Comment by Shinkei | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shinkei | Hacker News Reader

Let's say I run a town with shopping centers. Both are called Main Street Shopping but one is located on Main St and 1st and the other is located at Main St and 120th. When you show up at Main St and 1st, is it a bussling shopping center filled with stores of all kinds. When you GPS Main Street Shopping Center and accidentally arrive at the other location, you just find a parking lot with an empty field with a "coming soon" sign that's been up for 5 years. The site is undeveloped, commercially zoned and represents essentially a burden for the community from both the unrealized tax revenue as well as eye sore and lower local property values. Plus the brand confusion, misdirected out-of-towners, etc.

So take this analogy to the internet, admittedly the 'real' costs may be lower--transmitting a few billion bytes is cheaper than road maintenance, fire and police protection to the unused property--but the societal cost is the same. The property should be fully realized and transfered to someone who will use it. This is the whole 'eminent domain' debate in a nutshell. Just because you own something DOESN'T give you impunity to 'waste' it as you see fit. There is a public interest that is ethically sound. But at its heart, the people who cybersquat are a nuisance. They have no bona fide interest in the domain name and likely acquired it just to 'own' a property that they think they'll be able to flip one day.... it's the same sh*t as the real estate bubble, heck... bubble of ANY KIND. Fact is, I am glad this system of arbitration is in place because if I was Bill Gates and some guy named Joe Smith bought my name.com and didn't have a fan page or other relevant property, but just intended to sell it to me for a 10,000% return on his 'investment,' I would be pretty pissed off. I really don't see the other side of this debate. These are greedy people just speculatively buying stuff without any real interest. It has created all kinds of negative effects like shotgun domain bidding, poaching, pricing bubble, artificial scarcity, ID theft, the 4chan.org issues mentioned in this article.... need I go on?

> Just because you own something DOESN'T give you impunity to 'waste' it as you see fit

Under US law you sure do.

You also have to define "waste". The owners of 4chan.com are obviously holding onto their domain because they see it as a valuable asset. I doubt they'd see this as wasting their property. They're watching it grow in value.

Your argument would virtually have us outlaw anyone from holding onto an asset if it could immediately be used better by somebody else.

As a counter-example: Why should anyone be allowed to horde gold? There's a gold shortage and it would be of much more use in computer manufacturing.

That's obviously insane, and yet it's essentially the same scenario.

I understand that it would be better for the common good if 4chan.com was owned by 4chan.org, but if we're playing the game of Capitalism, then these are the rules.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

That's for currency, am I missing something?

Haha interesting side-case. Well, I will say that it certainly wasn't an example of Capitalism, and I don't condone something as silly as the illegality of owning a specific element like gold.

*hoard

I actually just found out that it's a homophone with horde (I thought they were spelled the same and had different meanings).

>Just because you own something DOESN'T give you impunity to 'waste' it as you see fit. //

Sure it does. IF you own it.

>These are greedy people just speculatively buying stuff without any real interest. //

This is capitalism. The more damaging domain as you suggest is real-estate. Online the problem becomes simply "oh example.com wasn't right, example.org ... oh, ya, there it is". That might be a very minor annoyance for some people for a couple of seconds.

The problem I see with the "they're not creating a mall" argument is that to the logical conclusion that means that if you have a swimming pool and aren't using it as much as the public feel you should that it can be confiscated. Or, say, you have 2 cars - well clearly you can't drive both at once; repossession by the state, et cetera.

Now I've got some pretty communist sensibilities but unless we're going to implement the whole system and treat all properties in this way (I'd really like to use one of the many, many over-priced vacant commercial premises in our city) then I can't see how you can really move on this?

>if you have a swimming pool and aren't using it as much as the public feel you should that it can be confiscated. Or, say, you have 2 cars - well clearly you can't drive both at once; repossession by the state, et cetera

This has nothing to do with what I said. Neither a swimming pool nor a car is a scarce resource. Now if you owned the only bridge to an island and didn't allow people to use it, or charged them extortionary rates... then we can begin the debate.

>Sure it does. IF you own it.

I'll tell you what, go let your house collapse from disrepair, attempt to assert mineral rights in your backyard and then pour raw sewage onto your land.... we'll see if the zoning code enforcement, county lawyers and EPA respectively come knocking or not. Despite your assertion, there is very little that we actually own in the real property market. This is because it is in the public interest to have the many protections that we have.

URLs are not a scare resource. Having a specific (and in this case marketable) one is (and really only if that URL already has market value). I could make the same argument that MY car is a scare resource. Any car is not scare but MINE is.

If I already have a pool where you wanted one, you have to put yours somewhere else. If my car is parked the spot you want at the store, you park somewhere else. If I bought the last car of the type you wanted, you have to buy a different one.

Economically speaking, everything is a scare resource. But more importantly, a unused domain does not cause any damage, as say a derelict house would. I don't find the metaphors compatible.

> This is the whole 'eminent domain' debate in a nutshell.

Not quite--eminent domain is also used to take property from people who ARE using it. And I think that is where that debate gets very thorny, because the compensation is not always worth the costs of uprooting someone from their home.

I agree with you--it's an oversimplification to make my point in this one extreme example, but that's why we have courts to decide the grey areas--hopefully fairly.

A good example of current use of eminent domain is highlighted in this article from HuffPost about border properties on Texas/Mexico land. The gov't is paying a lot of money, but only if you have the sense/resources to hire a lawyer and fight for more.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/landowners-seized-b...

Eminent domain hits the skids when it takes property from someone that is living there and pays them the market price for someone who wants to sell to someone who wants to stay. Those are different prices indeed.

