I’m not opposed to it if needed. This part is the one that convinced me it shouldn’t happen right now,
> $7.85 of your registration or renewal payment goes to Verisign. The actual cost to Verisign to provide the expensive infrastructure and the management of the registry has been estimated at between $2.50 to $2.90 per domain name per year. Other registries have said they can offer the same services for cheaper.
I’m wondering why the ICANN wouldn’t simply go to another company that would provide them the same service at that same rate. Is Verisign innovating somehow?
> I’m wondering why the ICANN wouldn’t simply go to another company
Do also consider the cost of change. I don't know if it's worth it, and it might be worth it just for keeping the 'market' competitive, but this is another factor.
I'm not a fan of government-style lowest-bidder procurement for something as critical as .com. Among other things, I assume this involves operating the .com DNS servers, and it seems like the current operators are probably uniquely positioned to understand what makes that different from operating e.g. .party or .racing, what weird load patterns it sees, maybe even how much to pay the folks who know the hard parts to keep doing this, etc. Obviously it would be better for the world if Verisign were transparent about their operations and it could be moved, but for potentially $5/domain name/year, forcing the change doesn't seem valuable. (If it were $50, sure, it'd be worth thinking about.)
Not that I disagree, but wouldn't that require increasing the price even more so you could pay both companies?
I don't think the argument for "We're paying Verisign too much to be a single point of failure, so let's pay someone else who's never done it less to be a different single point of failure" really holds up.
> No one likes a price increase, but 30% increase to ~$10/year over four years is not making my blood boil.
We're talking about something which has become a central piece of the modern internet largely by being perceived as a well governed non-profit organization.
Unreasonable price-hikes undermines that position and seems like a clear violation of the natural monopoly they have obtained through good will so far.
Maybe the internet just needs to learn a lesson or two, once again, about the problems with centralization.
I kind of want the price to increase, to combat domain squatting. That said, I'd much prefer it if the money went to some charity instead of the ICANN.
Squatting can be easily prevented by reclaiming domain names without refund when the domain names have not been used or used illegitimately for more than a fixed threshold period of time.
Parking pages or any other use that intends to work around the restriction can be deemed illegitimate use.
Why is it such a big problem that you have to pay more than $7 for a single word .com? Is it just that it feels unfair to you for someone to be profiting like this?
I’ve been more than happy to buy domains from these squatters, they’re usually willing to accept prices far lower than the value I can extract from said domains.
Of course ticket scalping is fine, many venues go out of their way to enable it.
I’ve often benefited from the scalpers by being able to buy last minute tickets. Same goes for domain squatters.
You think squatting is bad? Ok. What if my low-effort personal website was “doctor.com” and someone emailed me an offer of $2M for it, should I be allowed to accept that?
I don’t think there’s a meaningful distinction to be made there.
I guess you're technically correct in that the several thousands of $ these domains usually go for is "more than 7$" and in fact, I don't have a problem paying a high price for something valuable to me. I have a problem paying an unpredictable unregulated price to a completely third party just because they "got there first". Buying from a squatter benefits the squatter (a 3rd party) and to some extent the providers (registries, registrars, ICANN), but harms the end consumer. To me, that is the exact opposite of how things should be done. Consumer first, companies second, random third parties last.
Okay so the complaint is essentially “this doesn’t feel fair!”. I guess this really does come down to envy, just as another commenter pointed out.
>but harms the end consumer
It doesn’t though, without the second hand market someone would be using that domain for something silly and you wouldn’t get it anyway.
> Consumer first, companies second, random third parties last
But companies are the primary consumers in the domain name market. Internet end users benefit from squatting because the companies doing something with value are the only ones who end up actually using the good domains.
Because without the secondary market there’d be no incentive for anyone to give up a domain. At least now the domains actually end up with parties willing to pay a fair price for them.
Nobody is proposing we get rid of the secondary market, so you can stop proposing that straw man argument.
I'm not saying we should get rid of the secondary market. I'm saying the secondary market should consist of entities who are making a good-faith effort to make use of the domains, not middlemen who actively suck value out of the system while contributing nothing.
