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Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

Domain squatting is like a disease, but how would you regulate it? Where is the line between just a parked domain that a lot of tech (and non-tech) people reserve for their future projects, and a domain acquired for re-sale? Given a good offer you would probably sell one of the domains you own just as well, wouldn't you?

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Clearly the line would have to be imperfect, but it’s a perfect-is-the-enemy-of-good situation. I’d write the rules as follows: The cost of domains increases steeply as you acquire more, so nobody ends up with hundreds of domains. You have some grace period from the date you buy it to make something “real.” Use it or lose it. Renewals would be painful or even just disallowed if you haven’t built something “real” by the end of the grace period. Defining “real” would be tough, but I might look to the app stores for a model there. Even a conservative line would be an improvement. If it doesn’t point to a server, that’s bad. If it points to a web page that isn’t substantively different from your other pages (or just from other pages at all?), that’s bad. Questionable cases would be resolved by looking at all your domains (if you have two domains in clear use, a third that’s borderline will be judged differently than three hundred borderline domains).

Anyways, the point is that even imperfect rules (that surely have their own issues) would be an improvement. Hell you could even just cap the number of domains someone can own at twenty or something and still have an improvement.

A fairly simple approach for all is to up the price based on contention. Regularly auction out the lease f.ex

Allowing “ownership” of such resources just leads to rent-seeking.

But then you make it easier for corporations and wealthy individuals to "steal" active names from hobbyists. I own <my name>.com and have used it for over a decade to run my personal site, resume and personal services. There's a more publicly known and wealthy individual who shares my name and has expressed interest in it with an offer of like $100, which I declined.

Why should he have more right to it, or my renewal costs go to $100/yr? I could afford that now, since I'm a software engineer, but when I was a broke teenager?

This type of behavior exists for many of the new TLDs and for a lot of the blockchain proposals and is one of my big reasons for avoiding both.

Presumably those willing to pay more have found a more valuable use of the resource. In theory at least. In practice I think you are correct in it being a problem.

I do think the solution to that lies elsewhere though. It’s a more general issue about wealth and power.

Sure, the famous person who shares my name might generate more economic activity from use of the domain name than I will.

Why is that a reason why it would be preferable to reassign it to him? I don't think the domain name system exists to maximise economic activity, nor should it.

I guess it depends on your ideological bend, but the argument would go like so

- market economies optimise allocation of scare resources for maximum utility - domain names are a scarce resource - we want to maximise the utility of domain names

Not saying I’m convinced all of that is true, bto answer the why.

How are trademarks registered? Why not use the same procedure for domain names?

Because this puts an individual with limited resources at a great disadvantage to corporations

Except trademarks are only unique within a specific industry in a specific country.

In the case of Delta Airlines and Delta Faucets for example who would get to have "delta.com"? Then what about all the other countries with independent trademark rules and authorities?

I like the idea, but it would end up being way more complex than it seems.

We could have delta.airlines and delta.faucets; and apple.computer and apple.groceries for example.

You can append the country domain name, e.g. .us or .de, if you want.

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