At first glance I was happy to see the headline because it means it’ll be more expensive for squatters to profit, but then I do sympathize with people using these domains for legitimate non-commercial purposes.
The conditions of use of the domain state that you will give them _some_ use. "Planning to resell it" it is not considered a valid use. It's a public resource after all.
As an analogy, imagine someone buys all the housing in town, just wanting to re-sell them at a higher price just because they bought them first. It's an obvious case for consumer protection to step in -- otherwise it's just angry mobs. Well, not in some countries.
Get rid of bulk discounts on domains, enforce a fee on bulk purchases.
First 15 domains per tax id are available at regular price. Additional domains have fees that escalate with scale.
The companies using automated systems to scalp 100,000+ domains should disappear over night.
This can attempted as an experiment for a new TLD first.
ie I naively buy a domain for a too high price, and then the registrar revokes the domain? The seller ends up with the money, and I end up with nothing? A smart seller could possibly even snatch back the domain from the registrar?
domain transfer: $49.00
totally unrelated consulting services: $49,951.00Also, most desirable names would not be put to productive use since there'd be no relationship between what you can do with a name and how likely you are to get it, though this is a handwavier point.
State socialism specifically.
Could you expand on that? People tend to use widely different definitions of "communism" so I'm not sure what you mean by that.
1. It is practically impossible to enforce. Maybe exactly the right amount of money changed hands in one transaction, but how do you know there were no other related transactions perhaps via anonymous crypto transfers or entirely off-net (the good 'ol brown envelope full of cash) or by non-monetary exchange (service rendered).
2. It punishes the final buyer, so the scalper in the middle doesn't care. It may put buyers off so reduce the competition and the prices scalpers can command, but it won't stop them completely. For every scalper that decides it isn't worth bothering because profits are down 50% (figure plucked from thin air) there will be a queue of smaller fish more than happy to take the remaining margin.
Look into attempts that have been made to control big-name concert tickets and how they have all failed - the problem is essentially the same here.
Twitter (and Instagram) ToS prohibit selling handles and yet I've been on both sides of those transactions before. You just offer the person a "consulting" contract, part of which is delivering the handle
The simplest solution would be to revoke domains with domain parking pages on them.
If the domain contains an offer to sell the domain, you lose the domain.
That wouldn't solve 100% of the problem, but it would solve 80% of the problem, and that's better than what we have.
If someone can go to the domain and buy the domain, you lose the domain. It doesn't matter what else is there. If doesn't matter if nothing else is there. What matters is that something isn't: The ability to buy the domain.
That means Joe Schmoe can't go to the domain, put in his credit card number and enrich the scalper. Because if he can, they lose the domain.
If they come up with some convoluted scam to get around it, they'll get less business and scare away buyers who perceive it to be the subterfuge that it is, which is good.
The best thing about it is the low cost to honest people not trying to sell domains for money, who shouldn't be affected at all.
It's an offer to sell the domain that causes you to lose it, not where you put it. Putting it on the domain itself just makes it easy to find. But so does putting it on an exchange.
Parked domain pages are less bad than shallow fluff designed to try and improve pagerank.
>If the domain contains an offer to sell the domain, you lose the domain.
That could be used maliciously.
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What about "We are looking for an acquisition/exit"?
TBH, I think it's a solid model -- buying a finite resource like land merely with the intent to deprive others of it and make a profit in the long term is as unethical as it gets. Though completely legal is most places, of course.
Many capitalistic countries also have adverse possession laws, where if someone uses the land for X number of years, it becomes theirs.
But the US has a mentality of "our jurisdiction is infinite", so I'm not surprised they'd do that.
Surely "put to use" doesnt imply profiting? If it does put up banner ads?
I am not saying this is ethical - just hard to make it discernible from ethical use. Atleast with land building something on it costs real money so it is easier to validate the "put to good use" clause! Sigh!
It's a huge "it depends" to be honest.
FWIW, if someone buys a huge amount of land next to the big city, and puts up some ads, I wouldn't consider that giving it "proper use", and if someone needs to build a house, I'd consider that land abandoned and unused -- but I can understand that opinions (and even laws on the subject) will vary greatly around the world.
The big question is: do you care about allowing people to have access to unused land to buy houses, or do you care about a corporation's right to own everything in sight?
