> So what's the problem, isn't this a legitimate business? On its face, yes - but it is value-destructive as hell. Generally speaking, the vast bulk of economic activity is value-creating.
Ehh.. how is it different from buying land ? Theres a limited ressource and it has a value.. of course some people are going to buy it.
You should be happy the whole concept of "renting" a domain name doesn't exist yet.
Yup. In fact, about a decade ago, I “brought” a domain from a squatter, only to have them refuse to turn over full authority.
Apparently, I was just “leasing” it. There was no contract; just a simple payment.
I started raising a stink. They made some attempts at barratry, I said “bring it on,” so they rather sourly tossed me the keys, and told me to get out.
The idea is that you “lease” a domain to someone, who imbues it with value, and becomes dependent on it, then you raise the price on lease end.
If they had actually spent a few dollars, getting a lawyer to draft a contract, I would have been screwed.
Buying land and then renting it out without improving it is the literal origin of the term rent-seeking, and is generally less well-regarded than running a business that actually produces something.
I don't understand why people want to use existing words for their startup or whatever. Being unique surely strengthens your brand through a lack of confusion, improved name recognition and ease of search.
You don't understand? We have used legible and understandable words for companies through the ages. Making up a new word and hoping people to remember it is much harder than associating it with something they already know - such as "New York Times" or "Facebook". I'm much more confused if I don't understand a name of the company than the one that I understand.
They do not only squat dictionary words: also short words, or rather, short randomly generated letter combinations. So your unique startup name has be become longer the later in the life of the internet you start. No-one wants a huge domain.com no matter how unique and nice it is.
I understand the frustration from having your dreamed-up name taken by domain squatters, however, as we've seen many times, you can succeed with any domain name.
Google succeeded despite not having the search.com domain, Instagram didn't have the photos.com, and Uber did not own the taxi.com nor the ride.com.
If only it were as simple as the absolute best and most directly related word being taken. Almost every phonetically acceptable combination of characters as a .com is taken up to 6 letters long. Google would not be able to hand-register Google.com if it were founded today; they'd have to go aftermarket.
I agree it's terrible and as the things now are, only reasonable solutions I see is either increasing the amount of the "good" domains or just making the renewal price somehow cumulative the more domains you own. But I don't think there is any central authority or entity that could enforce that effectively hence things are what they are.
Sure, but it makes it harder and you could still pursue them for tax avoidance which is a risk a larger company can't really take. There is certainly bureaucracy involved but in theory it could be possible, it is just who could even enforce such law.
The answer was all the shiny new TLD's we got. Well, big companies got because they cost 100K each (iirc). But in principle we all got.
And to some extent that worked - if "yourfavouritename.com" is taken (it is) then you can have "yourfavouritename.tech" or whatever.
But there's this superstition about ".com" names in the business, that they're just more authoritative and people won't trust a ".tech" domain. And it does leave you open to someone else buying the ".com" later and giving you a problem.
But at least you can get a domain and launch the business, which is something.
Probably one of the reasons that startups tend to have nonsense made up words for names? Having said that really good names are probably taken by legitimate businesses.
Definitely why there are so many .io or .co domains out there. Speaking personally.
I would use my home country which I feel makes sense but it gets localized out of international search results whilst .co and .io have gotten a free pass for some reason.
> Probably one of the reasons that startups tend to have nonsense made up words for names?
Yes
> Having said that really good names are probably taken by legitimate businesses.
And No. Very no. There are lots of really good names out there that are being sat on, doing nothing. Anyone who's started a business can tell you of the infuriating days or weeks spent coming up with good names and then finding they're all being squatted, before settling for some nonsense made up name because "ffs I don't care any more, just hammer something into the keyboard that's available and we'll have that and get on with it"
> can tell you of the infuriating days or weeks spent coming up with good names
On the other hand it is quite fun to try to think about an original name that nobody else has thought of before. So yeah your days or weeks are in competition with people's years of doing this as a hobby.
Sure, but are they actually setting up a website for that domain, or is "thinking about an original name" the extent of their involvement?
Not that I'm knocking that, if that's what floats your boat. It's just exasperating when you're actually trying to do something else and this gets in the way.
http://www.hipsterbusiness.name/ is (I think mostly) a joke, but it implements the correct-horse-battery-staple solution to domain naming. The N one-word domains are long since taken, but there are N^2 two-word domains. They may not all make sense, but it presents a lot of opportunities, and they're "memorable" in that correct-horse-battery-staple way.
I was a little struck that my first attempt came up with Otter And Frame -- OtterFrame.com is taken, but OtterAndFrame.com isn't. I'd be curious to know what fraction of that N^2 space is taken already. (It doubles to 2N^2 if you add the word "And" between them, though I guess the version without will always be more desirable.)
OtterAndFrame.com is at least as good a name as Akiflow.com or Biyaki.com (two names dredged from YCombinator's summer class).
I can relate to this, I was recently looking to get a couple of domains for some ideas I wanted to pursue, but every name idea I came up with - at least the ones I really wanted - were taken and had a "this domain is for sale" or similar message on them. On multiple tlds.
I ended up just searching for available domains that kind of matched what I wanted to convey to use a product name.
It is frustrating, but I don't think there is really an answer.
- Limit the number of domains per person/business to say, 10, unless you can show that you are actively using them?
- Have a 'use it or lose it' type system?
Those are not great ideas, and practically are not really enforceable anyway.
I dunno, it's annoying but I guess it's up there with ticket scalpers etc
That has been problematic, if I recall correctly. I believe that was the reason Cybercity, an ISP, was asked to hand over large number of domains. Others claimed that Cybercity wasn't using those domains, because there where no websites. The domains had been registered solely to be used as domains for their customers email account, so their where in use.
I think the dropped the domains when their stopped providing customers with email accounts.
Depending on the court, I can see a large number of cases where someone is forced to hand over a domain, because they aren't using it for a website.
then the problem is the court not understanding the technology. If you are using the domain just for email then sure, that's a valid use case and you can claim the domain is being used
I don't think so. It hasn't happened in Denmark at least.
Besides, just having a "domain squatting is illegal" rule would mean domain resale websites won't be possible as they will be a clear sign of bad intend.
It may not remove all the squatting, but if you can't easily set up a resale shop, it'll be a lot less economically attractive.
Well, if a court rules that having an email set up on the domain is valid, how would you know whether that given case was legit or not? Who can really speak to the motivations of doing it?
