Should the ICANN do something about domain squatting? | Hacker News Reader

Should the ICANN do something about domain squatting?

13 pointscyborgx716 comments

I'm aware of the possibility of filing UDRP [1], but that option is only available if a specific trademark is being infringed upon. But the problem of domain squatting goes farther than that. An incredible amount of short, descriptive and potentially useful domains are being squatted and rendered unusable to anybody who isn't willing to take the risk of making a substantial investment in the domain name.

Some will probably argue this is a good way to determine the value of those domains, but its actual effect is that, what is probably a majority of useful domain names, are completely unused for any kind of productive or otherwise valuable purpose.

[1] https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/filing-udrp-2013-05-21-en

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At this point, no.

We have a vast number of potential TLDs now.

It doesn't matter if .com domains (by far the most lucrative squatting target) are being supposedly used for something productive or ... "valuable" (who determines what is valuable? a panel of clowns?).

If there was a good time to do something about domain squatting, it was 20-25 years ago, when we had few TLDs choices and the impact would have been far less due to fewer domain owners. Changing the system now would be a belligerent action against a very large number of existing domain owners. Someone has owned a domain for 22 years and they change the rules now - that's entirely unfair. The deal is, they pay the fee, the domain is theirs; then ICANN is going to change the deal? Letting bureaucrats begin arbitrarily changing the rules is about the worst thing you can ever do. Once you let the weasels in to change the rules in a big way, they'll keep doing it and you will not like the inevitable nightmare it creates.

The lack of supposedly useful domain names is not holding back the Web in any regard what-so-ever. If the domain is the big problem, in reality it's your product or service that is the problem. Owning Jump.com instead of JumpApp.com (made up example) is not the problem, it's the shitty product that nobody wants to use.

Domains are like ideas, it's not where the value is at in a service. Most of the value is in the execution of the thing. Tesla was at TeslaMotors.com in the beginning, it wasn't a problem for marketing. It's the same reason Business.com - after decades - has never turned into a $187 billion company like Salesforce.com, or a $42 billion company like Atlassian, despite such a tremendous name.

Why did I mention Jump.com? Microsoft acquired Jump.com in 1999, shut down the service, and then sat on the domain for the better part of two decades (now living as a redirect for Lime):

https://news.microsoft.com/1999/04/26/microsoft-acquires-lea...

Does it matter that Jump.com hasn't been used for anything meaningful in 20 years? Nope. It doesn't matter even in the slightest.

should we fix a problem? "nah it's too much of a hassle and it will anger rich people" ok.....

That's.... completely different to what he said.

They're saying that it could possibly do a lot of unexpected harm. A lot of people have websites they're not doing anything with, but releasing it could actually benefit squatters more than legit people.

Agreed.

Right now, I have about dozen unused names that I bought because I was working on some ideas but got side tracked. Maybe I will finish these projects next year or next decade.

But I don't want some 3rd party deciding if I should lose my domains because I didn't write enough code last month.

Just because there's no public facing service sitting on a domain doesn't mean that domain isn't in use.

I have a domain whose only public facing service is just some picture I took. Am I using that domain? Yes, sure. It hosts all kinds of intranet services -- a few are whitelisted to other external IPs. Could I set up my own DNS on my network for those services and not own a public domain for them? Sure. But then I need to make sure anyone joining the network is first configured to use that DNS, instead of just joining the VPN and now the services all publicly available to you.

As far as Joe-public is concerned, I'm just squatting on that domain and not using it.

A major problem I dislike about the current system is that when a domain expires, the domain registrar has the option to keep the domain name practically free (18 cents/year):

https://www.namecheap.com/legal/domains/icann-fee/

The registrars usually keep expired domain names and put them in an auction. If it's a "good/valuable" domain name, the registrar will keep it locked up indefinitely at a high price since it's only costing them 18 cents/year.

If a domain registrar wants to conduct domain auctions on behalf of its users and take a cut of the selling price, I'd be fine with that: users would still have to pay the annual registration fee while it is being auctioned.

