> individuals should be able to have and own their own domain names
We should probably remember that no-one "owns" a domain, at least not in the traditional sense of ownership.
We should probably remember that no-one "owns" a domain, at least not in the traditional sense of ownership.
To be clear, i'm not saying it's a good thing. I don't think we should be able to publish anything (read: pedonazi propaganda) and have it uncensorable, but i certainly believe DNS is not the layer where you want to apply regulation/censorship, as it's not hosting any content and disrupting a domain name can result in many other domains (from other, potentially legit users) becoming unavailable. That's why we have legal responsibility for hosts and you contact the host to get content taken down.
I'd be curious what a DNS coop would look like. I was excited about the .org coop being setup due to the sellout scandal, unfortunately the nefarious deal was canceled so the coop was buried alive. It would be great to cut the middlepersons for commercial names, as well as mutualize domains to share free delegations from such as afraid.org, eu.org, or netlib.re is doing.
No, rent is not tax.
Moreover, as was previously mentioned, domain name fees were previously introduced as administrative fees, not rent. It's a very modern invention that domains should be a profitable field.
No, not really, it's just definitionally false.
> A tax is a compulsory financial charge or some other type of levy imposed on a taxpayer (an individual or legal entity) by a governmental organization in order to fund government spending and various public expenditures (regional, local, or national),[2] and tax compliance refers to policy actions and individual behaviour aimed at ensuring that taxpayers are paying the right amount of tax at the right time and securing the correct tax allowances and tax reliefs.[3] The first known taxation took place in Ancient Egypt around 3000–2800 BC.[4] A failure to pay in a timely manner (non-compliance), along with evasion of or resistance to taxation, is punishable by law. Taxes consist of direct or indirect taxes and may be paid in money or as its labour equivalent.
> At least most registries cannot by law/contract take your domain away from you as long as you keep paying your dues
Any contract can be written that way and none of them are tax.
Aren't there situations where it ends up being hard for a landlord to take their appartment away from the tenant?
It may have become that, but was it always that way, though?
I grew up being pretty clear on the distinction between purchasing a book in a bookshop and borrowing a book from the school or public library.
Very good point that proves "ownership" means different things: private property under capitalism is different from a common/public property such as a book from a library. For most of history, land was not "owned" by anyone. See also "enclosure of the commons" for some reading on the topic.
Use-based "ownership" (personal belongings) is not "private property" (a religious belief that prevents people from using a resource that could benefit them such as empty dwellings), and is not "collective property" (shared resource managed by a community), and is not "public domain" (shared abundant resources such as air or water in some regions). All of these approaches can be considered forms of ownership/property, but they vary wildly in principles and applications.
There is no practical difference between personal property and private property. If i have lathe in my workshop that i use just for hobby purposes, then it is personal property. If i started business, put that lathe in that business and use it for work, then it is private property / capital. But in both cases it is the same lathe that someone has to produce, someone has to pay for it, someone has to maintain it and can be bought and sold on open market.
Does that mean that you don’t own the book?
Ownership is not so clear cut.
You still get value from reading the book. You get no value from a pogo-free pogo stick
Impersonation is a simple concept.
In most countries, leased property is often referred to as "owned", yet you have to keep paying over and over to renew that lease.
In that regard, ownership is more like "sizing the window in a large enough shape so that all stakeholders are convinced that it will never be required to put special attention on it again, despite ineluctable changes".
Maybe privileges, responsibilities and liability are less delusional terms for that matter.
Thought experiment: If they were to damage their vehicle (but assuming it's still legal to drive), who gets to decide whether it should - or indeed must - be repaired? Your parents, or someone else?
(Full disclosure: I recently added some scratches to my wife's car after a concrete pillar jumped out in front of me in an underground car park. I don't need to involve the insurance company, I don't need to talk to any bank or finance company, I can simply go to any local independent provider and have the car repaired. Or indeed not, if I decide it's not worth it.)
This is all true for a leased car as well. The only difference is that when you turn the leased car in at the end of the term, you may get charged by the leasing company for any damages that are currently on the car.
Almost, except that:
> The only difference is that when you turn the leased car in at the end of the term [...]
Yes, correct, and exactly what I was alluding to: the significant difference between owning and leasing!
EDIT: Maybe I'm missing something (we've only ever owned vehicles outright, never leased). Q: If you are leasing a car and you have a (let's say fairly serious) crash, are you allowed to have it repaired in the manner of your choice, even at a third-party repair shop, and not even be obliged to inform the leasing company about the accident and/or the repairs?
