Hacker News Reader

Comment by 20years | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand some of the negative comments here. This guy built a million dollar business in a year providing a service that people want to pay for. He did it all on his own with no other co-founders or employees. I say "Congrats!"

View on HN

I think it has more to do with the fact that we've all wasted countless hours cycling through domain names only to encounter landing pages from squatters like park.io.

Squatters are the ultimate douchebags of the Internet era. I there should be some sort of tax for squatting a domain name. I.e first 10 domains names are cheap then they get expensive.

If ICANN charged $5 a month for all domains perhaps it would not be so lucrative to sit on domains.

Though it would still be profitable for some domains.

The money could pay for ICANN or whatever.

Right now, a .io domain is ~$30/year which is $2.5/month. Doubling that wouldn't be that much more of a deterrent.

Good point.

Maybe they could set a 'holding price' that is a function of the likely value of the domain name. I'll bet at $30 a month - a huge basket of names become completely untenable to 'sit on' whereas it would mean little to the business owner, possibly.

This is an age old problem concerning how to deal with public goods. Real estate is the prototypical problem ... we don't consider those buying and selling land - and not using it - to be a problem to the system, whereas we could make the argument they are. In Vancouver and London, they've introduced a tax on housing spaces that are empty, i.e. if you don't live in it, you have to rent it or get hit with a tax.

>The money could pay for ICANN or whatever. //

ICANN seemingly just keeps a very simple database of domain owners. Reportedly their revenue last year was > $200 million. I'm sure they produce lots of interesting documents too but they appear to be minting it already.

> I'm sure they produce lots of interesting documents too but they appear to be minting it already.

ICANN is a non-profit organization, they are definitely not "minting it". Feel free to look at their financials and complain:

https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/adopted-opplan-b...

Just because an organization is 'not profitable' does not mean they are not efficient, and that there aren't stake holders raking it in.

'Non profit' means that investors are not making anything (there are none).

But there are other stake-holders: suppliers, customers, other kinds of financiers (debtors, other financial services), vendors, executives and employees.

They could feasibly be paying themselves 'significantly above market wages', they could be over-paying suppliers and vendors, and hiring far more people than they need, or otherwise operating very inefficiently.

I'm not accusing ICANN of any of this - rather - I'm making the point that their position as 'non profit' doesn't necessarily absolve the organization of 'raking in a lot more money than they need' kind of thing.

> Just because an organization is 'not profitable' does not mean they are not efficient, and that there aren't stake holders raking it in.

Hence my linking to the financials so you can see who is "raking it in".

There is a tax: it is the domain renewal fee.

The tax is clearly not high enough to keep people playing nice.

Perhaps but has little to do with park.io.

why not something like this: Every domain sold would be for the same price (10 per year or whatever), no secondary markets or private deals.

You can't enforce that. Nothing's stopping me from selling my domain to the highest bidder, taking their money in cash, and then doing whatever $10 transaction through ICANN.

park.io is not at all a domain squatter. Read the other comments on this page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12575992

EDIT: Or just ignore the facts and downvote emotionally.

Park.io is not a squatting service. There may be some squatters using Park.io to snipe domains, but most big time cyber squatters just write their own version of the service as it's just not that difficult and will end up being cheaper if you are trying to snipe domains in bulk.

I have my own service (as in process, not business) that I can run when I'm interested in sniping a domain. I don't use it in bulk or for squatting. Occasionally I will think "x.com" would be a great domain name that I could use for business idea X. Then of course it turns out it was registered by someone else who never did anything with it. I then add an entry to a SQLite database and turn on the service and forget about it.

Although now that I see how much money this guy is making maybe I need to compete with him...

> This guy built a million dollar business in a year providing a service that people want to pay for... I say "Congrats!"

More like, this guy built a million dollar business that arbitrages the DNS renewal system by squatting desirable names that he has no plans to use, then rent-seeking from those who do want to use the names. This is not a value-creating enterprise, but a zero-sum trader making money by taking it from other people.

I say "why don't you take that ingenuity and use it for something productive."

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Hate both.

If you dislike government intervention, you should realize that people like this are the prime cause for it.

This hasn't happened to me, but it would be pretty crappy to find out you lost your domain because the script that your domain registrant uses to renew your domain name is slower than park.io's script.

You can renew before the expiration and you can register multiple years at a time.

It doesn't work like that:

Once your domain has expired, it will be in Auto-Renew Grace Period (for 0-45 days), followed by a 30-day Redemption Grace Period. At the end of the Redemption Grace Period, you will not be able to renew your domain name. Your domain name will be released for registration by third parties.

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/expired-2013-05-03-en

For example, daily.sh will be available on their platform on 2016-09-30, but it actually expired back in 2016-07-01.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com