Parking pages or any other use that intends to work around the restriction can be deemed illegitimate use.
My personal domain doesn't even have an A record in the DNS, only an MX record because use it for all my email. By your definition that would be an "illegitimate use" and I should lose my domain...
Can we just agree that nobody is posting the full proposed set of rules on HN, and nobody is trying to take away your domain?
Every time this solution to domain squatting is proposed, someone counters with your objection as if it's a huge problem with the idea, but it just isn't. Surely you can imagine a set of rules that shuts down a large number of domain squatters but allows your use case.
And if they are a big company that owns hundreds of thousands of unrelated domains with no apparent email traffic, it would be pretty obvious that it's untrue.
So sure, a lot of small bad actors would get away with it. But it would could potentially take out the biggest bad actors.
And either way, even a bad countermeasure would be better than nothing, as it would show that squatting is not longer tolerated. It would set a precedent for stricter regulation later on, because as it stands right now, ICANN is actively ignoring the problem and happily collecting their 14¢ fees.
As for a better solution, first ban all advertisement of peer-to-peer sales of domain names (so only registrars may offer a domain for sale). That should improve the situation significantly.
Not entirely yet, or it would have already entered the political debate. However, in many ways the proliferation (and success) of alternative TLDs indicates that there is an issue. You shouldn't have to use an Indian Ocean domain because .com is squatted to the wazoo.
We have lived through the land-grab era, sooner or later the redistribution era will come.
> Should everyone be able to get a short dictionary word .com domain?
Considering there are less than a million 4-ascii-letter combinations, obviously not. But there could be more stringent criteria for assignment and revocation, like limits per-company and per-individual, escalating costs in a way that hoarding becomes uneconomical, banning parking (which is absolutely doable, you just need an actual human judge), and so on.
It's the same problem as land. We have more and more people that need it, yet the supply is by definition finite. Hoarding it for yourself not only contributes nothing to the community, it actively prevents others from doing so.
Yup. Still waiting to hear a more nuanced explanation of the supposed “problem” than this.
Yes, this is a terrible idea.
> Surely you can imagine a set of rules that shuts down a large number of domain squatters but allows your use case.
Nope, how do you intend to perform these usage audits?
I'm not saying a fix is or isn't needed, but there are all kinds of things we restrict despite ability to pay. For example, you can't buy a social security number without a person or a physical address without physical land to tie it to.
Your comment doesn't prove your conclusion.
The domain squatting problem is so bad, that even just solving the most egregious cases would be a big improvement.
How is the domain squatting problem so bad? You’ll need to expand on this further.
I’ve been more than happy to buy domains from these squatters, they’re usually willing to accept prices far lower than the value I can extract from said domains.
There are other reasons, but I'm a bit confused why this isn't something you find objectionable.
In theory, a free market should incentivize people to create value. But here's a case where people are literally removing value which was previously available, and getting paid to do it: if there ever was a perverse incentive, this is it.
From reading your comments, it seems like you think that anything that "freedom" = "anything the free market does". This is pretty fundamentally misguided, because if you don't have any rules to prevent people from amassing too much power, you just end up with rules set forth by whoever you've let take power. If you refuse to make rules, you're simply accepting the rules made by someone who doesn't refuse to make rules.
But I seem to have gone off track. Any situation where the consumer gets screwed because a completely third party wants to line their pockets is a situation I don't want to see. Namesquatting, ticket scalping, that thing where a company buys up the whole used market on something and then re-sells it for a premium, etc. are all examples of that and I am yet to hear a good argument for them other than "I have the right to be a capitalist dick with no regard for others", which I do not consider a basic human right.
>but harms the end consumer
It doesn’t though, without the second hand market someone would be using that domain for something silly and you wouldn’t get it anyway.
> Consumer first, companies second, random third parties last
But companies are the primary consumers in the domain name market. Internet end users benefit from squatting because the companies doing something with value are the only ones who end up actually using the good domains.
Please explain why you think this.
Also, what could be more silly than doing nothing with it, except wait for a sufficiently-funded buyer?
Because without the secondary market there’d be no incentive for anyone to give up a domain. At least now the domains actually end up with parties willing to pay a fair price for them.
I'm not saying we should get rid of the secondary market. I'm saying the secondary market should consist of entities who are making a good-faith effort to make use of the domains, not middlemen who actively suck value out of the system while contributing nothing.
Nothing less than the “strawman” of eliminating the secondary market is going to achieve anything at all.
I’ve often benefited from the scalpers by being able to buy last minute tickets. Same goes for domain squatters.
You think squatting is bad? Ok. What if my low-effort personal website was “doctor.com” and someone emailed me an offer of $2M for it, should I be allowed to accept that?
I don’t think there’s a meaningful distinction to be made there.
If we were to apply this, as with any poorly thought-out rule, only legitimate users will be affected. Anyone proposing an "easy" solution to a complex problem should think twice before speaking.
That's not going to work.