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Comment by Arkanosis | Hacker News Reader

Sorry for being that guy, but seeing all the enthusiastic responses on HN, I'm wondering…

Am I, in 2017, the only one left thinking that domain parking is a harmful activity? Like… the DNS equivalent of patent trolling…

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I still think that way too but I'm old. I remember back when domain names first opened up for registration in the early 90s and talking about it with a friend. We recognized the opportunity but thought it'd be unethical to exploit it. Now it's 25 years later and I still have my smug sense of moral superiority but am no richer for it.

i dont like domain squatters, though one way of looking at it is they are investing in the TLD.

It's not investing. It's speculating.

isn't all investment speculating?

No, usually investment provides money for people that want to build something with it, and you get it (and a small profit, for the risk) back afterwards.

In this case, though, no one but you has a benefit.

What about running a top level domain (TLD) ? Instead of company shares you get a domain name under that TLD.

The Benjamin Graham (who taught Warren Buffett) distinction between investment and speculation is: "An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative."

See http://buffettpedia.com/2015/07/investment-versus-speculatio...

Personally, I think it's helpful to think of it as a spectrum rather than as a necessarily binary distinction. Graham's definition is nice and succinct, but the problem comes with the word "promises". The safety of principal for anything cannot be guaranteed beyond all doubt.

"Promise" is not meant in the strict logical sense. "Promise" can also mean "to give cause to strongly expect", as in "the upcoming thunderstorm promises hail damage".

In this case, it probably means "the investor is reasonably sure of". No, it is not an exact definition, but we are dealing with human behaviour and value judgments here, not mathematical proofs.

Yep, I agree. That's why I like to think of it as a spectrum. Based on analysis, someone can believe one operation is more of an investment than another operation.

I know I was being pedantic, but I wanted to avoid making it seem simpler than I think it really is.

Honestly depends on the situation I feel. If people are just registering up a bunch of valuable names then yeah I'm not a fan.

The other kind of person is (like me, so bias) the type who register domains with a project in mind but time or resources don't get funnelled to the project so the domain may as well be released back into the wild - In this case the domain still has however long it's registered for left on the registration and will likely be scooped up by a domain drop bot by the first kind of domainer. It's always nice for a failed project to at least break even through the domain sale.

When killing off projects I usually try to find someone who might like to own the domain and offer to push it to them gratis if they've got an account on the same registrar if the domain's going to expire within 6 months or so

> The other kind of person is (like me, so bias) the type who register domains with a project in mind but time or resources don't get funnelled to the project so the domain may as well be released back into the wild

The third type of person is one who comes up with - at the time - a hilarious sounding joke, registers http://www.cannedgoat.com, and then continues to renew it year-after-year for sentimental reasons.

Besides, who's going to buy cannedgoat.com off me? Might as well keep it from being a GoDaddy banner site.

I'll happily offer $50.

That is not parking on my opinion. You purchased for a reason, an actual project, not just a "i could charge someone for this later" and are willing to give it to someone who will take over the project or similar

A good domain name is a scarce good, like a piece of land. How else do you want to solve the problem of distribution?

Exactly. I recently started a project that's not yet public (will take on the scale of years to get to that point), so the first thing that I did was to register the domain and the Github organization matching the project name. Would be extremely frustrating to find out that someone took it over a year after you started, and you have to go back and change the name all over the place.

I waited to register a domain matching the name I was using as a musician and it was scooped up six months later by a malware ad company. I now register anything I plan to use in the future, even if I'm nowhere near ready to start. However, the domains that I register aren't related to properties or people and I'm not grabbing them just to sit on them or resell them. People who do that are, to me, unethical bottomfeeders.

Some NICs actually ban domain squatting, and that’s a good solutiion, IMO.

If you actually need the domain, good, you can get it. If you only want to buy it to sell it later again, your problem.

You could just place some forum, blog or whatever on such a domain. Of course there wouldn't be much or no content at all. But how do you want to prevent this? With a "there must be regular content updates" rule? No problem, just create some nonsense text with Markov chains or copy some wikipedia pages. Now you would have to add a "Content must make sense" rule. Much fun to enforce this.

I completely agree, DNS-parking is harmful. However, I can't imagine a system for banning or enforcing 'fair use' of a domain. How would it be financed and run?

I also can't imagine how you would legislate around the sales process of domains.

I've thought through a few options, but all paths lead back to a marketplace for domains as assets. In said marketplace, there will always be the equivalent of investment and speculation - so domain-parking is inevitable.

The best way to fight speculation is to fight scarcity, i.e. create many (sensible) top level domains like .cars or .shop to increase competition with .com domains and drive down prices. Then more speculators go out of business because the price per domain goes down while the cost of parking it is unchanged.

One possible system for ensuring domains would be fairly used is a google based one:

When you register a domain, it initially sits alongside a high entropy string, like mything.3ku23j9. You then get traffic and links to go to your domain. If you get sufficiently popular, google will show your domain as one of the first hits for "mything". At that point, you get the mything domain bare.

You're not. It arbitrarily increases barrier to entry so a few people can make money for contributing nothing.

Perhaps, though the idea that if nobody squatted the domain would be there waiting for you isn't always true either.

There are a ton of good, not for sale, but underused, domains. Ones that are tied up with people that had intentions to use it, but never did. But, they still have the emotional attachment, and typically won't sell.

I agree with you. I think domain parking is a dirty thing. Most people see it as an "investment" though, but the reality, is that by squatting on a domain, your mostly just preventing others from using it. Very few would be willing to pay you for it.

I don't think all domain parking is harmful. Buying a known brand and extorting, sure.

But, I registered several <word>media.com names and sold them for $200 to $2k each. I just saw the trend of that style of domain. Didn't feel bad about it. It seems similar to buying land and sitting on it.

I struggle to find the added value in making a domain name more expensive that it would have been through a regular registrar. Do you provide additional services, such as curated listings of domain names you thought sounded good and were still available?

If I learn you're selling a domain just because it's not available for registration anymore, you are not adding value to my business, only increasing its costs.

Ahh. Yes, I just don't consider that "harmful". It is clearly opportunistic.

But, chances are that if I didn't buy it, someone else that planned on using it would have, and they wouldn't sell. The value add is that it's available to you at all, because I spotted the trend early.

Thank you for having taken the time to explain :)

The value you would add by making it available to me is value you would also add directly to the other parties intending to purchase and use it. So really, we're in the same boat as before as far as availability is concerned, except now I'm buying from you for a higher price.

It kinda bugs me, as do a few other things with the way we manage the name system. But I don't think there was ever any route we could have taken where the DNS namespace wasn't going to become either an opportunistic and polluted disaster or an unused relic.

It's like businesses that were listed in the phone book: "AAA Plumbers", e.g., so that they'd be listed at the top of their category.

A simple solution (with its own problems of course) is to charge $100 per year, rather than $10 per year, for each dot-com domain. This would destroy the economics of the parking business, except for the highest-value names, and thus would make a lot of names available for constructive use.

Interesting idea indeed, you could even have the price go up exponentially based on how many domains are already registered to a single entity/address/etc.

First domain? 1 a year. Second? 10. Third? 100. Fourth? 1000.

No one squats domains after that.

You'd see an LLC per domain almost overnight IMO

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