I agree that probably wouldn't work for land, which is why I support a higher tax on unused land/realestate instead, to incentivise owners to keep lowering the prices until it sells, instead of setting the price to something unreasonable and holding it for years and years until people get desperate enough.
But I seem to have gone off track. Any situation where the consumer gets screwed because a completely third party wants to line their pockets is a situation I don't want to see. Namesquatting, ticket scalping, that thing where a company buys up the whole used market on something and then re-sells it for a premium, etc. are all examples of that and I am yet to hear a good argument for them other than "I have the right to be a capitalist dick with no regard for others", which I do not consider a basic human right.
> Is it just that it feels unfair to you for someone to be profiting like this?
There are other reasons, but I'm a bit confused why this isn't something you find objectionable.
In theory, a free market should incentivize people to create value. But here's a case where people are literally removing value which was previously available, and getting paid to do it: if there ever was a perverse incentive, this is it.
From reading your comments, it seems like you think that anything that "freedom" = "anything the free market does". This is pretty fundamentally misguided, because if you don't have any rules to prevent people from amassing too much power, you just end up with rules set forth by whoever you've let take power. If you refuse to make rules, you're simply accepting the rules made by someone who doesn't refuse to make rules.
> Parking pages or any other use that intends to work around the restriction can be deemed illegitimate use.
My personal domain doesn't even have an A record in the DNS, only an MX record because use it for all my email. By your definition that would be an "illegitimate use" and I should lose my domain...
Would it be an undue burden to require people like you to put up a page saying, "This is my personal domain which I use primarily for email."?
Can we just agree that nobody is posting the full proposed set of rules on HN, and nobody is trying to take away your domain?
Every time this solution to domain squatting is proposed, someone counters with your objection as if it's a huge problem with the idea, but it just isn't. Surely you can imagine a set of rules that shuts down a large number of domain squatters but allows your use case.
That doesn’t really explain the implementation. How would you know that two domains are owned by the same person without completely revamping the role of registrars?
How do you write rules that allow "this is my personal domain that I use for email" and not squatting? Can't the squatters just say something along those lines?
If the squatters have to do that, then their squatting has no value to them. The point of squatters is to eventually sell the domain and if all the domains look "in use" (so no parking allowed), the amount of people sending offers will fall.
The "domain squatting" meme is intellectually dishonest and based on envy. People who buy zillions of domains must be allowed if people are allowed to buy as many stamps, boxes of paper, cars, jet skis or houses as they wish. It's called freedom, property rights and being consistent. If you want one of their domains that they registered and paid for before you so badly, inquire if they will sell it; if they choose to or not is their choice, and you are not entitled to it simply because you want it.
Domains are real estate. Periodic land reform / redistribution is a staple of human history, when things become patently unbalanced for society as a whole.
Is domain distribution patently unbalanced for society as a whole? What does that even mean? Should everyone be able to get a short dictionary word .com domain?
> Is domain distribution patently unbalanced for society as a whole?
Not entirely yet, or it would have already entered the political debate. However, in many ways the proliferation (and success) of alternative TLDs indicates that there is an issue. You shouldn't have to use an Indian Ocean domain because .com is squatted to the wazoo.
We have lived through the land-grab era, sooner or later the redistribution era will come.
> Should everyone be able to get a short dictionary word .com domain?
Considering there are less than a million 4-ascii-letter combinations, obviously not. But there could be more stringent criteria for assignment and revocation, like limits per-company and per-individual, escalating costs in a way that hoarding becomes uneconomical, banning parking (which is absolutely doable, you just need an actual human judge), and so on.
The difference between domain names and let's say cars or boxes of paper, as you put it, is so obvious, I didn't think it needed saying. It's that (usable) domains are a unique and finite, whereas all your other examples are neither. You can't just wait for the next batch of domains to come out of the factory and buy them from their manufacturer (new gTLDs were an attempt at that and failed miserably).
It's the same problem as land. We have more and more people that need it, yet the supply is by definition finite. Hoarding it for yourself not only contributes nothing to the community, it actively prevents others from doing so.