I think .dk and .com probably diverge in this case because (a) a top .com is literally a million-dollar lottery ticket of incentive, and (b) .com is so much bigger that it would probably allow for utility services that set up trivial email services for a minimal fee, across your whole portfolio of domains. I'm not sure .dk can sustain the same kind of domainer industry tooling.
Plus, there's the problem of jurisdiction. For .dk it's pretty clear: cases are heard and decided in Denmark. And, since it's mostly Danish entities using .dk, that doesn't cause much unfairness. If .com is arbitrated in the US, seems like US corps are likely to take advantage of that and cause a lot of problems for smaller entities around the world.
I wish the .dk solution could be applied to .com. I hate how .com is right now. But I'm not sure it works at global scale.
I did not, firstly because I have no way to verify that the email I'm contacting is not some sort of scam to get my info, and secondly I don't have time to sit and
have a back and forth email conversation to maybe potentially buy the domain for more than the current value. (Yes, value depends on what someone is willing to pay etc)
Whilst it was frustrating they were not available, it wasn't the end of the world to me.
The people owning these domains most probably have them listed on a domain market place so you might not have to deal with the person directly and if it's listed as instant buy there is no bargaining or whatnot. You just buy it and the platform handles the transfer of ownership.
I've had a 3 letter .net domain for 23 years, and in all that time there has never been more than a small website on it with a handful of extremely low traffic pages that no one would care about [1].
From a web point of view, it appears to be an almost dead domain, something that I played with a bit at the end of the last century and have largely ignored since then.
But domains are also used for email, and my primary email has been on that domain for all that time. There are several hundred companies that have that email address on file as a contact address and/or as an account identifier, and all my friends and acquaintances use it to correspond with me.
How would I prove I was using it if someone tried to get it transferred to them on grounds of non-use? To prove significant use of it for email seems hard to do without having to share a lot of personal and private information.
[1] Oddly, there is one page on it that for most of that time was the #1 hit on Google if you searched for the thing that page is about, although recently it has slipped a few spots, and is still #1 on Bing and DDG and Yahoo. The page is just plain text with some tables and some bolded headings, has never been publicized, has no SEO, and according to Google only has one outside site linking to it (in a comment I made seven years ago in a forum), and there are numerous other pages out there that cover the same thing I did and usually better. I am completely baffled as to why mine ranks so high.
While I dislike domain squatting as much as the next tech person that has been watching it for a quarter of a century, the author goes out of their way to evade the elephant in the room regarding their setup.
They say:
> So what's the problem, isn't this a legitimate business? On its face, yes - but it is value-destructive as hell. [reference to supposedly legitimate businesses] The world is better for these companies' existence. ... Domain-Parking is nothing like that. If it wasn't for domain parkers, you'd still get your domain - just for 10$, rather than 10.000$.
You wouldn't get your domain for $10, because someone else would get your domain for $10 instead. It is that simple, they'd beat you to it. How is that any more fair of a determining factor than raising the cost/price? It's not, it's a purely subjective opinion that one determing factor is better than the other, or more fair than the other. It's an argument that having capital to allocate to purchase a domain for eg $10,000 is unfair to everyone else without that much capital. It's false.
By that basis, it's unfair for a business to have $500,000 to buy a nice plot of land in a town square to open a new retail shop. Golly gee, what about all the other people that don't have that money. This is a perpetually reducing argument that goes all the way down to the last person with $0 (the person who gets to own the universe because they have nothing, and everything is unfair toward them accordingly; which then breaks the system morally, which lets you know it's a fraud, it's self-contradictory). It means having enough money to purchase a McDonald's franchise - which is like a magic ticket to a forever nice return on your money (at least historically) - is unfair to everyone else that can't (which is 99% of the world's population). It applies to all routine economic activity, all business function (without exception), and is similarly absurd when applied.
This business over here can't afford new $10k equipment. It's unfair, the competition can afford it. That equipment therefore should be $1 and it's first come first serve. The company making that equipment must be forced to supply it at a loss forever. All equipment derives from natural resources somewhere (which derives from land ownership/control), it's unfair some people can access those natural resources and others can't.
This business over here can't afford to buy a new building. Their competitor can afford a nice new building that draws more customers. It's unfair. Some building owner should be forced to turn over a nice building for pennies on the dollar. Who are these people that get to decide that natural resources like land or building materials are worth something? It should all be $0.01, first come first serve.
Norway and Canada should have to give me their oil resources, I want to screw around with a million barrels of oil per day. I have an idea I want to put into action. Who are they to control natural resources? It should be first come first serve, $0.0001 per barrel of oil. Because I say that's fair. Why should someone with a lot of money be able to buy a million barrels of oil and I can't?
Everyone that owns a house or yard with more space than deemed fair (who decides? the authoritarians of course), must be forced to turn that space over to someone else that wants to use it (for any purpose). You have no choice in who gets to move into your (whoops, it's not your space really) unused space, it's first come first serve. Welcome to hell.
It's unfair that someone else had more time than I did to watch for domain names to buy for $10 in the new system. The counters never stop, that's because the author's alternative will always fail and will never produce the supposed fairness.
Any application of this author's premise would implode into absolute disaster economically. Only authoritarian technocrats woul...
We might just regulate how a TLD works so that there is no domain parking industry and problem is then solved. The party who runs the TLD is surely not going to sell them at a loss since they aren't getting those 5k or 100k amounts even today. They just get 10$ or 100$ per yer or whatever.
If someone doesn't use a domain anymore and someone else has a claim on it, then it just gets moved to a new owner.
Example:
In Finland this is how the .fi domain works, you can get yourcompany.fi if you own yourcompany Oy (Ltd) and someone is just hoarding it. There's a process for this. It works.
Hah, that's exactly what he complained about (the part I quoted in my other comment) - even if it doesn't work, there's no reason to claim that "it works" and keep insisting on central planning.
What if there's no YourCompany Oy in Finland?
Why should someone need to go through the bureaucratic procedure of registering a company in order to get yourcompany.fi? Or why should the domain be wasted?
What if there's YourCompany Pets and YourCompany Swimming Pools, who gets YourCompany? Or two John's Bakery Oy? More bureaucracy, more rules, more lawsuits, more unused domains, higher taxes, etc.
Excellent comment. Of course it got downvoted becuase the economic truth doesn't work for those who are ideologically inclined to negate it.
In past 20 years I squatted on few domains but never sold any of them (I just thought I'd first buy them and later see what to do with them, if anything).