If you fail to pay your lease then they will reclaim that particular item.
At least in the states they absolutely do. It starts off as a tax lien which is then sold to whoever wants to buy it, so that the private sector handles actually reclaiming the land and re-listing it on the stock market.
https://www.bristol.gov.uk/council-tax/what-happens-if-you-d...
In the UK the process is different, which just shows that they don't have to take your house to reclaim outstanding taxes.
The point is that the government has options, if the property recovery value doesn't cover the missing taxes then I'm sure they will recover through other avenues. If you lease a car and don't pay, they can really only reclaim the car.
The government can take whatever they want in repayment as they are the government.
Also this depends on the state, some US states are set up where the bank owns the title until the borrower pays it off, and others have the borrower on the title from the start but with a lien on the car by the lender in case the borrower doesn't pay. https://realestatelicensewizard.com/title-theory-vs-lien-the...
A vehicle's registration papers show the keeper's name and details but the document states in large letters "This document is not proof of ownership".
[0] https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-registration/new-and-used-vehicle...
one gives you ownership at the start, the second one merely "rents" you the thing
Long-lease ownership is particularly common for apartments, where it is important that the owner of one apartment does not do anything to impair the structural integrity of other apartments or the building as a whole, and there may also be a common area that apartment owners are obliged to maintain. This means that you must impose certain covenants on the apartment owners and traditionally the only way to do that was through leasehold ownership.
Ownership is a very fuzzy concept and it is interesting to think about what are its hallmarks. There is no single correct answer, but I think a lot of lawyers tend to think of ownership as being a right "in rem" (ie, a right in respect of a thing, which is theoretically enforceable against any third party) rather than a right "in personam" (ie, a right against a particular person, which is generally not enforceable against third parties). In that regard, a leasehold is a right in rem whereas, for example, a licence to dwell on a property for a period of time would be a right in personam.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leasehold_estate [2] https://mullinstreacy.ie/freehold-vs-leasehold/ [3] https://www.ft.com/content/b8068d5f-b4b9-4be6-a67e-1866fee68...
Note that private property rights still exist on top of that but this is why the state can decide that e.g. an energy company's interest in your land is more beneficial to the people than yours. You'll still get reimbursed although legally speaking I'm not sure the state would have to do that in order to seize it. The difference is that they couldn't do this for land owned by the Catholic church for example.
As a caveat note that not all land used by the Catholic church in Germany is owned by the Catholic church, this really only applies to historical claims and contracts the state decided to uphold.
Maybe that's a technicality (at first glance it feels like an almost outlandish claim), but in the spirit of enquiry I'll put it like this: can you share a source for that?
FWIW I skimmed [0] and failed to come up with anything that comes close...
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteignung#Wiedervereinigtes_D... (third paragraph):
Since 2009 there have been 1647 procedures initiated in the Bundesrepublik for expropriation of landownership for road construction projects. As of August 2020, 448 of these procedures have been completed. Paragraph 19 of the Federal Funeral Street Act allows expropriations, "insofar as they are necessary for the execution of a determined or approved construction project" and are in accordance with Article 14 of the Basic Law for the benefit of the general public.
About six years ago there was a publication summing up the current state of affairs[1]. I believe we can safely say your comment doesn't reflect it at all.
[0]: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_14.html
[1]: https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/414774/826f537e22a405...
"But these buildings have an even lesser-known sibling in the world of condominiums, known as leasehold condos. In this scenario, condo owners get an actual deed and therefore own their property, even though the building is technically under lease to a larger ownership entity, to which it pays rent."
https://www.brickunderground.com/buy/what-is-a-leasehold-con...
So the total outlay would be around $540. The biggest issue with that is the possibility the registrar ceases existing over that time period.
In the sense of renting != owning
If you were truly buying a domain name, the administrative work would be one-time, indeed one might think the entire overhead of maintaining a registry would be significantly less.
It's a shame we have to pay at all for what is essentially a text entry in a database. I'm not opposed to having commercial domains (.com) or private TLDs paying off infrastructure for all other users, but i believe it's an essential component to a free Internet that anybody can own many names for free. Many projects would have died before birth if not for friendly operators giving away names or a shell account and some storage space on a server.