You are correct, but our entire economy is setup to reward the exact land hoarding that against which you are arguing. OP is asking why domain name ownership would be treated differently.
What a joke, within days of such rules being announced, a system would emerge to discover which domains might be willing to sell even though they would put up an “in-use” page.
Still much better than the current system. At least users who aren't familiar with it would just see the domain is "taken" and move along, not see a billion ads and a "contact us to buy" button. I've seen people who didn't even realize that was "outside the system" and thought that's how domains are supposed to be sold.
And either way, even a bad countermeasure would be better than nothing, as it would show that squatting is not longer tolerated. It would set a precedent for stricter regulation later on, because as it stands right now, ICANN is actively ignoring the problem and happily collecting their 14¢ fees.
As for a better solution, first ban all advertisement of peer-to-peer sales of domain names (so only registrars may offer a domain for sale). That should improve the situation significantly.
And if they are a big company that owns hundreds of thousands of unrelated domains with no apparent email traffic, it would be pretty obvious that it's untrue.
So sure, a lot of small bad actors would get away with it. But it would could potentially take out the biggest bad actors.
I hate to say it, but "domain squatters" pay for domains like everyone else. You have to take the shit with the sugar in a free society, not shit on everyone's personal liberties with Code of Conducts or "occupation" requirements. There's no perfect policy or "solution" that can fix every moral panic without causing other problems. And not every moral panic needs to be fixed either. That's life, sorry.
The fact that they can pay for it doesn't mean they're entitled to it as a logical matter.
I'm not saying a fix is or isn't needed, but there are all kinds of things we restrict despite ability to pay. For example, you can't buy a social security number without a person or a physical address without physical land to tie it to.
Yep. Busy bodies and control freaks shouldn't be allowed anywhere near power because they will abuse it and subject others to their fascist views. People should be allowed to do whatever they legally please with their domains.. it's their property, so long as they continue "leasing" them.
Domain names are a limited resource and some are more valuable than others. They should be treated more like the way we treat land, where highly valuable land is heavily taxed to incentivize people to actually use it or sell it.
You come across as possibly stuck in a scarcity and/or entitlement mindset too. There are effectively an unlimited supply of domains, and you're perfectly free to pick another one. If you want the right to register as many unregistered domains as you wish, bid on registered ones and generally live in a free society, you must accept that there are some unpreventable problems that come with it: like suicidal idiots with knifes, jerks who cut you off in traffic and "domain squatters." Aren't there bigger things to worry about, rather than worrying about what other people are doing with their property? It's not yours, after all, just because you covet it like Golum.
I'm not sure why you think domains are property. When you "buy" a domain you're really leasing the right to use it for a fixed length of time. And anyway, the system of assigning names is not fixed upon stones sent to us from the heavens. Our goal should be to have a system that is as useful and fair as possible.
How hard do you think it would be for those people to automate setting up basic template websites for all of domains they are hoarding?
If we were to apply this, as with any poorly thought-out rule, only legitimate users will be affected. Anyone proposing an "easy" solution to a complex problem should think twice before speaking.
This is a very myopic view of what domains are used for. Putting up web pages is certainly a huge use-case, but it’s not the only one (email, server naming, iot naming, network infra naming, etc).
The term "domain squatting" is a dishonest pejorative; they're not squatting if they're paying for it, like everyone else. In most countries, people are free to buy houses and then not occupy them. Telling other people what they can or can't do with their property isn't democratic, it's fascist. If you can offer someone enough money to sell you an underutilized domain, that's fine too; if they ignore you, that's their prerogative also. People are free to buy as many properties as they can afford; it's called freedom. Try it sometime. :)
While it's true that in many countries it's legal to buy houses and not occupy them, the locals tend to look unfavorably upon this practice, and some municipalities will charge additional taxes for unoccupied properties.
That's irrelevant. Local control doesn't apply to a global, shared resource. And, that mismatched metaphor describes infringement on individual property rights because you can't have it both ways.
There can be only one internet namespace if it's to operate correctly, and it can't be controlled by corporations or greedy individuals who think they should get things other people had, and paid for, before them.