But most commenters here are upset about people like me even though I didn't make any profit - in fact I spent hundreds of dollars to hang onto them for years, subsidizing cost of running a registrar, and everyone benefited from it.
> Only authoritarian technocrats would propose it could work and be managed, and they'd come up with all sorts of absurd regulations and systems that had to be followed & implemented perfectly in order for it to even function badly.
They know that, but they still want it. Because all you need it to make work is to improve algorithms. Nothing has been learned by these folks since Hayek wrote "The Intellectuals and Socialism".
One way to rephrase arguments in favor of squatters is: if they didn't exist, domain name you like would be cheaper and therefore used (not for domain resale purpose) by someone who needs it less than you do. They should be grateful that the domain name you want is $5,000 and not $9.99. :-)
But I am not seeing from the author an argument that his start-up idea is better then next person's who wants it too. Let's say you got it for $10 but then you sit on it and do little progress. But someone else has a better execution or idea than yours. How is it then fair or better overall? I think It's a perfect way to vote for your business idea: put up more money if you believe if it's worth it. If you were blocked to execute your idea because someone is squatting, then I'll agree but as others pointed out, you're not blocked. You might lose a little money if you really want that domain. Then again you should be able to make up if it's really good.
Fortunately domains don't really matter that much anymore. Address bars in pretty much all browsers are now search bars, and if you type a product name it will typically be the first result (as long as there aren't multiple products with the same name).
Sure, programmers like sweet and short domains, but customers don't care if your domain is widget.com, widget.net, widgetapp.com or companyname.xy/widget
Spending 5000 on a domain name is probably not worth it for the vast majority of startups.
There are some exceptions. If you are an email provider and your customers will use the domain in their email address it probably is a good idea to get a good domain.
But I really don't think that domain matters as much as founders think they do.
Yes, I believe this is the case. One thing are conventions. If domain name ZZZ is taken, you can use getZZZ, ZZZapp, and so on. It does not matter much, as almost nobody types www address. Plus there is huge amount of top level domains, so even if ZZZ.com is taken, there are 150 alternatives which sometimes are better than original .com.
Are we now at a stage that .com is no longer considers more 'trustworthy' than say .xyz ? I'm not so sure, which is why many people still hanker after the .com in the first instance.
That said, as a non-US person I'm not personally on-board with .com-for-everything, but I understand that Joe Public in the USA thinks differently.
> Are we now at a stage that .com is no longer considers more 'trustworthy' than say .xyz?
Generally, I'm not sure. But I (and I think the majority of the people I know) were beyond that stage a long time ago or never cared/understood to start with. As you mention, not being in the US might bias my opinions and the opinions I'm exposed to on the matter, so YMMV.
I'm not sure if it confers any SEO advantage, but I don't particularly care about that (the things I have hosted are only useful to people who already know about them, so SEO isn't a concern).
> trustworthy
That might be the wrong concept for the discussion though. Another key factor is whether somthine.com is more memorable or guessable than something.co.uk, something.site, something.link, ...
It's not - and I doubt it ever was - about SEO in the technical sense (the hypothesis being that .com has some kind of innate SE ranking benefit compared to other TLDs).
To me it's far more that if you have a company called, say, 'YCombinator' then a huge number of people will simply assume you are to be found at YCombinator.com, simply because their experience is that all the other well-known brands live at .com, so why wouldn't you?
Why would you choose to fight that if you didn't have to?
Sometimes it's about signalling strength, or dealing with a market that's not just consumers under 30. In those cases, I think the customers do 'care', or at least get some conveyed vibe from it.
Getting sales from big corps, for example, is often partly about your perceived current state of established-ness.
You're right, but consider the hypothetical that instagram.com was squatted and they instead went with instagramapp.com or whatever. Today instagram.com would be very valuable for advertising and/or scamming purposes. Instagram would probably consider buying it for $500k, a drop in the bucket for them, just to get rid of the problem.
In Sweden we've "solved" this problem by a rule that says that if you incorporated the business XYZ then you're entitled to the domain XYZ.se. Incorporating requires $2500 in capital and you can't incorporate as "pizza" or any other common word, so squatting is not a problem there.
> if you incorporated the business XYZ then you're entitled to the domain XYZ.se
What happens if the domain is already registered? I think I've seen .se used as the ending of english words like say impul.se (first try, seems to be unused or squatted).
Domain parking is somewhat similar to buying 100 tickets for the <hot-artist-of-the-day> concert just to resell them at double the price on the black market.
The solution, I think, is to raise the price. 20x the cost of a Dotcom, most people only need one or two and should be able to afford it, you’ve just increased the cost of squatting hugely.
That being said, I’d be scared about domain names raising the price 200x - all providers could literally hold domain renters hostage here, so it’s a double edged sword I guess..
Raising the price would solve the issue overnight. It doesn't need to be a uniform price increase, either - ICANN can guess which domain names are likely to be pricey based on length, dictionary words, or other heuristics. It can't be that hard. There's no reason why every domain name needs to cost the same amount per month. Domain squatters only do this because it's economically viable for them to register 10K domain names and just extort anyone who wants to do anything productive with them.
Also, ICANN should directly auction expiring domain names themselves. It's infuriating that when a domain name expires, whoever has the fastest script pays $10 and then immediately resells it for $100K to whoever actually needed it.
That would just increase the possible gains as well - while also making all the squatters with their existing portfolio all the much richer. Also makes domains harder to reach for common folks. Wins for squatters, loss for society, yay.
Would it? Squatters charge you the maximum they can, increasing the cost reduces the profitability, if you 10x the price of domains, you will see less squatters as a result.
I’ll also point out they trade in volume - they may run 9 romaine at a loss to successfully sell one, putting all in profit - if you increase the cost to them by a small amount, it decreases their profit substantially. Most Dotcom owners can probably afford $200/year for a domain.
Even in the developing world, double the current renewal price would be nothing for a company who owns one or two domains. Do you think the literal poorest people in the world are creating startups or even websites? The demand you're conjecturing just doesn't exist.
GP said "developing or poorer", not "literal poorest". You're creating a strawman to shoot it down.
I can only speak for myself, but if prices doubled overnight, owning a domain would not be feasible for me because I don't conduct business or earn income on the domain I own, and the only reason I went for this fairly obscure TLD is because it was the cheapest decent one I could afford. Some of us aren't "businesses", and unless you think we don't deserve a corner of the internet, you'll find there's tons of us.
