Making a prophet

Predicting the future is always asking for trouble. I don’t envy analysts and trendspotters who regularly cast auguries about the year to come. Especially when journalists like me love to take a list of predictions and subject it to the cold light of hindsight six months or a year down the track.

For example, last December marketing firm JWT released a list of 80 things to watch in 2008. Some of them were bleedingly obvious and just filling out the numbers, like the Sex and the City movie, the United States presidential elections and Beijing 2008. A few were just weird, like Pantone 18-3943 blue iris (zuh?) and single men saying no to sex (as if!). Several have already been overtaken by history, such as assassinated politician Benazir Bhutto.

Predicting the future, it seems, is a combination of picking out scheduled events, expecting current trends to continue, guesswork and not being afraid to be proven wrong. But if we can’t say with any certainty what’s going to happen six months from now, long-term planning and policy making are exercises in bravery or futility. One good example of policy decisions having unintended consequences is the recent change to predatory pricing laws.

Sociologist Robert Merton wrote in the 1930s that unintended consequences were the result of five things: our inability to anticipate the future; incorrect understanding of the problem; our immediate interests overriding long-term ones; the anticipated consequences coming into conflict with our values; and self-fulfilling prophecies – making decisions based on the assumption that something would go wrong, even though it might not.

A while ago I wrote about how ICANN was looking to change the rules on top-level domain names and suggested this could pave the way for a domain name landgrab.

In June this year, the Australian Domain Name Administrator (auDA) changed its policy and now allows owners to resell their .au domain names to third parties.

However, auDA is strongly against domain name speculation, where companies buy large numbers of domain names and try to resell them at a profit or monetise them through advertising. This is why auDA restricted the resale of domain names, such as not allowing them to be sold for six months.

There are strong arguments on either side of this story. If there is a speculative rush, smaller businesses could be squeezed out by large companies with deeper pockets. Getting the domain name you want could be very expensive. Regulating the market is supposed to prevent abuses and inequities, but can also have unintended consequences for small business. What do you think?