Comment by insoluble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by insoluble | Hacker News Reader

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Two approaches come to mind: (1) Require strict identity for domain registration, and then limit the number per person to something like 3, except where a special permit is held. (2) Make it illegal, where a heavy fine would be imposed for squatting. Naturally there would need to be a grace period post-registration before a domain were considered in squat-mode. Six months could be suitable.

Furthermore, there could be an added regulation that no two domains could serve essentially the same data for more than a certain transition period, such as three months. Not only are such duplicates bad for spiders, but there is no essential reason why they need to exist. With redirects and load balancers, a site could easily be switched over from one domain to another in a relatively short time.

One of the fundamental rules of this world is that if something can be abused, it will be abused. And unlike infractions that are obvious and hurt a person's social reputation, domain registration is so hidden that a person can squat left and right without social repercussions. Hence, the only solution is regulation -- either technical, or legal.

> limit the number per person to something like 3, except where a special permit is held.

Organizations are people too, or corporations end up getting special permits? Either one leads to trouble and groups that buy up to maximums since they want to use all their entitlements.

> no two domains could serve essentially the same data for more than a certain transition period

So now we all need different VPN gateway and email system homepages? Who is to say domains exists for HTTP? They are unique names for many protocols.

The main problem is the ability to sell them for value. Make that hard. For example, make parties prove it is a legal inheritance or court victory that requires a transfer otherwise push it into the pool where others can try to buy it faster and deny the old registrar involvement until it falls out of the next valid ownership chain.

Email logins are an interesting exception, at least for those whose domains exist purely for vanity. For non-email logins, sub-domains could be used instead.

I agree that targeting the selling aspect is another approach to consider, although I imagine there are some big hurdles there as well.

I've consider this before and thought of a similar solution. Like you I think there would need to be strict identification and rules that a person whose name holds a domain owns it irrelevant of other previous agreements (to stop people holding domains for others). This way if a domain became valuable the person that requested someone to hold the domain carries moral risk and would limit their ability to hold domains.

Then I would put exponentially increasing pricing on multiple domains per individual. Make it affordable to hold a small number of domains, but to hold many means it is very expensive and likely additional domains must return increasingly high value to justify holding.

Excellent point about gradual increases in price for additional concurrent domains. That's an elegant solution requiring very little human interaction or machine intelligence.

I'm a little bit confused though by your first suggestion.

On the first point, I'm trying to create an environment where a business cant hire many people to hold a small number of domains. So if you made a rule that holding a domain both grants ownership and negates any other deals about transfer of ownership, this would mean that if someone could only ask me to hold a domain via a trust relationship. That might be fine for a few family members and friends but it would never scale to large amounts.

Thinking a bit more on it you'd likely have to split individual vs corporate domain ownership to protect business interest. Charge corporate a x100 multiple for holding domains to avoid someone setting up huge amounts of shelf companies, but companies can also own a small number of domains but at a price where squatting is hard.

Okay. I see what you meant now. For the most part, domains would be non-transferable, hence directly linked to an entity's identity. In other words, buying a domain would be acquiring a licence to use said domain.

100x sounds a bit harsh. I think that would hurt small businesses (LLCs). Perhaps something more reasonable, like 20x would be sufficient.

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