Another April, another fool
I feel April Fool's pranks get more tedious every year, and more commercialised too. This year we seem to have had a record number of lame pranks devised by marketing departments and ad agencies with too much budget for their own good, who gleefully announce "April Fool" and promptly issue a press release about how clever they think they are.
How we must all have laughed this year when Fitbit announced its dating app on Facebook with the words "Burning calories meets burning passion in Fitbit's first-ever dating app for people who love to walk". Some fast food fans must have licked cholesterol-starved lips in anticipation when they heard BurgerKing was selling a Chocolate Whopper. Coca Cola must have thought they were pant-wettingly hilarious when they announced three new flavours of coke, those flavours being avocado, sourdough, and charcoal. Even the EU got in on the act, announcing that it had decided to change the colour of passports from maroon to navy blue (the same colour as future British passports), intended no doubt to wind up Brexiteers.
Apart from being irritating in their smugness, these pranks also create a problem that real news can be doubted as probably yet another April Fool's prank. On the morning of April 1st, I read a press release from EURid about domain names which stated that as a consequence of Brexit, UK-based companies, organisations, and individuals will no longer be allowed to register dot EU domain names as of 30th March 2019.
There is no technical reason requiring this exclusion, and using cross-border domain names is common-place, and has been since domain names were invented. For example, you will no doubt be aware of many Japanese and Chinese companies who use a dot UK domain name for the version of their website aimed at a UK readership, written in English, and using UK prices. Locking UK websites out of the dot EU domain sounds like petty politics, but realistically no great hardship in the long term.
More surprising is that the press release also states UK nationals will not be allowed to renew their existing dot EU domain registrations when they expire. This would affect some 340,000 existing registrations by British entities, and is more than 10% of the total number of dot EU registrations, (and therefore more than 10% of the registry's income). Blocking renewals sets a new precedent. In all previous cases where top level domain operators have changed registration rules, the convention has always been that existing domain owners are allowed to continue using their registered domains for as long as needed.
This would be such a radical step in the domain world that I dismissed it as a particularly lame April Fool spoof, but it now appears that this isn't a hoax at all, the press release is genuine, and that politics has taken precedence over common sense.
Let's finish with a short but cute April Fool gag. The zoo in the city of Victoria, Australia, announced that it was launching Cat VR, a virtual reality headset for cats.
I hate to burst their bubble, but Project Holodeck did the same April Fool's spoof five years earlier.
27th April 2018
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.