Ask HN: Why isn't domain squatting illegal? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why isn't domain squatting illegal?

6 pointscyptus11 comments

Getting good domains gets harder and harder, for new companies it gets difficult to find a good domain and so to find a good name for their company (matching their domain name). Almost every short domain name is already taken by big companies like godaddy, just to be sold by some thousands of dollars.

Why is this not illegal?

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Why can investors buy land and leave it undeveloped until there is an opportunity for profit? It is the same concept. The land is unproductive until somebody wants to live on it, or build their business on it.

It is true that many communities in the US have property taxes, which has an interesting effect. It makes it so only wealthy people can own and hold un-used land, because most middle and lower income folks could not afford to pay property taxes on land just to hold it.

you are right its the same thing, only that land is much more expensive in more sought areas.

domains are always at the same value when you register it (for each tld). this makes it easy for squatting-companies to register a huge amount and stop other business from using this names for their company.

Arbitrage is a foundational aspect of capitalism there is no legal argument to be made against squatters unless laws are changed. I agree it would be more fair if the domain registry could predict the future value of domains and charge more for them to the investors.

How much government control would you need to make you happy? Where is the line that determines who has right to the domain? I think if you add any level of enforcement it would lead to too much chaos.

In either case it would not help startups. Lets say you decide to open a company named "Banana". How do you envision taking ownership of banana.com? :)

New companies have a luxury of picking ANY name, and a name for which domain is not taken. There are lots of practices on name picking.

you are right, it wont work to make any rules about who has which rights for any domain. but i think just making it illegal to make a business about reselling domains (which includes the squatting just for selling them later), the domain market would be much better to a find a real domain matching your business case. i think companies their business case is just to buy and resell domains for higher value, do not give any value to the domain market and just make it worse.

You know that TLDs are not owned by any single government. Even if some countries introduce domain reselling laws, its just enough to have one country to not to have the same law.

It is sometimes frustrating, but we can live with that. As I said before, you just have to improvise a little bit more with naming.

You could say the same about every single object you can purchase though, it's a business and a way for people to make money.

Why is it not illegal to sell diamonds for a unreasonably high price?

i dont think selling diamonds is a good example in this case. they need to be mined an processed to be sold. companies do just automate the buy-process for domains only to resell them for a much higher value.

ticket squatting for example is illegal.

Okay how about bitcoin and all currencies then? people buy them to just up-sell at a higher price. Or stocks, i don't think there is anything wrong with it. Just another way to make money.

And ticket re-selling is a thing, happens in the UK

currencies are in general not a "limited" resource. domains are. also each domain is unique. their use is to register an internet site and not to buy it just to make use of their name which people maybe later will need. i think that is just an abuse of the domain registry

The whole economy works based on "scarcity." Anything is scarce is valuable, like our time

So like gold, like domain names, like food, like workforce, ...

However, I can understand your feeling. I waited for months to be able to register a domain which was taken And it's about 8 months waited for another domain which has taken and should wait another 2 months again, and hope they don't be able to sell that domain

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