Registrars should not be allowed to hold expired domains longer than 60 days - long enough to make sure the previous owner doesn't want it.

Not saying this would fix all issues, but I do think this one is a major wart that should be fixed.

Domain Squatting has a specific legal definition, so I think very little can be done about that. "using an Internet domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else". Essentially, this is only something you can enforce if you trademark something and someone takes a domain name after you trademarked it.

I think we need a new term for what is going on - "Domain Scalping", wherein speculators buy up countless domains hoping to resell them for hundreds or thousands of dollars. Scalping is a better term because that's exactly what they're doing - buying an address and preventing anyone else from using it unless you pay them.

Let's talk about language and why it matters. Domain Squatting (Cybersquatting) is a very specific thing, which you touch on. It's infringing on someone's trademark in bad faith. This is entirely separate from descriptive domains you mention in your next sentence. To use the Jump.com example, that's not being squatted because it's not being used to infringe on someone's TM.

I think it's impossible and unfair to change the rules now. Some of the largest portfolio holders are big corps. Look at P&G who own Clean.com and just redirect it to Tide.com. Going to have a hard time prying that away.

I know a lot of people feel like people who are holding domains are unfairly profitting, but I'm still waiting for a better system to be described that could pragmatically be implemented as well. I know there is a boogeyman of domain investors at ICANN that a lot of people (who seem very connected to registry interests) use as a way to push for their agenda because domain investor interests tend to align better with consumers at large (eg. price increases, registrant rights, etc).

Finally, you have a bajilarillions of options for domain names at this point. Hundreds of TLDs, I think 63 characters. Just using a-z0-9- we're talking 3,763,572,874,813,444,727,106,020,660,762,327,844,147,969,869,582,735,798,064,027,429,183 combinations in one TLD space. If you can't find an available domain name with that, you're not creative enough to be running a business.

Citing the potential number of free domains isn't fair because random gibberish as a URL is in no way useful. There's a reason why these scalpers aren't buying up GUIDs as domain names - they're buying up permutations and combinations of words because they know those are the 'good' domains people actually want.

And not figuring out a way to make a memorable name in a space that addressable is bullshit. I've been able to find plenty of two word .coms and built companies on them. Or startups have gone with .ly or removed vowels or a number of other creative ways to create brands when there is false scarcity.

I'm not a fan of squatters, but it's a complex problem. I'm not sure we can ban 'squatting' or 'scalping' per se.

What we could do, however, is limit the maximum price a domain can be bought and sold for (say, $100). This would eliminate most incentives.

The meta solution, of course, would be to eliminate the necessity of TLDs altogether.

>The meta solution, of course, would be to eliminate the necessity of TLDs altogether.

Would you care to elaborate on this?

Say we have no TLDs - everyone is now sharing the same address space, every company now has to compete for domains (who gets the most desirable domains e.g. "shop" or "bank"? do bank.com and bank.net have equal claim over it (assuming they're seperate entities) or does one former TLD have precedence for existing domains? who arbitrates disputes?), there's no separation for government or educational services (anyone who wants to offer free services to people with an academic email address can no longer validate on e.g. .edu or .edu.tld addressing, you have to maintain a list of every educational institution), different countries are now competing for domains... it would be chaos.

The other option would be to have a public key thumbprint, similar to Tor, but then you have the problem of remembering the address - so you'd need something like DNS to convert memorable names to thumbprints, and then a means to find out what IP address holds what services and pubkeys...

I agree, it's a difficult problem. I don't have a brilliant alternative.

The number of TLDs should not have been expanded so greatly I think. The decision to do this in 2012/2013 makes enforcement very difficult at best.

Great example is https://aal.army

Is it an official US Army site? I've inquired in the past. No one knows...

one step up the hierarchy, is this an official US Army website: https://armyfuturescommand.com/ ?

Outside of special purpose TLDs/subdomains, the number of TLDs doesn't change that much in that regard IMHO.

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