Get rid of all Top Level Domains
tech.slashdot.org
tech.slashdot.org
For example, under the current rules flowerpot.com can be a mom and pop shop with a national reach. flowerpot.tn.us? Not so much, especially if there is a flowerpot.ny.us. As people starting up, that would kill many of our businesses.
This issue gets even worse outside of national boundaries, especially for those of us who live in small markets but sell to larger ones as a matter of purpose. Take abebooks.com for instance. Abe started as a small, local used book store in Victoria, BC Canada. It is by all accounts a major niche player, having been acquired by amazon. I highly doubt abebooks.bc.ca gets half the American traffic that made it a success.
It doesn't seem like there's a straight and simple solution for TLDs, squatting and the whole domain regulation problem.
Are all the good names taken? Of course, but apply a little creativity, and the problem goes away. We all know what delicious is and that name is a nightmare.
That said, domains need to be regulated by SOMEONE, and ICANN isn't doing a very good job (not that some government bureau would do any better).
What I got from the poster (and what would be cool) is if ICANN or some similar body were bound by some of the principles we've developed over the years from trademark law (required to be using a name to own it, can't just squat, etc.)
The other thing I don't like about ICANN is the appeals process. Can a (US state/federal) judge order a domain transfer, like in a trademark dispute case? At what level? What about international trademark disputes? Perhaps unfairly, I've always been skeptical of "arbitration" or things that look like a legal proceeding but really aren't. And the legal waters of domain disputes have always seemed rather murky to me (ianal).
Isn't abc.com literally worth more than weqporjewroq.net ???
An apartment in times square costs more than a 5 bedroom house in Iowa.
If you buy a domain for $9.95 and sell it back to me for $15,000, there's a word for that: extortion.
Maybe my argument truly is illogical and I'm missing something. I've spent my life gaining wealth by providing tangible value and I hate that people exist who profit hugely for providing none whatsoever. Maybe that bias is at play.
If I buy a domain for $9.95 and then try to sell it to someone for $15,000, but they won't pay, then I'm pretty sure it's not worth $15,000.
The problem is when people/companies whose domains have been squatted, pay the squatters, hence making it a profitable business.
In spite of the above, I believe there should be better regulation mechanisms to let people/companies protect their names/trademarks. Although probably those mechanisms/policies will be exploited in someway too.
Maybe a better analogy is branding. A better brand can charge more simply because of the public perception with no change to the service value provided.
If pepsi completely ceased selling all physical products and put up for sale the right to use the "pepsi" name, you better believe the bidding would be higher for that name than for "pepsa."
"But," you say, "pepsi spent years building the pepsi name." True, but consider this: abc spent years being the first three letters of the alphabet and weqporjeqwroq spent forever being nothing.
As an aside, please don't bring this "holier than thou"
attitude around this forum. It's a leak in your character
and benefits zero readers.Are you going to take my domains away because my paying work takes up too much of my time?
Yes -- just like a trademark.
Are you going to take my domains away because my paying work takes up too much of my time?
If they were important to you, you'd use them -- just like a trademark.
personally i am vehemently opposed to this sort of socialist way of thinking...
Why doesn't that happen?
Because the world's population has a vanishingly small proportion of people to whom hierarchical naming structures matter, or, for that matter, even exist. For some staggeringly overwhelming percentage of the world's internets-using population, there's not even a reason for .com. It just is, and is as immutable and unquestioned as gravity.
Until you can address that, playing musical chairs with DNS hierarchies is just screaming at the wind.
All domains are sold for 1 year at a time. At the end of each year, they are auctioned off to the highest bidder, with the exception of domains that are identical in name to a registered and established trademark, and is a .com (for for profit) or .org (for not-for-profit). The net proceeds from the auction go to the previous holder of the domain. If you hold a domain, and you win the bidding to keep it, that money goes to me in the form of walmart gift cards.
Ok, why do it like this? Domain squatting becomes impossible. Since the domains are re-sold every year in an auction, buying domains becomes like buying stock options. Maybe you can make money on them, but you might lose money too, since there is no assurance that the bidder who wins one of your domains will bid as much as you did the previous year to get it. Also, since domains are bid in an auction, you can't wait until there is interest in some domain and then squeeze someone for everything you can get. If someone wants some domain you own, they bid for it. Unless you or someone else is willing to pay more to keep it, they get it for what they bid for it.
If you have a trademark, you get to renew your domain that is identical in name to that trademark without bidding (you pay some fee, like is the current system). However, you have to acquire the domain somehow. If the car company wants nissan.com, they either have to convince the current owner to sell it to them, or they have to bid on it during it's yearly auction.
Ok, this makes it seem like the current owner of nissan.com is going to get screwed, since he can't pay as much as the car company is willing to bid. However, nissan is likely to be willing to pay lots of money for that domain. Other bidders also know the car company is willing to pay a lot for the domain, and would be willing to buy it and then hold it for a year or privately sell it to the car company. However, nobody will pay more than they think they can get for it later.
This system is purely awesome.
But country domains aren't enough. It's like the difference between the yellow pages and white pages; it helps to organize businesses and groups by purpose, while having a more generic by-location classification system for everything else.
It is also useful for domains to be conspicuous so that they can be automatically recognized as domains (e.g. for linking). There is no doubt what "foobar.com" is, but "foobar" is without context (and arguably, "foobar.cc" is more likely to seem like a source file than a country domain).
Example: http://ewaouacswkaoieljoewa90d
Step 2: Browsers don't emphasize the domain name anymore. No more bar to type domains in directly, you would have to open a modal dialog to type or paste one in. Since the url's aren't memorable anyway, it doesn't matter that you don't see them. If you are concerned about people spoofing your domain, you're already using certs to prevent that anyway.. right?
3. How do people find your site now!? The same way everybody does anyway, Bing. (Ok, I didn't want to say Google because this system of going without domain names shouldn't rely on a single company like google for it to work, although it does. This isn't so bad, since the internet de facto already does rely on google to function, we just have these short, memorable domain names that aren't necessary also.
Having domain names is retarded. What if you had to get a street address that was also the name of your business?? What is the point of it?
Network administrators are people, too. Suppose you had to administer a server; the task would be almost impossible without domain name patterns.
Take a proxy server, for instance. Right now, I can set it up by saying that domains "*.xyz.com" are local to my network, forcing everything else to go through the proxy. If every location were an incomprehensible name (as you suggest), the only way to configure the server would be to list every obfuscated name. It also wouldn't be future-proof; without a pattern, the server couldn't possibly determine how to handle a new machine name, so someone would have to go in and add more obfuscated names to the list.
So to be clear, the idea is just to take away any choice when you buy a domain name. Since people don't use domain names much to navigate around, and tend to use google, this won't change much.
The domain is hidden and ugly, but otherwise works as per usual, perhaps I should have been explicit about that.
Something else I should have been more explicit about: The whole point is to make it impossible to have squatting and lawsuits about domain names. Let a search engine decide what is the best 'flower' site, not who happened to buy flower.com in 1994. The current system inherently favors existing sites over new sites, which is silly.
the problem the author wants to solve is people assigning value to names. not only will his idea not work for his specific goal, but he's not really taking into account a few other variables that also need to be optimized.