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This person has built something using the domain. They are not squatting it.
A lot of the value of these domains stems from the popularity of sites they may have been attached to in the past, or search terms that relate to them.
So these people are literally making money off of the back of others’ work whilst providing no benefit themselves, probably not that much even to their advertisers.
Such squatting sites are, at best, an annoyance to web users as well.
hugely value-added activity, and a well-earned increment.
I don't think that old business names should be "retired" and forever banned from use. After a certain amount of time the name should be free for someone to use again, and 10 years of non-use seems reasonable to me. The main concern with reuse is confusing consumers into thinking they are dealing with the old friendster, but I think consumers are savvy enough to realize that an old trademark rising from the dead often has nothing to do with the original, regardless of whether the current trademark holders purchased rights from the original, or claimed abandoned ones, as in this case.
His other business dealings aside, I don't have a problem with how he obtained/revived the friendster domain and trademark.
Lets look at Friendster from a less foggier lense, its an attempt in the right direction. Use it or don't use it.
While I personally wouldn't go as far as "Society profits immensely from their contribution", these types business people do serve an important function in the economy.
Much like traditional middle-men sellers, commodity speculators, insurance providers, and the like, domain name re-sellers take on the risk that no one else are willing to bear at some particular time (that the domain they're "squatting" could be worth nothing in X years). If and when the domains they're "squatting" later on become more valuable, either through their own direct efforts, or by re-selling them to other parties that can make better use of them, then the profits they make from such transactions are justified for the aforementioned risks they bore.
If they didn't do any of this that combination of letters doesn't disappear, it just goes back to being available from the primary registrars.
The squatters are just vacuuming up some of the profit off people that would/could use that combination of letters to actually provide a service.
I don't view middle man parasitic behavior as valuable, and see no market value performed here other than extraction.
Seeing middlemen businesses as "parasitic behavior" is a common misunderstanding of their role in the economy. They make possible commercial transactions between initial producers and ultimate end-consumers, where and/or when such transactions could never have taken place affordably without their presence.
Useful middlemen do serve a role and add value. A parasitic middleman just extracts value without adding any value anything in return.
Except you have no idea if $10-100 charged by registrars should be the actual price of those domains. The only two factors that should determine the price of something is the lowest price the seller is willing to sell it at, and the highest price any single customer is willing to pay. That's it.
If some government policy existed that enforced domain names must be priced below $x, then that functions as an artificial price ceiling, which necessarily results in a misallocation of the resource in question. In this case, that would mean, domains going to people who are less incentivized to put them to the best possible use.
Take the very example of friendster.com: when Mike Carson bought the domain from his park.io customer, friendster.com went from a website that only generated ad revenue to now a new social networking app idea he's developing, which I'm sure even you'd agree is an improvement to its previous use. And that was only possible, because Carson believed the 30k he was being asked to pay in order to acquire ownership of friendster.com was worth it (to him).
If all domain prices were artificially capped to $100 (or whatever other arbitrary threshold) and below, then in all likelihood, you'd see the problem of malicious actors who bulk buy then squat domains become worse, not better. You might counter, why would they do that? Since on the surface, it'd appear that they cannot profit from those domains by re-selling them at a higher price later on. Sure, perhaps not directly (but even this is debatable, because what'll likely happen is you'll just create a black market for it); but maybe they'll just tell the people who want to take the domain off of him that whatever app idea they're building, he wants a x% stake in?
In economics, your intentions don't matter, it's all about the incentives your proposed policies create. And to that end, price caps never work, because they just shift the collateral damage elsewhere, while making the economy worse in net.
And do tell how you distinguish "useful middlemen" from "parasitic middlemen". These are meaningless terms based on your own value judgements. In other words, they're completely useless in practice.
A universally recognized transaction-coordinating mechanism works much better. And guess what? We already have that: price.
an article that spends most of its time talking about the sunshine and roses of purchasing domains from a domain squatter, even if you are a domain squatter, is an article about domain squatting.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Also, I'm not sure about the personal attack and aggression. I only described search engine optimized ad spam pages with strong words. It was OP's decision to build this crap. Nobody, not even he himself argued against that these spam-pages have any value besides making him money.
I'm genuinely surprised that OP seems to not realize his past success story might be nothing to be proud of. I am also genuinely surprised that we, as a society tolerate this kind of behavior, and I actually wanted to have a discussion about this. The second post, I answered his question how I think we should deal with that and unfortunately mobbing is the only way I can think of. Again, I was open for discussion and put in alot of "I'm not sure, this is how it looks from my view" words. In the third post I tried to clarify that it's the seo ad - fueled, and that I consider that similar to littering with profit, which I guess is illegal in most countries.
A day later it still looks to me like I made a few very reasonable arguments. But sadly very little debate has been going on besides the typical low effort partisan comments. On that note, I'd like to point out that the karma system very much encourages these partisan comments, cause unfortunately solid argument are usually received much worse than snarky remarks.
If you'd like a heuristic to assess whether you're doing that or not, I'd say it's the combination of denunciatory language with second-person voicing (i.e. explicitly or implicitly addressing "you").
None of that has to do with making an argument - it's just directing aggression toward the other person. If you'd like to make your argument in a principled, neutral way, that of course is fine.
Maybe I glossed over something
So the spirit of ICANN's philosophy around this is clear: we don't want people buying domains with the intent of withholding them and later profiting by selling them to trademark holders. I would argue that preemptively buying domains with the speculation that people will eventually want them and pay for them is basically a violation against the spirit of their policy, you're just operating in bad faith preemptively against any possible future owner rather than a current specific one.
Disputes around this are notoriously unsuccessful. I say all this context to get to the point that I think the current system would work fine if there were policies that included this style of preemptive squatting, and more of an ability to successfully dispute bad faith actors. Including by looking at: how many other domains does this person own and not meaningfully use, how much is the site a legitimate use versus asking ChatGPT to write 50 articles, and whether the effort or investment put into the site is proportional to a ballpark of the value of a domain name. With exceptions, perhaps, for situations like domains that are also your name.
I'm even fine with the idea that domains go to the highest bidder on fixed terms, like 5-10 years. Or that it will at least require good-faith evaluation after a fixed term. But it's a problem when that money goes to squatters instead of towards something useful, like funding infrastructure. Maybe we can have a non-profit version of Cloudflare.
* lots of jurisdictions have occupancy taxes on vacant real estate
* taxation rules differ depending on the source of income, ex: employment vs. investment
* going concerns are legally treated different than inactive entities
* qualitative usage can define treatment
* lots of internet-focused legislation provides for challenging "what" is being served
You would think this is all in Google's best interest, as the SEO of these low-value domains is a major threat when LLMs are very effective in displacing google searches.
There is nothing inherently wrong with domain squatting. Lol. Blame the system, not the people operating within it.