Comment by wegs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wegs | Hacker News Reader

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Rules:

1) First-come-first-serve for your first handful of domains. Price is nominal (e.g. $1/year).

2) Increasing price with number of domains held. If I hold myname.com, it's $1. If I hold a thousand domain, the last 500 are at $1000/year.

3) Oversight for transfers. If sold, resale value is capped. Historic domains shouldn't be used for spam but perhaps go to archive.org or similar entities.

4) Managed by a government institution or not-for-profit with open meetings, salary caps, public records requests, and other (legally-enforceable) checks-and-balances.

5) Several TLDs, but you can't register in all of them. You can have mybusiness.com or mybusiness.mobi, but not all of the above. If I have the same business name as you (Apple records v. Apple computer), I go to a different TLD.

6) Rules for new TLDs. You can't pull the Coursera.org "We're a not-for-profit" shtick. Old domains grandfathered in.

7) Oversight/governing board with members from the EFF, FSF, OSF, and so on.

> Increasing price with number of domains held. If I hold myname.com, it's $1. If I hold a thousand domain, the last 500 are at $1000/year.

People will just form a thousand LLCs or use straw men.

> Managed by a government institution or not-for-profit with open meetings, salary caps, public records requests, and other (legally-enforceable) checks-and-balances.

I think you're making this too complicated.

Just prohibit them from ever raising the price or changing the terms on an existing registrant. The cost of hosting goes down over time, so the price should never increase. If you started off paying $10/year, it never goes up, the end.

And then create more sensible top-level domains, like when they're industry-specific. Then there is more competition between TLDs and the value of good names stays lower, which discourages squatting because it's less profitable when good names are less scarce.

> People will just form a thousand LLCs or use straw men.

Replace "if I hold" with "if the Beneficial Owner holds" to stop that. Beneficial ownership is not masked by forming LLCs or using intermediaries.

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

How do you enforce that? Now you need to have a regulatory agency whose sole purpose is to investigate people, companies attempting to abuse, workaround the system.

You can't enforce it consistently - as another commenter said, in practice ownership is still masked.

But if the price or terms of ownership of something like domain ownership were legally defined using a reference to beneficial owners, that would make ownership the result of fraud (if terms haven't been complied with) and therefore precarious when such owners are discovered later.

The possibility of losing a valuable domain later due to discovery of that breach of terms would create an incentive against that kind of fraud.

If the terms are just to set a higher price, without requiring beneficial owners to be named, potential owners might be willing to simply pay the higher amount without revealing who they actually are, to ensure they don't face the risk of losing the domain on discovery, and that would achieve the original goal of raising the price.

Private right of action.

If I want morbidus-rex.com, and I see a cybersquatter there, I can file a complaint. I pay $100.

You also need to give appropriate tools to allow private enforcement. If I file a complaint, the cybersquatter is required to release documents showing corporate ownership all the way up the chain. Failure to do so results in automatic loss.

Registrar arbitrates, with first $1000 in costs going to complainer, and remaining going to registrant. Typical case, I show that I'm an individual or similar entity, and it's done. If there is a complex corporate scheme to decipher, the party with the complex corporate scheme covers costs.

And if you hold a thousand domains like jkhzxkljhdsjkl12jkl.com, I don't really care.

That isn't designed to be an anti-sybil measure, and won't work as such.

> Beneficial ownership is not masked by forming LLCs or using intermediaries.

Defining a term does not make it a reality, it would seem: https://www.financierworldwide.com/tackling-beneficial-owner...

> Beneficial ownership is not masked by forming LLCs or using intermediaries.

Well, yeah, in practice it often is masked that way. Sufficient effort can often penetrate the mask, by that doesn't mean it's not effectively masked.

>> Managed by a government institution or not-for-profit with open meetings, salary caps, public records requests, and other (legally-enforceable) checks-and-balances.

>I think you're making this too complicated.

It isn't complicated at all. My internet provider is exactly like this. Unlike US "nonprofits" it is actually nonprofit and every dollar goes to building a better infrastructure.

The hosting required for a Registry is a "bit" more complex than some little crud web app.

No it isn't.

I used to work for the coop that ran .coop ICANT's technical requirements are very stringent.

> People will just form a thousand LLCs or use straw men.

Given the overhead of forming, filing and paying for an LLC, that's probably a good disincentive.

For example in the UK there's an annual £13 filing fee, plus a £100 automatic fine if you miss your tax return by one day. Even returning a 'no tax' return takes about 20 mins of work. It's definitely not scalable to holding thousands of domains.

I could live with that.

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