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Comment by codingjerk | Hacker News Reader

Domain squatting should be illegal

Apparently they not only create the website, but also claim the Google Maps listing using the website and then go on to extort the restaurants for $$$ to add their correct contact details on the listing.

This is worse. They are using them to "steal" direct customers.

Agree, this is deceptive, and highly annoying as consumer too. There must be some consumer protection laws in the EU that can be used against this?

Sadly not, the corrupt ICANN seems out of reach of European regulators.

These are ccTLDs, though, ICANN is out of the picture there, they have no authority after delegation. It's the fault of DENIC, the German ccTLD local operator. DENIC is a German entity, they are very much within reach of regulators.

(That's also the reason why foreign ccTLDs of, eh, semi-stable countries, e.g. .so domains, are risky - should the local operator start to lose it at some point, no-one can help you, neither ICANN nor IANA)

The domain registry isn't even relevant here - the authorities can go directly after Liferando - who are doing business in Germany - no matter what TLD or other medium they use for their fraud.

They could fracture the internet. I expect even the threat would bring ICANN into line.

Judging from their handling of the American-dominated search, email and cloud shenanigans to the EU's detriment already, the EU probably can't even conceive that the infrastructure giants like PCH even need to be threatened yet. They are very slow on the uptake.

Yeah and it feels Germany more than other EU states is dragging behind in everything IT related.

Perhaps the problem isn't as much the lack of political will, but rather lack of competence.

The lack of competence is downstream of a lack of vision. Fix it and the competence will come. Don't fix it and every attempt to imbue competence will fail.

> corrupt ICANN

Could you elaborate?

A recent example is what they first did, and then tried to do, to .org in 2019.

Domain ownership should be progressively taxed. House ownership too for that matter. With houses it's easy to prevent tax evasion by splitting the ownership between multiple entities (because companies shouldn't own housing), but it would be almost impossible with domains...

> Domain ownership should be progressively taxed. House ownership too for that matter. With houses it's easy to prevent tax evasion by splitting the ownership between multiple entities (because companies shouldn't own housing), but it would be almost impossible with domains...

Taxes aren't the answer for everything. And they are already taxed in the EU, it's called VAT.

Emphasis on progressively. Tax is just a placeholder word, we can call it fee if that helps and just burn the money if you don't trust anyone to handle it well. Your first domain is $10/year, your 1000th domain could be $100k/year.

> Emphasis on progressively. Tax is just a placeholder word, we can call it fee if that helps and just burn the money if you don't trust anyone to handle it well. Your first domain is $10/year, your 1000th domain could be $100k/year.

More taxes isn't the solution to every problem, that's reasoning is absurd. Who's going to force every country to apply a tax on domain names? Which government? That whole idea is stupid.

I said as much in my original comment. It's not possible. But it would solve the problem of domain squatting. But it won't, because it's not possible to implement.

Property taxes mean you never own your home: you just rent it from the government.

That's like saying that you never own your car because you have to put fuel in it for it to run, or need to have it registered / tested, or you need a licence to be able to operate it.

If you redefine "own" to mean whatever suits you, yes, you're right.

You "own" the property because people agreed on that people can "own" land. Same people agreed on tax ownership. Like they agreed on other kind of taxes.

There has to be tax. It’s probably better and fairer to tax wealth than to tax income where possible. So yes tax homes more and income less.

Renters end up paying the property tax as well. Sure, the landlord handles the money at some point, but there’s a solid argument that the tax is ultimately paid by the user rather than the owner.

That's true of all taxes. It doesn't mean there shouldn't be any taxes. We should also be able to agree that taxing wealth is preferable to taxing income, at least morally, because hard work should pay a little bit more, and simply owning things should pay a little bit less.

I'm simply arguing that work is taxed too much in comparison to wealth. I am not saying taxes should go up even more in general, necessarily.

The point of a progressive home ownership tax is to make it a better deal for more people to own their own homes.

I'm sorry to be this blunt, but this is a stupid argument. You already "renting" your plot of land from the government. Without government, your home has no protection at all and you own nothing.

You should be able to protect your home yourself, but the government doesn’t let you. It’s simple blackmail.

I have no idea where you live. As a European, I think that what you just said, is batshit insane.

I trust, and I have to trust, that my government acts (mostly) in my interest. If I stop doing that, I'm at war with my own government and I leave the "moral territory" of democracy. Nothing good can come out of that.

You have chosen to put yourself in a position where either you think the government acts in your interest or you have to be at war with your government. The answer lies somewhere in between.

It is not allowed with some domain names such as .DK where you can complain if you see a domain name used in that way.

it is illegal if you have the trademark you can use the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy to get it back

DENIC (who controls .de) has its own (very... German) dispute system: https://www.denic.de/en/service/dispute that they would rather you use. It requires mailing a form to request information, then mailing a form to send a dispute (don't be fooled by the web forms or PDFs, those are just tools to generate the documents you need to print, sign, and send).

Their FAQ lists why you usually don't want to go for UDNDR when you can help it, though: https://www.denic.de/en/faqs/all-faq#code-106

ICANN's procedures are all nice and dandy if all three parties involved are in the USA, but when it comes to international disputes (in this case the Dutch company registering the domains and the German business being impersonated), things can get pretty complex and expensive real fast.

How is it different from real estate which people have been hoarding without using for centuries?

Land hoarding should be illegal too. But it's especially egregious when it comes to domain names, as you're paying fortunes to rent imaginary strings of characters, made scarce for absolutely no reason since we have an infinite supply of them.

We don't have an infinite supply of the abc.com domain, there's just the one. That's the whole point of DNS, to provide unicity across the whole network.

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