Random musings about the Philippine’s Internet Industry
July 5, 2004Recently, I received some questions from a two UP students (Rachel Mahinay and Melodie Tumambing) who wanted to profile some IT personalities in the Philippines. Their questions were quite interesting, so I thought I’d share them with you:
Who was Joel Disini in his highschool/college days? Did you see yourself becoming popular, and controversial, like now?
I was a Computer Science/Electrical Engineering undergrad at Caltech. I went to Philippine Science for High School.
Yes, I’m a bit surprised at the controversy the PH Domain has created. Perhaps if our servers were regularly crashing, or if we had treated some customers badly, or if something was wrong with our service, I would be better able to understand it.
Perhaps part of the problem is that the PH domain is viewed in some quarters as a license to print money. Since the Philippines is a rather poor country, there is some envy associated with this. But if people took the time to study the matter, they’d find that running a Domain Registry is a tough business! There are many ccTLDs out there who have totally lost out to COM. Globally, COM outsells ccTLDs 2:1. Because Verisign has sheer economies of scale, they are a formidable competitor. We at DotPH have to spend a lot of time innovating, advertising our brand, and thinking of ways to promote PH over COM. In some ways, because the Filipino has less pride in his country than say, a Frenchman or an Englishman, promoting .PH is more difficult than promoting .FR or .UK.
Another factor is that IT news of global interest is quite rare. Other than the Love Bug Virus, the only other IT News that’ll get the Philippines mentioned in CNN would be the PH Domain. When the people who first criticized us found their names plastered all over the Wall Street Journal, they didn’t let up! In a perverse way, journalists who do stories on the PH Domain are more likely to see their stories carried by the international wire services, hence the disproportionate interest in the PH Domain. (more…)