If you want a freedom, you must give everyone the same freedom, even if they misuse it. That's the definition of a free society. An unfree society digs into peoples lives and makes value judgements about them and tries to control them to their views.
It becomes a "tragedy of the commons" situation unless there is some regulation of this one shared namespace. Even the FCC has "use it or lose it" rules in place for the limited wireless spectrum.
I mean, isn't that what's happening with property in real life? The ones that can afford to do so keep buying it up, and renting it out, and perpetuating the cycle of inequity?
There is no tragedy of the commons here, its the opposite, people create value on previously worthless dns-land. There is no shortage of TLDs, instead an infinite supply, so its not a zero sum game. Of course demand and supply applies
Housing and spectrum are inherently limited so it makes sense to have ‘homesteading’ rules, especially when they are not even rented out
There really isn't an infinite supply though. There are desirable properties of a domain, including memorability (length of domain, typability, common words).
Sure, something like "eebe8X.com" is usable, but it's not very desirable.
No one is arguing that it is illegal (at least at the moment), but it is a really shitty thing to do. As anyone with even a semi-common last name, it is basically impossible to find a TLD using it. Not because people are using them for anything, but because someone decided that they could extort money from people by registering it and just sitting on it until someone is crazy enough to pay the ransom.
Someone else has a personal page with my last name under .com. Squatter or not, I don’t get to use it. I don’t see how squatters make it any different.
Because one person is using it for it's legitimate intended purpose and one person is using it as a speculator (and blocking legitimate use without paying a toll).
Should someone be able to buy all existing insulin and then charge a toll to use it at a price closer to it's value to the consumer (multiples of the current price)?
If I owned “doctor.com” or “lawyer.com” and used that for my unrelated low effort personal website, would that be better for everyone than a domain squatter who’s willing to sell the domain to someone who’s actually going to do something useful with it? I don’t think so.
No the solution is to drop the price by an order of magnitude. Every domain will be squatted, but due to naturally intense competition, they will cost $2. Make squatting unprofitable again.
(There is nothing inherently wrong with squatting)
Isn't it odd that prices are going UP instead of down ,even though they flooded the market with tlds? The issue is obviously their monopoly, and it needs to be broken down. Petitions are petty
Actually what would be even better is if browsers started supporting ENS or some similar competing name system
Handshake[1] is another such similar competing name system that specifically is aimed at taking down ICANN's monopoly - which they've abused time and time again.
There has to be a common namespace, even if it's controlled by a different entity that's transparent, fair and non-profit. Fragmentation of the namespace breaks the internet. Starting a parallel namespace doesn't address the core problem: the privitization/commercialization of names, registrars and the meta-registrar were all extremely bad ideas because publicly-traded companies are selfish, omnicidal and suicidal. All non-country TLDs should be run at actual cost by one entity that is a nonprofit. No more commercial registrars or meta-registrars; per-country registrars can do whatever they want. If people want to auction-off, buy or sell domains in a marketplace, that's their business. Let's not not solve the problem by avoiding it with phony solutions that cause more problems. Petitions won't work either.
Handshake isn’t parallel, but instead, it’s a drop in replacement for ICANN that is controlled by the people. All existing TLDs continue to function as they did prior.
Alternative DNS roots seem like the Internet equivalent of being a sovereign citizen. Sure, there are lots of things wrong with the government that everyone believes to be in power, but simply believing it to not be in power solves none of those problems, neither for yourself nor anyone else. You still need to interact with a world that believes in the government you don't believe in (or worse, believes in their own alternative vision of government).
Domains are the virtual realestate on the web and we are all just tennants and not owners. So there need to regulation for this "market" against domain hoarding and price hikes. Sadly the US government doesn't care.
Since domain names are finite, like real estate, why not charge based on demand? In this scenario, in-demand domain names (mostly based on length) would have higher renewal fees than undesirable ones. Perhaps add an order of magnitude in pricing for each character under 7?
89 comments
[ 192 ms ] story [ 3401 ms ] threadNot that it isn't worth a shot, but I have become highly cynical of the entire organisation.
