But it's very valuable and he wants (needs?) the money for his retirement. Microsoft may not be willing to pay up.
He has no obligation to M$FT or any of their customers.
He has an informal agreement with a informal group of organizations to respect his decision of what records to return in response to DNS requests. No one is obligated to follow that agreement. This form of abuse of that informal agreement should result in the group of organizations unilaterally terminating that agreement.
It’s a legally binding agreement. I guess we should start yanking peoples’ homes because all they have is an “informal agreement” with the seller?
He has some legal agreement with his registrar, and maybe indirectly with ICAAN, but that legal agreement means jack shit to DNS providers, who are the ones that ultimately matter.
For an example of DNS providers already using this fact for the public good, see AdGuard DNS
The fact that a criminal may acquire them and/or use them for nefarious purposes does not mean selling them is a problem.
[1]: https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results.aspx?...
Otherwise, you end up with a world where anyone who comes into possession of a dangerous item is obligated to potentially keep it forever and force all of their descendants to keep it forever.
> O’Connor said he hopes Microsoft Corp. will buy it, but fears they won’t and instead it will get snatched up by someone working with organized cybercriminals or state-funded hacking groups bent on undermining the interests of Western corporations.
They would try to alert companies using a domain they didn't own for communications to their customers that this was a bad idea, and soon after got nastygrams from the company's lawyers saying they'd stolen their intellectual property and wiretapped their communications.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/03/they_to...
The only real difference in the corp.com case is that instead of just one BigCorp, it's one BigCorp that's gotten a bunch of other SmallCorps and BigCorps to all incorrectly list the same address too.
On the same general note, "a business listed my phone number as theirs and refuses to change it" stories are pretty common, and often have the same "the business refuses to change it" quality.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/kansas-couple-su...
It's their house, they can sell it and the associated addresses to whomever they see fit
In his position, I would absolutely capitalize on the domain; consider that selling is one of the more harmless ways that value could easily be extracted from it. Maybe if I were a billionaire I would consider giving it away, but even then I would rather take the money and donate it than leave it in Microsoft's pocket, considering this is 100% their screwup.
Instead they leaned on free benevolence from this guy.
An asking price of $1.7 million is hardly "taking advantage" of a $286 billion company. Microsoft hoist themselves by their own petard here by letting this problem sit for 26 years: that's only about $65,000 per year, which is more than reasonable pay for somebody who's been effectively giving them free IT services that entire time.
And as an aside, your stated market cap for Microsoft is off by more than a trillion dollars.
Yes. However, whoever managed raise 1.7 mil probably did through earning it. Money goes both ways.
Your statement is completely ridiculous. There's no requirement to "work" or provide benefit to society before you can sell something you rightfully and legally purchased.
Everyone investing in the stock market is the first to buy something at a lower price. Do they not own the stock? What work did they do when it increases in price? Do they have to prove to society that they're a good person when they offer to sell the stock?
> "If a decision is made you can't trade in them"
Ok, but it hasn't been made. Ownership can be sold and transferred so that's what's happening.
When you buy a share of a company, it's also just assigned to you. But you still own it.
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2008/10/18/kentucky-vs-141-dom...
They're intangible property (I never said they were tangible), though that distinction doesn't really make a big difference here anyway since the physicality of the property isn't relevant.
Criticism of loose capitalism isn't automatically ridiculous.
>There's no requirement to "work" or provide benefit to society before you can sell something.
Well, obviously some people think that that is a problem with our current system of wealth distribution :)
Some people believe ridiculous things. Doesn't make it any less true, and I've yet to hear of any magic utopia system that's any better than capitalism in reality.
Except in my hypothetical example your response makes you sound like some sort of communist outraged by the profit your neighbor made off their house, when you bought the decidedly unfamous one next to it.
> His is just trying to extort society for that money by threatening to help criminals if we don't give it to him.
Is he? Where's your proof? Perhaps he's just sharing his very novel experience of a property he owns that the world honestly should know about for security reasons. What if this man dies in a few months and we didn't know about this, then his kids sell it to the NSA or Russia, would you rather that?