June 4, 2004

From The Government, Here To Help You

The contract for the company that operates the heavy-duty servers and computers that keep the .net portion of the Internet up and running and make it possible for your browser to find websites that end in .net is up for renewal or assignment to a new company. So what? Yeah, that's what I thought. Until I read this. Some research firm calculated that .net is involved in $1.15 billion in business-to-consumer ecommerce every hour. The online economy takes a big hit if the government agency overseeing the re-contracting screws it up. Online consumer commerce is growing rapidly in Europe, and in the U.S., where the retail e-commerce industry is rapidly becoming very profitable.

Here's a column on that subject from the WaPo's Leslie Walker. And David Ticoll says it's time for Canadian retailers to "wake up and smell the digital cappuccino."