It is especially bad when the market value is depressed to almost nothing by the development to begin with, leaving people doubly shafted

If you want to stay, your 'market price' may as well be infinity.

Alright let me take your example and turn it around. Say someone decides to build a big fancy complex mall on Main St that will not only generate 10's of thousands employment but also attract a good amount of tourists. They finally found the plot of land, bought it and put up a sign called "Coming Soon". Pushing the paperwork, completing the construction would take 5+ years. In the mean time, someone read about this big project and decides to built a mini mart called Main St. Shopping right around the corner and demands the original Mall should be renamed. Now what? Now who is creating a bigger waste?

Things are not always black and white. If Google decides to squat on a domain for a future project, would you still called it squatting? Or them owning Google.io despite not having a business in these tiny islands be considered squatting too?

For the domain analogy, if they have a mini mart then they are actually using the address in a non-squatting way and nobody has to rename. (and an enormous under-construction mall is clearly not squatting either)

A future project will go a good way toward keeping a domain, probably not indefinitely, isn't usually relevant to the squatting case.

TLDs don't actually signify location so getting company.xyz is not squatting.

>In the mean time, someone read about this big project and decides to built a mini mart called Main St. Shopping right around the corner

Are you trying to stengthen my argument? You've just proven that they were doing the very thing I'm arguing is unethical. Now if they incidentally named their shopping plaza this name and they can prove it was coincidence... well then we have an argument.

As for Google.io, they DO have a business there... and all over the internet. If there was an existing business there named Google that say delivered math lessons to homeschoolers, then I would say Google could not legitimately claim them as squatting.

This is a "I know it when I see it" standard. It's usually pretty obvious what is squatting and what is not.

>Are you trying to stengthen my argument? You've just proven that they were doing the very thing I'm arguing is unethical.

No, the point is you are trying to use emotions to determine the "good" guy from the "bad" guy, which is not as black and white as it seems. On the same issue: 4chan.com was created on "12/13/03" where as 4chan.org was created on "2004-02-14". Now you can't say just because 4chan.org is popular, they should be awarded 4chan.com OR that 4chan.org should be transferred to 4chan.com because the name was "copied" from them and is thus "unethical".

>As for Google.io, they DO have a business there... and all over the internet.

No they don't! Having a brand on the internet does not automagically qualify you for legally registered business rights all around the world. Having a universal trademark is hard, time consuming and restricted to local laws.

>This is a "I know it when I see it" standard. It's usually pretty obvious what is squatting and what is not.

Yes this worked out so well which is why our laws are based on vagueness.

>Yes this worked out so well which is why our laws are based on vagueness.

Actually this is a common thing in Law. Many times we can't objectively define something, but 'most' people know it when they see it. Some examples you should look at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prima_facie

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Res_ipsa_loquitur

It is a mark of our intelligence as humans that we can rapidly integrate the available knowledge and render judgement--at least tacitly.

>On the same issue: 4chan.com was created on "12/13/03" where as 4chan.org was created on "2004-02-14". Now you can't say just because 4chan.org is popular, they should be awarded 4chan.com OR that 4chan.org should be transferred to 4chan.com because the name was "copied" from them and is thus "unethical".

You have not observed the full history. 4chan was popular before both dates observed by you, but under the 4chan.net domain (from September 2003). That domain was suspended by the registrar on 2004-02-11, which was the cause of the move to 4chan.org.

I.e. the 4chan.com domain was registered about three months after 4chan.net, at a point where the latter had substantial traffic.

> This is the whole 'eminent domain' debate in a nutshell.

Actually, a lot of the debate about eminent domain is who is on the receiving end of the property. Eminent domain is supposed to be about the taking of private property for public use. E.g., building a school. It gets a lot more dicey when you start taking A's private property and making it B's private property.

I own a domain name that is basically mynamemyindustry.com . It is of zero value to anyone else who doesn't share my name, which isn't too common.

Someone bought myname s myindustry.com and occasionally sends me an email that it's going up for auction soon and enquires if I'm interested. I've just ignored them in the hope they get the point. They have been trying to make it seem like there's lots of other demands, when there's absolutely no reason to buy it other than the kind of similarity to my domain.

It can't even be profitable typosquatting. Nowdays the domain just redirects to a newer domain of mine and has been for a number of years, so in the unlikely event that someone tried to type in my current domain exactly and mispelled it, they still wouldn't end up on that domain. The only reason I keep up the registration is Google's inability to swap the primary domain on Google Apps.

Eminent domain isn't used to avoid waste. Rather, it's used to acquire land that you need for something important.

As far as I understand it, if I'm wasting a bunch of land and refuse to sell it, but there's a million acres next door that you can buy for pennies and your project will work just as well there as it would on my land, there's no case for eminent domain. Go buy that other land and build there.

Eminent domain is for stuff like, we're building a highway from here to there, and the only reasonable route is through there, and that's where your property sits, so we'll take it from you even if you don't want to sell, because this highway will have a big public benefit that outweighs your personal property rights. If the highway can just move half a mile to the left to the land of someone who wants to sell, then you do that instead.

On the internet, all property is adjacent and nothing has to be in a particular spot. The supply of domain names is effectively infinite. I don't see the case for taking one just because the owner is "wasting" it. You don't need that specific domain, just buy the one "next door", which on the internet is all of them.

> The supply of domain names is effectively infinite

If you don't mind going to places like, adjkdhad3fnnkjd.com for all your future services, at which point domains lose their intended use, you might as well just remember and type out the ip number.

The supply of pronounceable, human-readable, reasonably memory domains is also effectively infinite. There are even lots of short ones left available.

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