Well talk about strawmanning, who said you couldn’t have a corner of the internet? There are plenty of TLDs that aren’t subject to the issues .com has.
Sorry but yes, if you’re not making enough money from your .com to pay (say) $50/year, I think it’s perfectly fine that you can’t use it for your random hobby project. The lost value that comes from .com being messed up is so much greater.
I thought your first two sentences were independent of each other and that you were talking about all TLDs. Sorry, probably a language barrier thing.
.com is very clearly commercial so what I had to say isn't applicable to it (which is why I mentioned I use a relatively obscure TLD like .site or .xyz).
Of course they do? Not everyone builds a business for the whole world or expects a SV growth with pumped in money. 13 has value at plenty of places where people are able to build stuff.
The poorest people in the world are struggling to survive. They barely start start businesses at all, let alone those that need global reach via a .com. The people in developing countries who do need such things and do have such businesses can easily afford $50/y.
I don't agree with it what so ever because I've been at the same situation. Businesses, especially online, are not only made by some Silicon Valley of the local types. I'm sorry but everything you write comes from a place of privilege unless you think dot com should be reserved only for the richer parts of the world.
>Thanks to Uber you now can seamlessly hail a ride to wherever you are. Thanks to AirBnB you now have a great alternative to hotels. Thanks to Amazon you can have every item on the planet cheaply shipped to your doorstep. The world is better for these companies' existence.
These services would have existed regardless, opersting under other names hd those domain names not been available for purchase in the start up phase. That’s by supply and demand.
The problem is that it's a property like everything else. Should we also prosecute who whold on to buildings, cars, huge strips of land without using it? Sure, but now you see the futility of how this would be possible. Anybody can generate a valid looking fake website for "proof of usage" in no time.
This is solved in real life by taxes which make it uneconomical to sit on high value land while doing nothing with it. If it's not high value then who cares, feel free to squat. The problem is ICANN just charges $10/month per .com no matter the value, so it makes it economically viable for domain squatters to buy everything and just extort anyone who comes looking to do something productive. Just raise the yearly price on .coms, or raise the price proportional to how popular ICANN thinks the name will be, or ideally both. If it was $1000+/year for a high-value domain name, and $100/year for a reasonable length .com, squatters would vacate real fast.
The problem with proportional pricing is, who decides the value? If your website becomes successful, and the word "facebook" becomes more valuable, what's to stop ICANN simply increasing the charge? Then it just becomes extortion from ICANN.
The new-generation TLD owners already do this with "Premium" names. Google does it with .app. A price is arbitrarily decided for your first year. Who knows what price it might be in a few years' time.
buying a property to just hold in in hope somebody buys it in couple years for 20x current value just would not work, there are taxes and other costs and it just does not make sense.
Not that I don't agree with the article - who hasn't struggled with this problem? But this problem is as old as the internet itself and part of the culture at this point.
In fact, I'm sure you could liken the rush to squat domain names to many present-day internet gold rush crazes. People didn't know for sure that they would be valuable and scarce, don't forget.
So yeah - obviously it being hard to get domains you want is annoying, but that seems quite a simplistic and outdated rant for this place.
Oddly I have the opposite problem, I keep having good idea for names and registering them, then I end up doing nothing with them. I think I need to attend domain names anonymous
When somebody eventually wants one of your domain names, do you sell it for roughly the total of your holding cost, thus making the author of TFA happy, or do you sell it for as much as you can get?
The analogy isn't great, because you having car A ( with its advantages, like easy to remember, good SEO, good pun on the company name, etc.) doesn't preclude anyone from having the exact same car bought elsewhere. Domains are unique, cars rarely are.
But from a practical standpoint you will be served equally well or better by a different model of car. Domains do make a difference for businesses though. It's important for them to be relevant, memorable, and easy to type.
Just because cars are fungible to you, doesn’t mean they are to other people.
The same applies to domains. Some people don’t care if they need to add an extra word, or pick a different extension. To other people it matters a lot.
There are a lot of domains that are easy to type and memorable, and being “relevant” will come with name recognition. It seems pretty glib to just say cars are “practically” all the same; why does anybody pay 3 times as much as the cost of an economy car if the difference is so small?
In practice, unless you're chasing collectibles (in which case this is analogous to domain squatting), you'll find more than one seller if you look around, and a ton of sellers if you're willing to settle for a slightly different make/model - so competitive pressure keeps prices on a reasonable level.
Importantly, unless you literally tell a given seller that you won't settle for a different make/model, they have to assume that you might, and thus in their minds, they're competing for you with a lot of other people. As a buyer, you'd have to work really hard to get an unreasonable quote.
Don’t you think collectibles are more analogous to domain names than cars which are in bountiful supply? Nobody is paying more than the purchase price for a Camry.
All cars are produced in limited numbers, and luxury or classic cars can be extremely rare.
Even mass produced cars are rarely identical. From new, there are a huge number of ways cars can be optioned, and on the resale market there are myriad variables that can make a car more or less desirable to different buyers.
1. If I haven't used the domain in 2 years, it's never going to happen so I will let it lapse
That in itself may not be enough, as you may become attached to some of the names, because they're just too good. So there is also rule 2:
2. Max 12 domains at any time (1 for each month), to keep costs reasonable.
If I'm at 12 domains, and I have a really good idea for another one... I have to weigh it against the existing domains and either not register it -- or immediately turn off auto renew for whichever other domain lost against my brilliant new idea.
IMO the problem isn't the person who holds ~25 unused domains, the problem is the company that holds ~25,000 and parks a "make me an offer, minimum 2,000" page on all of them.
More efficient how? Rather than registering the domain name via a registrar there's now another middleman and that's efficient? What are you, a manager?
> how does keeping domains away from people with little money provide any value?
True, it doesn't. Then again, how is it different from property prices? A business that wants to open a shop in a premium location has to pay a higher price. I may be not seeing something, but to me this looks similar.
> As long as the owner pays the fee who gives a f?
I think other market users would become annoyed. Businesses would still have trouble coming up with names, but now they would have no way to solve that with money. And users would have to deal with more "creative" names.
Concert ticket scalpers also provide the same value, keeping culture available for people with more money. I just don't get this mentality - it's a negative for the world.
True, ticket scalpers also work in a niche where the actual price and the market price are different. Ticket companies solve scalping by lotteries; or they bring the ticket price closer to market value with price increases or auctions. Offering domains always for $10 seems similar to lotteries. Lotteries make money irrelevant; to me it makes sense for a concert but not for things that can enhance your business. I'd prefer domain parkers over $10 domain lotteries.
