Comment by larrys | Hacker News Reader

Comment by larrys | Hacker News Reader

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"thereby earning genuine trust with current and prospective customers"

I don't disagree with that in general but I will raise the issue that you would need to know the percentage of current and future customers that really care about things like this to know the effect that it will have on their business in dollars.

Consumers and business are fickle. Good will has a value but people will drop you in a dime if the next shiny ball comes along with a better product and/or lower pricing. My guess is that the community that cares about this relative to their sales volume is not as significant as your statement suggests.

As an similar example, people on HN regularly hate on godaddy but they are still a giant in the domain business and end users that use them (I deal with those end users since gd is a competitor of ours) don't care about any of the shenanigans. And the "tech guys" that feed business to gd in general seem to be pretty happy with the relationship judging by transfer rates.

I think this will positively affect potential applicants to the company much more than potential customers.

All things being equal, we all want to do good with our time and support organizations that do good.

Funny that you mention domains, because, while there might be some public good in patents, it's much harder to say about domain name squatters. Why have we not put adequate regs in place to eliminate squatters? I liked a particular domain name for a new startup. I approached the domain name owner -- a FB engineer no less -- who had bought the domain, and I offered him a price that would have yielded him 7500 in profit. He turned us down and continues to squat on the domain and do nothing with it. We ended up going with a dotme domain, which isn't ideal.

Now, as a lean startup we probably shouldn't have been looking for an expensive domain name in the first place. But ineffective squatter rules (10K for an arbitration!) are preventing the marketplace from making the most of attractive, catchy domain names, and instead we're settling on domains that do not adequately describe the business.

So let me see if I understand your point. You are saying "they aren't using it so therefore we should be able to use it" and are somehow comparing that to what patent trolls do?

Further you are saying that someone who holds a domain name (or any property) should have to satisfy a requirement of "use" of that property or domain name? And if not they should sell it to you for a price that you find acceptable or maybe just give it to you?

If that is the case then please tell me who will be in charge of determining what "use" of a domain name is?

What do you define as a squatter? Because it's not someone who registers a domain name and just holds it although that is the popular culture interpretation of the word.

By the way there is no such thing as "arbitration" with domain names. There is the filing of a UDRP (which costs much much less and you can file on your own) but to do that you would have to have some basis. I can assure you that if you have just formed a startup you don't meet the requirements for filing a UDRP. It isn't meant to protect people who "just want a particular domain and the seller isn't being reasonable" it's meant to protect those with true intellectual property interests (from what I'm reading in your comment you don't meet this in any way).

The mistake is in thinking that domain names should be property. They're not property, they're address space. Imagine if trademarks worked this way -- right now to get a trademark you have to actually use it (or certify that you intend to use it), you can't just squat on a thousand different names and hope somebody is eventually willing to pay you for one of them.

And the solution should be the same. You can't sell a trademark. What you can do is sell the goodwill it has accrued and transfer the mark along with it. That sounds like the same thing, right? But if you haven't used it there is no goodwill -- in fact, if you stop using a trademark then you eventually lose the rights to it. It shuts down the squatters but not anyone else, which is why we don't have trademark squatters the same as we do domain name squatters.

Define "using" a domain name. I have a couple of domain names where my primary reason for holding them is for email addresses, or an inside joke with friends.

Admittedly, no-one is clamoring for these domain names, let alone offering me $7500 for them for their business, but just because you can't see the use doesn't mean that they're not being used.

Yes, domain name squatters suck, but they're making money, so they'll keep doing it, and there's no way to fairly stop them that doesn't take away my right to hold stupid domain names.

Nobody has to stop you from holding stupid domain names. Hold them all you like. You are using them for something. Nobody said "something" has to be hosting a website. But don't try to sell them without having built any value into them -- you should only be able to profit from the transfer if you're transferring it incident to something of value you've created, like an email service or website with actual users. And yes, that means some of the squatters are going to try to create sham transactions and commit fraud, but at least then you can prosecute it where you can prove it, rather than allowing their useless, irritating, wasteful arbitrage-based businesses to continue lawfully.

Completely agree AM. I would have no problem if the person were using our domain, but they're not. They're squatting because they realize that someone ELSE will want the name. They have accomplished nothing from an innovation point of view, they've only seen some stroke of potential innovation -- which is why I compare it to a patent troll. Patent trolls don't actually innovate, and neither do people who buys what they know will ultimately be a catchy domain.

What's the difference between squatting and building your app? So you're doing to take my domain whilst I'm in startup phase?

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