denmark isn't entirely immune to rackets

denmark is largely a country of very little corruption and few signs of racketeering, but (you knew there was a but) the odd thing pops up now and again. years ago, i realized the whole setup around the .dk domains was one big mafia. i also suspect the way you get a driver's license in denmark is similar - with a whole apparatus built up around "driving schools" (some dude with a "school vehicle" sign that he mounts on the top of his skoda sedan and charges 20,000kr to "teach" you to drive). and this week, i encountered a third example.

there's a scheme by which employers are forced to pay for you to have "screen glasses" if you do a lot work in front of a computer. i recently realized that i am having trouble properly reading the fine print on my screen(s) (getting old, you say?) and since my solution to not being able to see things to read them is to get about 2cm from said screen, i decided it was getting rather embarrassing and i broke down, filled out the form and made an appointment to get "screen glasses." (i'm putting that in quotation marks because i've been outside my native language for so long now that i'm no longer sure whether that's just a direct translation from danish or a real thing.)

i filled out the form, got it signed and stamped at work (oddly, that's apparently still a thing, though it felt like i had to teleport to 1990 to do it). i even got permission to use an old pair of my own frames for it, which felt quite sustainable of me. why get new frames when i had some that i knew i liked, just languishing here at home, unused since they were an old prescription. i went to the optician we are mandated to use (not my regular one). 

they immediately started asking me questions about where the glasses i was wearing came from. i found that a little weird. i said they were from another optician, but didn't specify where. it felt like none of his business. i handed him the form and reminded him that i was there for screen glasses. 

we did the eye test and then he started trying to up-sell me. i think the deal they have with companies has probably been pushed to the bare minimum by cynical purchasing people with some kind of bonus riding on how much they save. so he gave me the hard sell on premium glass. 

i asked what the company pays for and he said that the premium glass hadn't been ticked off on my form. i had filled out the form myself, so i knew that, and since i didn't know what any of those boxes had really meant (they were written in rather insider-y language), i hadn't ticked anything, thinking we'd be able to discuss. he really tried to push me to get the fancy glass, without telling me what it would cost. in the end, we agreed they would call my work and ask whether we could include the fancy lenses.

i was thinking that for glasses i'll wear only when i'm looking at my screen, i don't really need anything fancy. i chose my own old frames to be a bit more sustainable and to save a bit on new frames (i had admittedly heard that the choices were limited). naturally, my company didn't fall for the up-sell from our friends at louis nielsen (yes, i'm going to name names), so i'm getting normal glass. the guy called me and really tried the hard sell on the phone, telling me that the fanciest glass would cost more than 4,000kr. (that's over $500 these days). and i'm like, wait, what? thank you, no. 

clearly louis nielsen isn't too happy about the deal they've made to provide screen glasses for companies, so they try to push people into spending more than the company will allow, in order to try to recoup some of the costs. it seems rather like a racket to me. 

in which she exposes that the mafia is live and well in denmark

about two months ago, i made a big mistake. like many mistakes, i didn't realize it at the time. i decided to purchase a domain ending in dot dk. i am starting a new business providing all kinds of services in english - from writing to translation to teaching - with a couple of friends.  since our target audience for the business is danish, i shrugged off my preference for dot com domains and decided to buy a danish one.

the first red flag (which i blithely ignored) was that you cannot buy a .dk domain through a large international provider like GoDaddy (where i've bought all of my other domains). so i went to a danish provider called DanDomain and for 123.75DKK i purchased markmywords.dk. i figured that afterwards i'd just move it over to GoDaddy where all of my other domains reside and then manage them in one place. (oh, how wrong i was).

minutes after i purchased the domain, i got another email from something called dk-hostmaster, telling me that i needed to go to their site to complete registration of my domain. they gave me new log-in and password to do so (if you're counting, this will now make 3 different log-ins and passwords to get to my domain once i move it to GoDaddy  - which at this point, i still believed was possible). but, having been in denmark for going on fourteen years, i figured ok, this is just danish bureaucracy at its best, so i dutifully signed in and activated my new domain.

then, i proceeded to look through the help on both DanDomain and dk-hostmaster (which is in english until you really need it) to find out how to move my domain over to GoDaddy. by now the red flag had become a red flashing light, and as i got a back and forth conflicting answers with DanDomain telling me to ask dk-hostmaster and dk-hostmaster telling me to ask DanDomain, the flashing light began to sound alarm bells as well.  still i brushed it all aside and thought i would be able to solve it. i found on GoDaddy's site that i had to own a domain for 60 days before it could be moved, so i decided to just try to point the domain at our servers from where it was.

again, i was so naive. i dutifully entered the server name on dk-hostmaster, where it said that they had to approve such a move. they then proceeded to ask the most intrusive and unnecessary questions of the server admin in the UK (where our j2research.com site resides) that they decided they didn't want anything to do with it! what happened to the openness of the internet?  i began to think of dk-hostmaster, a rather mysterious organization, as The Godfather, at about that point.

turns out that dk-hostmaster is a godfather of sorts. i thought they were a state organization, but they aren't, they are a consortium of all of the private web hosting providers in denmark and they keep tight-fisted control, like any good mafia boss, of all use of .dk domains.

by this point, i wanted to create the website on google sites, where it would be FREE and where they surely couldn't say no to that. at last i talked to a support guy at DanDomain who sounded sensible (in retrospect, i should have asked his name, as i'm quite sure that corlione was there somewhere). he said that if i purchased a DNS-forwarding subscription for a mere 120DKK per year, i could point the site wherever i wanted it. what he neglected to mention was that it was wherever i wanted it as long as it was in denmark and i was paying through the nose for it). so i dutifully fronted up the 120DKK and tried to point the domain.

by now, you can guess what happened. nothing, that's what. despite having entered the IP address (we had returned to the idea of the UK servers) of our servers, all that showed was a redirect to the mob boss at dk-hostmaster.

so last monday, in resignation, i finally purchased web hosting to the tune of 923DKK per year from DanDomain. of course, for this premium price, i then learned that i couldn't even have a PHP-based website, as that would require another 50DKK per month. yes, the danish web mafia was trying to squeeze even more money out of me, just so i could use open source programming on my own friggin' domain!

happily my business partner's husband brilliantly stayed up late converting our PHP-based site to javascript and it's now up and running. have a look if you'd like. it's here at markmywords.dk.

and the lesson in all of this? never, ever, ever buy a .dk domain. the real world wide web is freer than that (unless, of course, they get their way with this SOPA thing).