to inform the registrar and site owner.

This request also asks for authority to take down sites for certain circumstances beyond malware, including “to protect the integrity, security and stability of the DNS; to comply with any applicable court orders, laws, government rules or requirements, requests of law enforcement or other governmental or quasi-governmental agency, or any dispute resolution process; (and) to avoid any liability, civil or criminal, on the part of Verisign, as well as its affiliates, subsidiaries, officers, directors, and employees… Verisign also reserves the right to place upon registry lock, hold or similar status a domain name during resolution of a dispute.”

Aden Fine, senior attorney with the ACLU, stated that their procedure is a little worrisome. “The default shouldn’t be ‘take down first’,” he said. “Any time the government is involved in seizing websites, that raises serious First Amendment issues. It doesn’t matter if it’s a private company pushing the button.”

Source: Ars Technica

After they surveyed 2,277 US adults between April and May of 2011, they found out that 83 percent have a cell phone. Of that group, 42 percent own smartphones, making it so that 35 percent of all adults surveyed own a smartphone. Smartphones tended to be the most popular among those with a college degree and seeming financially “well off,” and the highest rate of ownership came under the age of 45. Given the “new” age of this technology, that isn’t too surprising, either.

Nearly half of the people surveyed that were employed full time had a smartphone. Only a small percentage over 25 percent had a smartphone when they were unemployed. Smartphone owners were also found to generally be more likely to own laptops, music players, desktop computers, tablets and e-book readers.

The unexpected result is the one of the primary internet source. So, 28 percent of smartphone owners access the Internet primarily through just that. That amounts to 10 percent of all cell phone owners, or 8 percent of all adults in the US. It may come as no surprise, but with the growing availability and decreases in pricing for smartphones, while broadband access is yet too expensive and not readily available, the trend is likely to continue for quite some time.

“Smartphone owners under the age of 30, non-white smartphone users, and smartphone owners with relatively low income and education levels are particularly likely to say that they mostly go online using their phones,” wrote Pew, which says that nearly a third of the “mostly cell” group lacks any kind of traditional broadband Internet access.

Market share statistics are also a must in such a study. Pew Internet Project found that 15 percent of all cell owners and 35 percent of smartphone owners reported owning an Android device. Apple and RIM are both at 10 percent for cell phone owners are 24 percent of smartphone owners. Microsoft and Palm both were at 2 percent of all cell owners.

While the Android lead is not surprising, Apple has been reported to be rising in sales, according to Nielsen. However, the demographics of the cell phones are interesting. More than a quarter of African-American cell owners own an Android device, roughly “twice the rate for Caucasian and Latino users.” BlackBerry and iPhones are “particularly high” among those with the highest level of education and incomes. These people are four times more likely to own a BlackBerry or iPhone. And last but not least, those who live in urban or suburban environments are twice as likely to own an iPhone than a rural user.

Source: Ars Technica

The new UI is super minimalist, perhaps more so than any other browser. You have back/foward, the address bar with some buttons in it for refresh/stop, the tabs, and the home/bookmark/options menu all on one line. Very cool, but I wish they did it like Chrome and put the tabs and stuff in the title bar. If they did that or at least allowed you to do so, it would be amazing. Of course there’s HTML5 support which is done really nicely…and super fast thanks to the native hardware rendering capability. However, the coolest feature has got to be the ability to pin sites to your taskbar in Windows 7. Chrome lets you do this, but IE9 takes it to a whole different level. If you pin Facebook to your taskbar, for example, you can right click on the window and have instant shortcuts to your messages, wall, etc, right from the taskbar. If you pin Hulu to your taskbar, you can pause and fast forward right from the taskbar using the Aero Peek feature. It’s very cool, but it requires you to pin the website. I hope IE9 lets websites control their section of the taskbar with this feature in the future. However, it’s an awesome start for now.

I could go on and on about this, but Ars Technica has a huge six-page article that digs into IE9. It’s well worth the read.

To get the beta, go to the IE site at www.beautyoftheweb.com

Source: Download Squad

Engadget

Very neat. If you don’t want Instant, you can turn it off by clicking the text that says “Instant is on” which should is right next to the search box.

Source: Pitchfork.