A Hand Wavy Defense of Domaining | Hacker News Reader

A Hand Wavy Defense of Domaining

floverfelt.org

11 pointsfloverfelt17 comments

>I know HackerNews thinks gail.com is really clever/cool, but imagine if every single domain was like this.

Most domains already are. If it's not one lucky Gail, it's a random sub-sub-brand of a corporate behemoth who got there first, and all the content served from the domain amounts to nothing more than an advertisement flyer (or a 302 to the parent company). In the grand scheme of things, Gail's domain is probably the preferable allocation.

But these conversations are boring. I don't think there's any method for good allocation of the domain space. And anyone who defines commercial activity as a proxy for measuring good use of a domain has already decided the allocation scheme they prefer.

What's the alternative if not based on commercial activity? Lottery?

Not what I’m saying. There’s two separate ideas in that paragraph. 1) allocation strategy and 2) measuring success of an allocation strategy.

Our first-come with modest renewal + transferable + UDRP is a strategy. Complaining that someone ought not to have a certain domain based on their use is based, at least implicitly, on a measurement.

Yeah fair point.

Whenever you register a domain you should be asked what you would sell it for. That would increase the amount of domains available for sale and lower prices. It would also be a good business for domain registrars.

I don't follow. Why would being asked/answering this question result in that?

I think it needs to be tied to a consequence for it to all fit together. The stated price would be effectively a binding offer to sell at any time.

It reminds me of the "24 Hours of Lemons" joke racing series. The rules require participants to send in a car worth less than $500. To enforce this, the operators reserve the right to buy any participating vehicle for $501. If you act in bad faith and under-price your entry, you get it bought out from under you.

The problem is that works well for enforcing an upper bound on price. You need a different model for enforcing a lower bound. Maybe the renewal fees are scaled according to the stated price to provide a reason not to claim everything is worth millions.

I still don't understand how this would result in what the commenter says.

I have domain names that I've been using for 20 years or so. They are not for sale, and will never be for sale. If I'm forced to put a price on them, that price is binding, and I'm not allowed to set it so high that nobody would ever pay it, is that not the same thing as forcing me to relinquish my domain names? Doesn't that eliminate all of the value of a domain name?

I'll pay whatever the "buy it now" price is for your personal email domain. Within a few hours I can get password resets for all your accounts. Bank accounts I wire all your money out, sell off your short Twitter handle, scrape data from your other accounts and sell it off to a broker.

You've just invented fire sales for people.

When you register a domain, you are prompted to put it for sale. You don't have to. As the article points out, a lot of people register domains for optionality. Maybe one day I'll use that for a project. And that optionality isn't worth an infinite amount of money.

Nah I get "domain brokers" reaching out to me sometimes for selling domains that I'm just sitting on and when they ask I usually tell em I'll sell it for $300,000 because I have no intention of selling them.

Why wouldn't everyone answer a million dollars?

How does this account for domain value changing over time, as you depend on it more?

A fairly straightforward mechanism to deal with this is to make the price that you have to pay proportional to your reserve price. It's an established theoretical concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harberger_Tax but afaik there are no notable real-world implementations so far. I'm not deeply familiar with it btw, and not advocating for or against it, just fyi

Because then no one would buy it.

People who don't own $valuable_asset believe that it should be regulated and there should be mechanisms in place so that everyone has some $valuable_asset.

That is not what I’m saying at all though? The article is literally a defense of the existing system which allows those that own valuable assets to keep them and price them accordingly.

The closing paragraph was more to point out that if you do want to encourage development of domains and prevent squatting and overcharging - regulation could be a way to achieve that. I’m not endorsing the view just commenting that that’s a way real estate deals with the problem.

I don't even understand why we need TLDs. Like, I get infrastructurally why they're there, but I don't get why we need them to even exist anymore.

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