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Comment by rtb | Hacker News Reader

No mention of the ethics of this, except in a single dismissive comment?

He is deliberately land-grabbing domain names in the hope that he gets in the way of legitimate users enough that they pay him off? Scummy.

People try to distinguish between domain squatting and "domaining" by saying that the former is "bad faith" but the latter is not, but I don't really see any difference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting

https://www.godaddy.com/garage/what-is-domain-squatting-and-...

I hope that ICANN release enough new TLDs that this problem just goes away by dilution and the "domainers" lose all the money they "invested" in this scummy practice.

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I don't know the guy, but we have plenty of high profile individuals in tech (not all of whom started FB), who have a very different or diminished sense of ethics. I guess it's just shocking to see someone stand up and proudly display their activities.

Some people think that if something isn't illegal then it must be morally good.

I am not sure if that coping mechanism or limited perspective on how life works.

Amazon et al. don't steel money, they legally offshores them to tax havens. Illegal? no. Immoral, yeah I'd say so. But at least they don't publicly gloat about it.

I think one factor is that the guy is an 'honest' trader, and doesn't squat on a domain to fill it with scummy links, bitcoin miners, malware, porn, scams, or impersonating other websites. More a straight 'this domain is for sale'. Morally bad has varying degrees as well, and if this guy didn't scalp the domains, someone else would have.

Not saying the guy is a good guy, but there's worse ones out there.

Sure there are degrees of badness. Doing something less bad than you could have done doesn't make your action laudable.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

"Lawful evil"

Microsoft was someone infamous in the past for taking other peoples' technology and using it without paying for it, and later settling in court for small money.

Amazon very certainly has bad behaviors with respect to allowing counterfeit items and possibly treating labor unfairly.

Google seems to have its share of bad behaviors as well.

Don't forget banking and finance, politicians, and other groups.

But let's face it: the Mother Teresa's of the world don't gain the financial riches or obvious power that narcissistic and sociopathic leaders do.

And at least in finance, not so unrealistically portrayed in The Wolf of Wall Street, some takers will privately mock their marks and fools. Incidentally, that movie missed telling the story of the real wolves. I'm still waiting for the Goldman Sachs/Fed/Government story. Point is, this behavior is OK for some.

I think you could just as easily devise a moral framework where paying more tax than you are absolutely required to is immoral, given the actives that your taxes support (e.g. war).

I don't think what the person in the article is doing is cybersquatting.

If I bought, say, Microsoft.ai and the tried to extort Microsoft to buy it, that's cybersquatting.

If looked at the list of available domains, saw one called "cooldomain.ai" and bought it, and then after that someone starts a company called CoolDomain and wants to buy the domain, then that is fair enough.

Is he providing value or simply extracting value?

A fair point, but I would imagine there are a lot of businesses you could say this about.

Ethics are complicated. System has to be ethical first, then individual actors. You cannot have an unethical system then expect actors to be ethical.

Yup, and capitalism isn't particularly ethical. It's amoral at best.

Agreed. There are much worse things happening right now.

Mostly as a result of capitalism, yes.

No "system" is somehow a separate thing from its "actors". A void wouldn't exist with nothing to put in it. People like this author are the unethical individual actors making the entire system unethical.

When I said system I used as a meaning of ruleset. There are 2 set of actors in this case, one is making unethical rules, another is abusing this unethical rules basically.

I think the argument here is essentially that of the prisoner's dilemma. A system or game can put two rational (or we can say ethical for the purposes of this argument) actors in a position where the most rational/ethical decision isn't the most ideal for all parties.

You can argue that the individual acting in a self-interested way is the problem, or you can argue that the system itself is the problem.

I'd have to agree with the parent comment - it's complicated.

I think by definition acting in a self-interested way is going to benefit you the most, otherwise it wouldn't be called self-interested. The problem is that often, acting in a self-interested way harms others, either directly or indirectly, hence being unethical. That's not the fault of the system, no system can prevent dogged self-interest being the most beneficial for yourself.

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