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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

Imagine a shopping mall car park where it costs $0.20 a day to park. Except you can't park anywhere near the door, because people turn up at the start of the day, park their cars across three prime spaces, and offer to sell them - for $20.

You'd have to be a big fan of the coase theorem to enjoy paying $20 for a $0.20 parking space, when the only thing the seller has done to add value is get in your way.

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While this is an entertaining hypothetical, I think Coase would say that you should go & offer the shopping mall $0.50 to rent you the spot. And the price might still end up being $20.

Applicability to domains: maybe they should all be auctioned?

Or - if you simply look at it as real estate - they bought that land when the supermarket was being built (and no one else thought it was valuable).

In this space - it's akin much more to having parking spaces near a sporting event or concert. In which case - there's lot of happy people willing to pay $20 for the privilege of parking.

Also - you should know that pricing goods based on "what they cost" isn't the proper way to valuate a property, service, etc. If that was the case, every user past 1,000 in most SAAS apps should just ask for their subscription to be free.

No, the mall bought the land and made the parking spaces. They are merely squatting on parking spaces that other people created. And the reason those parking spaces were created was to enable actual, productive business to take place, not to feed parasites.

Technically - the land was free. You're looking more at a hypothetical that's similar to settling new land.

Also - calm down. There are businesses that are way worse than domainers.

Ah, the "I'm not the biggest scumbag in the world so it's fine" argument.

That might be a reason for you to not do something even worse. But it doesn't make you less of a parasite.

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