The Samsung Conspiracy Against Dot-Organisations

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Down with dot-com advocacy!

Four years ago I bought and continually renewed the KoopaTV.org domain name, after we were on the unseemly koopatv.blogspot.com name. We became independent of the free domain and to a paid one. It's one of the best decisions I ever made for this website. We had a lovely music video to go with it too.

Unfortunately, not everyone has been supportive of the change. Take the smartphone industry, for example. I have a running theme of demeaning smartphones and their associated products as “mobile trash” or related terms on KoopaTV, as recently as yesterday.

Makes sense that they'd strike back on KoopaTV... by trying to prevent people from coming here. How do they do that? Manipulating the very input methods that billions of consumers use to get to websites. Observe, from the Samsung smartphone under my control:

Notice the .com buttons on the default Samsung keyboard, and the Swype keyboard.

The Samsung smartphone comes pre-installed with two keyboards. One is Samsung's, and one is Swype's. They both have an automatic .com button when inputting an address. (As opposed to the .com being an auto-fill or auto-correct function... and clearly, those functions have very strange suggestions for KoopaTV. Painkillers?)

The problem with an automatic .com button is that KoopaTV's domain is KoopaTV.org. That's obviously incompatible with a .com button. And while this impacts many other existing organisations (as opposed to commercial enterprises), it of course impacts KoopaTV. If you're wondering, KoopaTV.com is under the control of domain trolls for stupidly high amounts of money that's way outside our already-strained budget.

I wasn't able to test other smartphone manufacturers’ keyboard set-ups—I asked some Apple users and one of them said their default iPhone virtual keyboard doesn't do this—but KoopaTV's resident tech expert Kamek told me that this kind of .com button is “common practice.” Let's take his word for it, because that best plays into the KoopaTV-is-a-victim narrative I'm trying to portray here.

Independence... is hard. 


KoopaTV doesn't have to be independent all alone (despite that being what the word implies)... the site has you, readers, to help it survive and fight back against these dot-com tech giants! Spread the dot-org word to your friends and advocate the better top-level domain! (Advocating for KoopaTV.org itself and not just the .org part would be great, too.)