> $7.85 of your registration or renewal payment goes to Verisign. The actual cost to Verisign to provide the expensive infrastructure and the management of the registry has been estimated at between $2.50 to $2.90 per domain name per year. Other registries have said they can offer the same services for cheaper.
I’m wondering why the ICANN wouldn’t simply go to another company that would provide them the same service at that same rate. Is Verisign innovating somehow?
Do also consider the cost of change. I don't know if it's worth it, and it might be worth it just for keeping the 'market' competitive, but this is another factor.
I'm not a fan of government-style lowest-bidder procurement for something as critical as .com. Among other things, I assume this involves operating the .com DNS servers, and it seems like the current operators are probably uniquely positioned to understand what makes that different from operating e.g. .party or .racing, what weird load patterns it sees, maybe even how much to pay the folks who know the hard parts to keep doing this, etc. Obviously it would be better for the world if Verisign were transparent about their operations and it could be moved, but for potentially $5/domain name/year, forcing the change doesn't seem valuable. (If it were $50, sure, it'd be worth thinking about.)
I don't think the argument for "We're paying Verisign too much to be a single point of failure, so let's pay someone else who's never done it less to be a different single point of failure" really holds up.
We're talking about something which has become a central piece of the modern internet largely by being perceived as a well governed non-profit organization.
Unreasonable price-hikes undermines that position and seems like a clear violation of the natural monopoly they have obtained through good will so far.
Maybe the internet just needs to learn a lesson or two, once again, about the problems with centralization.
Parking pages or any other use that intends to work around the restriction can be deemed illegitimate use.
The domain squatting problem is so bad, that even just solving the most egregious cases would be a big improvement.
How is the domain squatting problem so bad? You’ll need to expand on this further.
[0] https://www.domcomp.com/blog/the-last-coms.html
I’ve been more than happy to buy domains from these squatters, they’re usually willing to accept prices far lower than the value I can extract from said domains.
I’ve often benefited from the scalpers by being able to buy last minute tickets. Same goes for domain squatters.
You think squatting is bad? Ok. What if my low-effort personal website was “doctor.com” and someone emailed me an offer of $2M for it, should I be allowed to accept that?
I don’t think there’s a meaningful distinction to be made there.
>but harms the end consumer
It doesn’t though, without the second hand market someone would be using that domain for something silly and you wouldn’t get it anyway.
> Consumer first, companies second, random third parties last
But companies are the primary consumers in the domain name market. Internet end users benefit from squatting because the companies doing something with value are the only ones who end up actually using the good domains.
Please explain why you think this.
Also, what could be more silly than doing nothing with it, except wait for a sufficiently-funded buyer?
Because without the secondary market there’d be no incentive for anyone to give up a domain. At least now the domains actually end up with parties willing to pay a fair price for them.
I'm not saying we should get rid of the secondary market. I'm saying the secondary market should consist of entities who are making a good-faith effort to make use of the domains, not middlemen who actively suck value out of the system while contributing nothing.
Nothing less than the “strawman” of eliminating the secondary market is going to achieve anything at all.
But I seem to have gone off track. Any situation where the consumer gets screwed because a completely third party wants to line their pockets is a situation I don't want to see. Namesquatting, ticket scalping, that thing where a company buys up the whole used market on something and then re-sells it for a premium, etc. are all examples of that and I am yet to hear a good argument for them other than "I have the right to be a capitalist dick with no regard for others", which I do not consider a basic human right.
There are other reasons, but I'm a bit confused why this isn't something you find objectionable.
In theory, a free market should incentivize people to create value. But here's a case where people are literally removing value which was previously available, and getting paid to do it: if there ever was a perverse incentive, this is it.
From reading your comments, it seems like you think that anything that "freedom" = "anything the free market does". This is pretty fundamentally misguided, because if you don't have any rules to prevent people from amassing too much power, you just end up with rules set forth by whoever you've let take power. If you refuse to make rules, you're simply accepting the rules made by someone who doesn't refuse to make rules.