(Private equity recently tried to obtain .org and jack up the prices, but the acquisition was blocked by ICANN https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/05/icann-blocks-con...)
Putting it that way is very charitable towards ICANN. They only blocked it after much public outcry and after the CA attorney general started an inquiry [0]. There is no reason to believe that they won't try again after the frog is sufficiently boiled.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/17/icann_california_org_...
You cannot sell the licence to somebody else, however if you sell the business/website etc, the domain transfers with it.
Sure, there will be a black market, however with the threat of having your domain licence revoked for breaking the licence agreement, I'm sure this will act as a sufficient deterrent.
Kind of like an OS licence, I can sell the desktop and the licence stays with the hardware (aka website), but I cannot sell my OS licence separately to somebody else.
Interest: Who defines an interest, community or other?
Personal?
Website? Domains are used for a lot more than WWW on port 80 or 443.
The logistics of setting up as many shell companies and domains which are squatted seems unreasonable. The onus is on the purchaser not to illegally purchase a domain against the licence agreement or the domain is revoked. Both of these would likely massively reduce the financial incentives domain squatters enjoy.
> personal
They can still licence a domain, but when they're done with it, it returns to the pool of available domains for others to purchase.
> Websites
sure, and websites are the major driving force behind domain squatting though.
Maybe I'm explaining this poorly, and I know I haven't solved the worlds problems in a single post but it's fun to theorise, however if I purchase a software licence, I cannot sell that on. If a business purchases a software licence and that business changes ownership, the licence isn't always void.
Don't buy a .io domain for your personal site - stick to the gTLDs or national TLDs that are run by trusted governments (for reference, I have a .ca TLD because I trust the Canadian government to keep the cost roughly competitive with gTLDs). ccTLDs that have been bought by private companies are essentially privatized in a way that gTLDs and government-run ccTLDs are not.
It should not even be possible for companies to buy ccTLDs.
Why should it go to whoever values it the most? And what do you even mean by thet? Whoever is willing to pay the most?
Domains are most useful as a stable human readable name for a server/service. If someone comes along later with a "better" use is not a reason to take the name away since that (or doing so indirectly by increasing the cost past what the owner can/wants to bear) would destroy the main value of domains in the first place.
And who are you to judge that an under construction gif is not a valid use of a domain. Maybe that gif is what the hoster wants to have there. Maybe there is more content that you don't know the path of. Maybe there are other non-HTTP services on that domain.
the big problem is the scarcity of .com domains along with people's insistence on needing the .com because it is "better".
It's like renting a space on a fashionable commercial street — if rent goes up, there's not much point complaining.
IP addresses work fine, like phone nmbers and street addresses.
Non-technical people will likely not recognize four three-digit numbers separated by periods as being an address for a website.
And phone numbers have been largely supplanted by contact lists on phones (I've occasionally forgotten my own number). Looking over my call history, out of the last fifty outgoing calls, six are not in my phone book and all but one of these were dialed directly from search results on the phone.
I was only half joking previously. Why require a solution when you can remove the problem instead?
I highly doubt showing the domain prevents any meaningful amount of phishing attempts.
Please, do elaborate on what other ways of phishing preventions you have in minds.
Wouldn't stop the main issue but it might kick in the rear.
This squatting is the same reason we need a LVT on land to prevent people from squatting on property that could be developed to provide housing.
Actually .cars exists and ford.cars is indeed taken by Ford.
> This squatting is the same reason we need a LVT on land to prevent people from squatting on property that could be developed to provide housing.
Yes because private property all exists to become housing.
Increasing the price even further means that people from poor countries won't be able to afford domains (at least not a .io or .com), and this is bad for the open web, because it means that fan forums move to Reddit or Discord, small businesses move to Facebook and WeChat, and so on, until all content is inside these walled gardens instead of the open web.
I hate this argument. All the small fees priced in "Starbucks coffees" add up quickly and all of a sudden running a personal website to share one's hobby dries up the monthly coffee budget and then some. Then there's the fact that a significant part of the world lives on a single US Starbucks coffee per day.
In the meantime, we got those domains because we use them, and not all of us actually get 2 Starbucks a month. The price going up 30% without any recourse and with a 1 month notice is a sad joke. We cannot seem to trust private interests with the management of public resources.