My completely unscientific perception is that companies that focus too much on getting the perfect domain name from the get go are doomed to fail, and especially so if they buy a domain for more than $1k..
the solution here in Denmark is very, well - socialdemocratic; The Complaints Board for Domain Names.
"A complaint may be submitted by any person who has a sufficient interest in the outcome of the case. The chairman of the Complaints Board decides whether the complainant has a sufficient interest.
The Complaints Board decides whether the registration of a domain name is to be maintained, deleted, suspended or transferred to the complainant or to a natural or legal person appointed by the complainant. In addition, the Complaints Board can confirm, cancel, change or refer back a decision made by DK Hostmaster/DIFO about compliance with the terms and conditions of business (”Terms and conditions for the right of use to a.dk domain name”)."
(from the official page: https://www.domaeneklager.dk/en)
We've used the board in our business once. When we first started our SaaS the domain name we wanted was already taken by another person who seemed to use it for something genuine. So we contacted him/her and decided to wait.
In the meantime, a competitor managed to contact the other owner directly and bought the domain name. He then changed the site into one big ad+redirect for his own competing service.
We complained to the board, and presented our arguments(+screenshots). He did the same, and we won.
The domain was transferred free-ofcharge to us, and we've owned it since.
DK's a small country, and something similar might not work for larger countries, but it does limit the domainparking issue.
I'm a big fan of it!
He does not explain the link the parent comment, no. But one could guess that he thinks of domains as private ownership and something you can steal. However, that view on domain is very problematic, as you have to renew it which indicates a right to use under specific terms, even for .com domains. The terms are just different for different domains, which is not too controversial.
Private ownership becomes more and more challenged these years. The original comment is set in Denmark. I am also Danish, and I can verify that we have another view on ownership than what you experience in the US.
Yet, the poster did devote a paragraph to the topic. That different people draw the line of theft at different places is immaterial to the actual discussion existing in the comment.
He did not. It might be subtle, but the paragraph your refer to explains his view on the people in question, not the link between domains and stealing.
"But one could guess that he thinks of domains as private ownership and something you can steal." - I think you're right, also about the view on ownership.
I'd argue that, since there's a limited amount of useful - domain-wise - words in the English dictionary, the number of available domains are bound to run dry faster if domainparking is not discouraged somehow.
One might argue that the new TLD's are merely a 'bandaid' on a systemic problem with domains not being released properly, when no longer in proper use.
Someone else had the right to use a domain. They had paid for that right. You appealed to some people with guns, they decided to use the threat of force to revoke that right, and you benefitted.
Actually, the whole set of up all laws derives from people with guns. Like, if there was no government, then we probably wouldn't have the internet, so domain names couldn't be taken away.
Like, are you saying that rights of property are more fundemental than government?
That seems like an odd argument, given that rights to property would seem to derive from government, at least in the modern world.
> ... rights to property would seem to derive from government...
Yeah, this is the fundamental disconnect I have with (apparently) most people. Rights come from God. The idea that they come from governments is, in the words of a famous person, "not even wrong".
Anyway, this was an informative exchange. I learned that I'm in a minority, at least in this corner of the world :)
This [1] is by far the best answer I have ever seen to that question / request. Since it is quite long, I will attempt to summarize: that is what I start from. I am more certain of the existence of God than I am of my own existence - the first one is an axiom, the second one is a theorem ("I think, therefore I am").
"The answer is that a reasonable person is a person who believes what Augustine believes and who, like Augustine, can only hear assertions contrary to that belief as absurd."
I genuinely see opinions different from mine as absurd. As in, "you cannot possibly believe this, which means you are lying" absurd. It's why I generally dismiss the common saying "do not attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence". NOBODY is that incompetent, and therefore whatever I disagree with is in fact malice.
I realize it's a minority opinion. I am fine with that situation, though I continue to be surprised when people disagree :)
This is silly. God gave no right to domain names. If the internet was a libertarian utopia, I would just run my own DNS server and could "own" google.com, apple.com, etc. Except no one would use my DNS server.
Instead governments and NGOs manage limited "intellectual property" rights on DNS servers everyone agrees to connect to so the internet can actually be useful and not a free-for-all. The same applies to copyrights and patents. There is no natural right to exclusive ownership of an idea or written text. These things are "naturally" meant to be copied. Intellectual property "rights" are entirely constructed by government decree.
I don't believe in Imaginary Property (aka Intellectual Property). It's not what I was talking about.
Someone bought the right to use a specific domain from a specific domain name provider. It was a private transaction between two parties, freely agreed to between them.
My God says you have no rights except those derived from governments. Now what do we do?
"Rights" are more properly understood as "a social agreement among people of a culture". If a culture doesn't value something, no rights for it exist. When cultures intersect, "rights" get real muddy real fast.
Problem with this argument is: What god and under what rule book?
If my rule book says women are second class citizens, then is that just it? They have no rights? Or if my rule book says homosexuality is bad, but another interpretation of the rule book says its fine, then who's rule book is correct? Who settles that argument? Government.
Only other answer is a holy war and the survivors rule book is supreme. Until the next holy war.
This is a deep well of theory of society, and reasonable people disagree based on how they answer that question.
Some do believe property rights exist independent of government (and existed before the concept of governments, as webs of individual agreements between people with no over-arching enforcement authority, i.e. "This belongs to me because if you try to take it from me I will kill you. That belongs to you because you would do the same to me. We have an understanding between us, but is an understanding between two people a 'government'?").
The obvious disconnect is whether they actually did have the right to use this domain. Where I'm from you may not mislead with advertising, which includes buying Google ads with your competitors' names. I place this domain name issue squarely in the same bucket.
I do see how someone with, say, more adversarial US background may have a different opinion.
Our product: A was a direct competitor to the other product: B.
We tried to purchase domain: C - without any luck, we could not get in touch with the owner since he did not reply to the publicly listed email address.
B's owner(our competitor) purchased domain C from it's owner; B was better at location contact-information I guess.
So suddenly domain C contained logo, image, and redirect to product B; and that was when we complained.
We had no intention(or right) to complain when domain C was still in use by its original owner.
Owning a domain-name is not some fundamental right or need. It's an artificial thing, whose operation is, in many countries, paid for by taxpayer money. The entire history of the Internet, and related inventions, are also filled with a lot of taxpayer funding(CERN, DARPA).