Economic barriers kill innovation, especially from poorer countries where 10$/y is not cheap, or for people for whom access to banking services is not easy/guaranteed (such as homeless or indebted folks in western countries).
Imo there is a good argument for property tax if you view land as a somewhat public good. After all some wealthy family can and in some cases in the old world literally does own vast stretches of land for centuries. That's basically hereditary aristocracy, probably not the best political system we could come up with. So imposing a tax/rent on land ownership seems reasonable to me.
Anyway, I may be digressing because the point wasn't even if it's good or bad, just that it isn't ownership in the way people generally understand the term. With DNS I find it personally questionable why it's in private hands if we as a society have decided to impose a tax/rent. It used to be public afaik, it's a bit like privatizing the water supply. I think most people would be against it if they know how the internet works. They simply never noticed it even happened.
That "some" might not be the property you failed to pay the tax on (eg it could be your car whereas you failed to pay property taxes on your house). There are usually protections on the property you inhabit, but otherwise they should look to seize whatever is smallest but big enough to cover the amount due.
With domains, you lose the domain that you failed to pay fees on, and no other property will be seized to pay it off.
The difference is in requiring a court system and in what way you are liable (any of your holdings can cover it).
They registered it, NOT created/invented it. It's like saying the Patent-office created your patent, but yeah you can loose the url, like you can loose your patent when you forgot to pay the patent-office.
Renting is just not the right word, because renting means that you never owned it, but someone else.
Like an appartment. Can lease it, or purchase it.
It is impossible for the blockchain to prove anything about anything that originates from outside of that particular blockchain.
This is the reason why wanting to apply blockchain to everything such as land ownership is laughable and shows how little blockchain fanatics understand about the very technology they praise.
Imagine somebody suddenly "owns" my house because they pickpocketed my house keys, without any recurse. Then I really don't own the house, do I.
True, but instead of having to trust a central authority for insertion, updating, removal and constant maintenance of your "ownership", the trust would only be required for insertion. Once you purchased a domain and it's inserted in the blockchain, no one (outside of yourself) should be able to revoke, change or question your ownership of the domain itself.
Honestly it would be a pretty good use case for a blockchain, but it lacks a money incentive for any part involved so it will probably never happen
E: Honest question, comes off as snark a little - would they be able to just take it somehow or would they need to use jailtime and or broken kneecaps to get it off you? Either way the blockchain's concept of ownership seems like it would be broken easily by law and companies with lots of money
Or more likely, in partnership with other big tech with similar concerns, they develop an infrastructure that permits blocking/revoking/overriding specific domains, that most clients would refer to in preference to the blockchain. This would be fairly easy to justify on grounds of security and crime.
Or they just don't support the blockchain stuff in the first place, because the current system mostly works and provides a legal process for disputes which they are content with.
This is a given, it's strictly hypothetical.
> they develop an infrastructure that permits blocking/revoking/overriding specific domains, that most clients would refer to in preference to the blockchain
Luckily we already have something similar to fall back on already, that's a time saver!
There would have to be consensus that the particular blockchain is the source of truth for who owns which domain.
> It is impossible for the blockchain to prove anything about anything that originates from outside of that particular blockchain.
Yes, and this is something that wouldn't be necessary with blockchain-based domain names. It would not need to know about anything that originates from the outside.
> This is the reason why wanting to apply blockchain to everything such as land ownership is laughable and shows how little blockchain fanatics understand about the very technology they praise.
I'm far from a blockchain fanatic and using blockchain for land ownership is obviously laughable to me.
If the money were to be used to secure the network somehow, it would make sense.
If the money just goes to the creators... it was all just a money grab.
However most of the potential token supply (like 50%) was premined/airdropped to ssh keys of Github users with >15 followers.
That's not necessarily fine if the fee is in custom tokens. By burning they are just reducing supply, locking in the amount paid and increasing the value of their huge holding. It's pretty terrible.
Ofc in this case the Devs and the "sponsers" have 10% of it, so yea.
the registration fee does prevent someone from squatting the entire Library of Babel though
What is your suggestion for those of us who can't spare an angel investment of "just" ten dollar a year until we die or sell the domain?
Why is that a problem? Do you even understand how physical property IRL is owned at a legal or philosophical level?
Edit: as I wrote in another comment, I got confused with indentation and assumed that the comment I was replying to was saying that it doesn't make sense to have a recurring fee for domains. I'm sorry. I do agree that a blockchain isn't a good alternative.