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Comment by rhizome | Hacker News Reader

What are the terms by which value is measured?

In the paper by Glen Weyl linked above, the property tax should be set at about 1/normal turnover rate (e.g. 1/30 years = 3.3% per year), owners should declare their own assessed value for which they pay the tax (e.g. on the $1500 asking price in the article, the tax could be about $50/year assuming a 3.3% tax rate), and then if someone else wishes to buy the property they can purchase at the same self-assessed value.

That sounds terrible. Companies should not have to pay millions of dollars per year to keep their domain safe.

If a website-needing company pays based on how badly it would hurt them to lose that site, it would destroy their margins. If they pay a more reasonable amount, or if they're just a smaller company, they're vulnerable to competitors kicking them offline at a whim.

Land is pretty much the only area where taxing a significant percentage of value makes sense, and even then it's frustrating and awful to do it with a buyout system.

So the holder assigns their own "make me move" price? For e.g. Disney this would be "infinity," and I've taken a math class recently enough to know that 3.3% of infinity is infinity.

fyi in Weyl’s book, he says that to avoid this problem, “Possessors would be allowed to group their assets into clusters and to pull them apart, as they choose.” In other words, Disney could bundle the domain with the business (which is already listed for only $243 billion, not “infinity”) http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s11222.pdf

I think in general the business should be bundled with the domain, although I think that probably there should be some oversight preventing completely unrelated domains from being bundled together.

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