IMO it's a flaw in the system that allowed domainparking in the first-place, there should have been a built-in way to mitigate that issue.
It would be a lot different if this was say; a twitter-handle or an ICQ-number (like in the old days where the simple ICQ numbers could be sold for a lot of money), but the Internet is so close to being a public utility that it should be operated as such, and not like a town in the Wild West....
>>Owning a domain-name is not some fundamental right or need. It's an artificial thing, whose operation is, in many countries, paid for by taxpayer money.
Owning real estate isn't a fundamental right or need either. That doesn't mean property rights have no relevance or value simply because of their "artificiality". Property rights exist whether it is for houses or for domain names.
>>The entire history of the Internet, and related inventions, are also filled with a lot of taxpayer funding(CERN, DARPA). IMO it's a flaw in the system that allowed domainparking in the first-place, there should have been a built-in way to mitigate that issue.
DARPA was no longer involved with the internet/ARPANET by 1984. CERN had nothing to do with the Web besides the fact that one of its physicists made a GUI and a markup language. They both have nothing to do with DNS, URLs/URI, or IANA/ICANN. SRI/INTERNIC, a private research institute, was responsible for it's creation. As far as domainparking is concerned, the built-in limitation used to be the number of IPv4 addresses. But with IPv6, the point is made moot.
> That doesn't mean property rights have no relevance or value simply because of their "artificiality".
It kinda does, actually. Without the existence of a state enforcing said property rights by threat of monopolized violence, any sort of land "ownership" beyond physical occupation is meaningless; there would be nothing stopping someone else from inhabiting "your" land unless you're able and willing to infringe on their rights to life and liberty.
Given that dependence on the state, land "ownership" is naturally subject to its whims.
>>Without the existence of a state enforcing said property rights by threat of monopolized, any sorry of land "ownership" beyond physical occupation is meaningless.
Then by your standards, a state would be just as artificial. Without the existence of a sufficient number of individuals capable and invested in engaging in violence for the defense of property, any concept of a state would be just that: a concept. An imaginary plaything. Enforcement of property rights can only come from people, not papers or buildings. And since a people precede a state, so to do their rights to own property.
>> There would be nothing stopping someone else from inhabiting "your" land unless your able and willing to infringe on their rights to life and liberty.
You're contradicting yourself. If one owns land, no one else has any right to life or liberty with respect to it. In other words, your rights end where mine begin.
Proof of this is the fact that (contiguous) United States isn't bordered by Mexican Gulf, the Pacific Ocean, and the 49th parallel because nature or belief willed it. It's there because people physically occupied territory long enough to obtain legitimacy, people purchased other colonial territories (i.e Alaska, Colonial Louisiana), or people negotiated treaties that says they owns certain areas. None of this is any different from how ordinary people obtain or historically obtained ownership despite your claim of insufficiency in their case. If that's so, what makes it be inherently different for a so-called state?
Nothing stops Canada from invading a la 1812 except for pieces of paper that merely claim it "can't". Canada chooses not to, not because it lacks a dedicated army with sufficient capability to capture some land, but because because it obtains benefits from an alliance and because provoking a potential retaliatory occupation by it's nearest neighbor isn't currently in the country's personal interest as a result of what violence would likely ensue.
Ownership is not a power that comes with the prima facie existence of a state. It's not even granted. Individuals have those rights to begin with. It is the exercise of those rights to pursue either agreement or defense that demonstrate ownership.
> Then by your standards, a state would be just as artificial.
Indeed it would be.
> And since a people precede a state, so to do their rights to own property.
Except that the concept of private land ownership without a state has yet to be demonstrated, specifically because said private land ownership is wholly a function of the state.
> If one owns land, no one else has any right to life or liberty with respect to it.
Says who? There's a reason why the rights to "life, liberty, and property" are in that order: property is meaningless without life and liberty, and liberty is in turn meaningless without life.
And further, because the state - like the notion of land ownership - is artificial, your ownership of land is at the mercy of those fellow members of society and their collective conjuring of the state - and its powers to enforce ownership over imaginary concepts like parcel boundaries - into existence. That said society happens to currently tolerate your exclusive claim on some parcel of land (without receiving anything even remotely resembling reciprocal compensation for the incurred opportunity costs) is a privilege, and one which can be revoked when it conflicts with the rights to life and liberty.
> Ownership is not a power that comes with the prima facie existence of a state.
With respect to land, unless you live in Bir Tawil or have decided to invest in deep sea and deep space real estate, said ownership quite literally is a power that comes with the prima facie existence of a state. That the state itself exists (ostensibly) as an action of the people it governs doesn't change the fact that your "ownership" of land is more of a lease, and that a superior landlord - the state - continues to exist.
If you disagree, then you're encouraged to brush up on your understanding of the difference between "fee simple" and "allodial" titles - hint: if you own land in a common law jurisdiction like the US, your land is almost certainly under the former kind of title, not the latter.
The terms of that domain ownership included the possibility of losing it in the manner described. The buyer knew those terms and implicitly agreed to them at time of purchase. It's all perfectly libertarian.
Or do you think you know better, and want to limit what kinds of contracts/ownership terms people can enter? And enforce those limits with men with guns?
I'm interpreting (disregarding possible narrator bias) OP as that the person who lost the claim bought a domain unrelated to their business other than it being the company name of a competitor, and redirected all traffic to their own company.
Are you interpreting it the same way as me? If so, yes the domain was indeed taken from the person squatting it (but actually worse than squatting, since it took you somewhere else than where you as a consumer wanted to go). And that's something I'm entirely ok with, and in fact applaud.
"Stealing" and "ownership" are defined by the set of rules (usually national laws) surrounding a thing. In this case, the GP didn't steal anything, they entered a dispute and acquired ownership in accordance with the rules surrounding domain allocation in Denmark.
I don't have to care which specific instance of them I have (mostly, land is where it gets funny but that's more secondary effects like transport hubs, taxation, regulations etc at which point it's not "land" it's a location I'm after).
A domain name? It's a unique registration on a global index. It's value is in that uniqueness.
There's an entire economic school of thought dedicated to railing against the specific problem of sitting on physical land just to keep it out of use until someone else pays you a higher price:
It's fun to note the game Monopoly was designed as a teaching exercise for Georgism (it's meant to be awful; it's designed to show the unfairness of existing landholder/landlord structures), though the pack in rules (for somewhat obvious reasons) no longer include the pro-Georgism text and counter-rules that illustrate that the game is far more boring, but quicker and more fair under a Georgism-like model.