My personal domain doesn't even have an A record in the DNS, only an MX record because use it for all my email. By your definition that would be an "illegitimate use" and I should lose my domain...
Can we just agree that nobody is posting the full proposed set of rules on HN, and nobody is trying to take away your domain?
Every time this solution to domain squatting is proposed, someone counters with your objection as if it's a huge problem with the idea, but it just isn't. Surely you can imagine a set of rules that shuts down a large number of domain squatters but allows your use case.
Yes, this is a terrible idea.
> Surely you can imagine a set of rules that shuts down a large number of domain squatters but allows your use case.
Nope, how do you intend to perform these usage audits?
Yup. Still waiting to hear a more nuanced explanation of the supposed “problem” than this.
Not entirely yet, or it would have already entered the political debate. However, in many ways the proliferation (and success) of alternative TLDs indicates that there is an issue. You shouldn't have to use an Indian Ocean domain because .com is squatted to the wazoo.
We have lived through the land-grab era, sooner or later the redistribution era will come.
> Should everyone be able to get a short dictionary word .com domain?
Considering there are less than a million 4-ascii-letter combinations, obviously not. But there could be more stringent criteria for assignment and revocation, like limits per-company and per-individual, escalating costs in a way that hoarding becomes uneconomical, banning parking (which is absolutely doable, you just need an actual human judge), and so on.
It's the same problem as land. We have more and more people that need it, yet the supply is by definition finite. Hoarding it for yourself not only contributes nothing to the community, it actively prevents others from doing so.
And either way, even a bad countermeasure would be better than nothing, as it would show that squatting is not longer tolerated. It would set a precedent for stricter regulation later on, because as it stands right now, ICANN is actively ignoring the problem and happily collecting their 14¢ fees.
As for a better solution, first ban all advertisement of peer-to-peer sales of domain names (so only registrars may offer a domain for sale). That should improve the situation significantly.
And if they are a big company that owns hundreds of thousands of unrelated domains with no apparent email traffic, it would be pretty obvious that it's untrue.
So sure, a lot of small bad actors would get away with it. But it would could potentially take out the biggest bad actors.
I'm not saying a fix is or isn't needed, but there are all kinds of things we restrict despite ability to pay. For example, you can't buy a social security number without a person or a physical address without physical land to tie it to.
Your comment doesn't prove your conclusion.
If we were to apply this, as with any poorly thought-out rule, only legitimate users will be affected. Anyone proposing an "easy" solution to a complex problem should think twice before speaking.
That's not going to work.
Squatting domain names is the same deal.
There can be only one internet namespace if it's to operate correctly, and it can't be controlled by corporations or greedy individuals who think they should get things other people had, and paid for, before them.
If you want a freedom, you must give everyone the same freedom, even if they misuse it. That's the definition of a free society. An unfree society digs into peoples lives and makes value judgements about them and tries to control them to their views.
I mean, isn't that what's happening with property in real life? The ones that can afford to do so keep buying it up, and renting it out, and perpetuating the cycle of inequity?
Housing and spectrum are inherently limited so it makes sense to have ‘homesteading’ rules, especially when they are not even rented out
Sure, something like "eebe8X.com" is usable, but it's not very desirable.
Because one person is using it for it's legitimate intended purpose and one person is using it as a speculator (and blocking legitimate use without paying a toll).
Should someone be able to buy all existing insulin and then charge a toll to use it at a price closer to it's value to the consumer (multiples of the current price)?
If I owned “doctor.com” or “lawyer.com” and used that for my unrelated low effort personal website, would that be better for everyone than a domain squatter who’s willing to sell the domain to someone who’s actually going to do something useful with it? I don’t think so.
(There is nothing inherently wrong with squatting)
Actually what would be even better is if browsers started supporting ENS or some similar competing name system
Handshake[1] is another such similar competing name system that specifically is aimed at taking down ICANN's monopoly - which they've abused time and time again.
[1] https://www.handshake.org
If you don’t support centralized authority over the DNS root, you can vote with your computer for a new DNS root controlled by the commons [1].
[1] https://www.handshake.org