Quite. The original rules document is in the public domain now and is a fascinating read of turn of last century economic thought that is still relevant today (as this larger discussion shows). Maybe someone could do a quick interesting reskin for "The Domainparker's Game".
Yes, but they do it to the exact opposite effect. Squatting property actually puts it to its intended use (living, agriculture etc.) Domain squatting is meant to prevent the domain from its intended use (access to a meaningful service). For gold and bitcoins, there is (or at least there should be) taxation to make sure you're not sitting on them.
Around the world there are actually laws regulating physical squatting [1, 2], because it seen as a socially positive outcome (compared to leaving houses/land disused). And there are also often provisions that allow you to prevent squatting [3], but you have to give something back (e.g. dirt-cheap short-term rentals).
Worth adding, at least in some countries, the laws allow physical squatters to legally take over ownership of land or property, if they can document they lived there / put it to productive use over many years (IIRC 20, in Poland), while the original owner didn't use it in any way.
I don't think the parallel to be drawn here is against physically squatting in property the occupants do not own, but with people who buy property and use it as a value sink; as seen with a sizable portion of non-domestically owned property investment in London, Vancouver and other high value regions.
Such property can be seen to sit unused by anyone, but it's lack of availability (when it could otherwise be used) contributes to the scarcity of property in that district, and thus inflation of property prices in that area (be it naturally occurring or otherwise)
There is a loose analogy between Domain parking and land speculation (though it's not perfect -- you can make more domains, but you can't make more land).
Another approach you can try instead of a formal complaint department is to apply a universal "use it or lose it" tax to the asset at risk of speculation, as economist Ramin Shokrizade famously did in EVE Online to oust speculators and solve problems with recessions:
What's hilarious is that in doing so, he unwittingly rederived Henry George's Land Value Tax from first principles.
Applying a properly sized tax that disincentives holding assets for speculation can actually reduce the price overall, because speculators stop jacking the price up knowing they can HODL forever.
The LVT is this but... more. The idea of a full land-value tax is based on a principle related to universal basic income. In both cases, the argument is that by applying the tax/income to every stakeholder indiscriminately, it removes bureaucratic complexity and motivation to "cheat" the system.
Since the effect is the same no matter what, we don't need a huge statute listing what does and does not apply as X.
> The idea of a full land-value tax is based on a principle related to universal basic income.
And tangentially: seeking a minimal state that exists solely to collect LVT (and possibly Pigovian and severance taxes) and distribute the proceeds evenly as UBI is the basic idea around geolibertarianism.
A bit on the pedantic side, but you can make more land; there are dozens of artificial islands around the world, some of which have resulted from the need for more land.
The costs, of course, as well as other considerations (legal...) are of a different scale.
Two responses to this: Georgists classify “land” as both territory and all natural resources (really nature itself) so the “new land” the Netherlands makes is classified as an improvement to the pre-existing sea bed.
You might reasonably say this isn’t what most people mean by “land” to which the reply is, the amount of “new land” you can make in this manner is pretty limited and usually the reserve of states or state owned enterprises.
Comparatively, nothing stops you from tripling the number of domains overnight.
Regarding whether it's "pretty limited", yes and no, imo:
Yes, compared to, say, the size of a continent, the amount of new land is tiny.
However, new land is usually made in highly sought-after (high-density, high-value etc) areas [citation needed]. So it would make better sense to compare the surface of the new land to the surface of the adjacent area.
For example, the polders in the Netherlands significantly augment the country's surface. The artificial islands in Tokyo Bay significantly add to the real estate of the harbour. The artificial islands in Dubai and Bahrain significantly add to the coastline.
I think that this is enough for OP's analogy between domain parking and land speculation to reasonably stand.
Land in this context is more of a mathematical concept: yes, you can make more land, but the surface of the oblate spheroid that we call "Earth" has a finite surface area, and it's that finite supply that gives land its population-proportional value.
Even if we're willing to stretch into a third dimension, that oblate spheroid has a finite volume, and the overwhelmingly vast majority of it is inaccessible to meaningful possession/occupation; you can only dig so far down or build so far up.
The book Radical Markets proposes the following tax (to replace most other taxes), quote:
Every citizen and especially corporation would self-assess the value of assets they possess, pay a roughly 7% tax on these values and be required to sell the assets to anyone willing to purchase them at this self-assessed price.
This is a horrible proposal. Do I have to put a price on my family's home? And if I price it just right, be forced to sell to some speculator who wants it just because he has more money than I do?
Maybe can work for some types of assets one doesn't use, like parked domains
In your example, you could also say "I have to put a price on our cat, and...?" Or your glasses, or your jeans and underpants. But the proposal probably didn't have such things in mind
Another way to think about it is, that you adjust the price continuously. If a speculator offers you money, you are in the position to take the offer or raise your own valuation and pay the increased tax. At some point a sensible person would be like: screw this, I am moving out of the city because the offers are so high, resulting in very high taxes, which is the intended effect.
First, under this system, long-term speculation is not really viable, due to the high tax. So the buyer must have some reason for paying higher than the price you set, which you don't see, i.e. you under-utilize the asset. Google/Facebook ads work this way - every slot is always up for auction. Also similar dynamics in partnership agreement's "shotgun clauses", etc.
Second, you can always factor in your sentimentality into your price, then the buyer will buy your neighbor's house instead. But you have to pay for it in the form of a higher tax. This is like a penalty for obstructing economic efficiency.
Third, this system pretty much does away with the strict idea of private property, into what they call "partial common ownership". It's basically a way to have shared ownership (as in communism) without the central planning, i.e. in a way that might actually work. (In fact, it quite reduces the role of government.)
I'm not advocating for this system, but I think it's fun to think about.
> $10k buys you three months of rent and ramen noodles which might be enough to get your project off the ground and make the world a startup richer, but if these 10k go towards a domain name, that might never happen.
If your startup success depends on a 10k domain name then you should probably rethink the whole thing anyway ...
There was an article on the frontpage today about a fintech startup named pipe with url www.pipe.com. I really wonder how much investor money went in the domain.
I've been much more sympathetic to concerns about domain name brevity and pronounceability ever since I ignored those concerns for my personal domain - something I regret anew every time I have to tell somebody my email address over the phone.
So if you want to make a quick buck, you find a good domain name, build a fintech, use the investor money to buy your own domain and let the startup die out.
I also chuckled at the idea of resigning to ramen instead of moving somewhere where $10k will buy you way more than just 3 months of rent with plenty left for proper food.
Not really on topic but I've never understood why a country like the US, with the underlying ideology being what it is, wouldn't allow anyone in the world to live in the US as long as they don't use any social services.
For example, if someone has enough money for one year of rent and health insurance, and is not deemed a security risk, why not instantly admit them? If they get a job and pay tax, you let them stay as long as they pay tax. If they keep this up for X amount of years, offer them a citizenship.
Obviously the current legislation is made with current circumstances in mind. If tourists can't get financial aid for college there's no reason these hypothetical renters must.
This could be an interesting experiment, but I don't think that this would be really practical for two reasons:
a) you can't realistically expect this class of immigrants not to use any social service (especially emergency), there will be costs that US isn't prepared to pay
b) there are bound to be negative consequences for having a explosively growing number of poorly integrated people that are treated as second class by the government
a) you could have a mandatory one time cost that reflects the average likelihood and cost of them using it (ie up front insurance)
b) the US is already filled with "poorly integrated" people, the whole country was founded on immigration. The only way you'd necessarily be treated as "second class" is by not being eligible to vote, which tourists also aren't and they don't seem to mind much.
The specifics of what to charge and what to demand are obviously flexible, but to me the net positive seems pretty obvious.
By that logic you shouldn't allow tourists either, as far as I know they don't pay for emergency services, or most of the roads, or whatever else public costs there are.
(And in addition, nothing is stopping you from charging them for the average possibility of them using it)
And just how do you intend to enforce that? It sounds nice, but we can't deal with fraud - let alone trying to determine who should and shouldn't get something on that kind of scale.
How about the rest of the world adopting more of what makes people want to come to the US? Seems to be more rational (and sustainable) than advocating that everyone should just be able to come to the US.
with all of the creative TLD's these days, it's still reasonably easy to come up with a nice domain name. Heck, I just recently registered a 5 letter .com.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] threadEhh.. how is it different from buying land ? Theres a limited ressource and it has a value.. of course some people are going to buy it.
You should be happy the whole concept of "renting" a domain name doesn't exist yet.
Apparently, I was just “leasing” it. There was no contract; just a simple payment.
I started raising a stink. They made some attempts at barratry, I said “bring it on,” so they rather sourly tossed me the keys, and told me to get out.
The idea is that you “lease” a domain to someone, who imbues it with value, and becomes dependent on it, then you raise the price on lease end.
If they had actually spent a few dollars, getting a lawyer to draft a contract, I would have been screwed.
In fact, some cities have laws against people doing exactly that with houses. And for good reason.
Google succeeded despite not having the search.com domain, Instagram didn't have the photos.com, and Uber did not own the taxi.com nor the ride.com.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070605175835/http://www.uber.c...
Without good way to attribute ownership of thoe domains, they would just split them into different shell companies.
And to some extent that worked - if "yourfavouritename.com" is taken (it is) then you can have "yourfavouritename.tech" or whatever.
But there's this superstition about ".com" names in the business, that they're just more authoritative and people won't trust a ".tech" domain. And it does leave you open to someone else buying the ".com" later and giving you a problem.
But at least you can get a domain and launch the business, which is something.
I would use my home country which I feel makes sense but it gets localized out of international search results whilst .co and .io have gotten a free pass for some reason.
Yes
> Having said that really good names are probably taken by legitimate businesses.
And No. Very no. There are lots of really good names out there that are being sat on, doing nothing. Anyone who's started a business can tell you of the infuriating days or weeks spent coming up with good names and then finding they're all being squatted, before settling for some nonsense made up name because "ffs I don't care any more, just hammer something into the keyboard that's available and we'll have that and get on with it"
On the other hand it is quite fun to try to think about an original name that nobody else has thought of before. So yeah your days or weeks are in competition with people's years of doing this as a hobby.
Not that I'm knocking that, if that's what floats your boat. It's just exasperating when you're actually trying to do something else and this gets in the way.
I was a little struck that my first attempt came up with Otter And Frame -- OtterFrame.com is taken, but OtterAndFrame.com isn't. I'd be curious to know what fraction of that N^2 space is taken already. (It doubles to 2N^2 if you add the word "And" between them, though I guess the version without will always be more desirable.)
OtterAndFrame.com is at least as good a name as Akiflow.com or Biyaki.com (two names dredged from YCombinator's summer class).
But the domain costs 5000$ so I cannot afford it, since the service I would offer is free of charge.
I ended up just searching for available domains that kind of matched what I wanted to convey to use a product name.
It is frustrating, but I don't think there is really an answer.
- Limit the number of domains per person/business to say, 10, unless you can show that you are actively using them?
- Have a 'use it or lose it' type system?
Those are not great ideas, and practically are not really enforceable anyway.
I dunno, it's annoying but I guess it's up there with ticket scalpers etc
This is how the .dk and probably many other top level domains are handled.
There is a special "domain court" which you ask for a ruling in case a domain seems to be unused and you have a better claim for it.
I think the dropped the domains when their stopped providing customers with email accounts.
Depending on the court, I can see a large number of cases where someone is forced to hand over a domain, because they aren't using it for a website.
Besides, just having a "domain squatting is illegal" rule would mean domain resale websites won't be possible as they will be a clear sign of bad intend.
It may not remove all the squatting, but if you can't easily set up a resale shop, it'll be a lot less economically attractive.
I think .dk and .com probably diverge in this case because (a) a top .com is literally a million-dollar lottery ticket of incentive, and (b) .com is so much bigger that it would probably allow for utility services that set up trivial email services for a minimal fee, across your whole portfolio of domains. I'm not sure .dk can sustain the same kind of domainer industry tooling.
Plus, there's the problem of jurisdiction. For .dk it's pretty clear: cases are heard and decided in Denmark. And, since it's mostly Danish entities using .dk, that doesn't cause much unfairness. If .com is arbitrated in the US, seems like US corps are likely to take advantage of that and cause a lot of problems for smaller entities around the world.
I wish the .dk solution could be applied to .com. I hate how .com is right now. But I'm not sure it works at global scale.
Whilst it was frustrating they were not available, it wasn't the end of the world to me.
I've had a 3 letter .net domain for 23 years, and in all that time there has never been more than a small website on it with a handful of extremely low traffic pages that no one would care about [1].
From a web point of view, it appears to be an almost dead domain, something that I played with a bit at the end of the last century and have largely ignored since then.
But domains are also used for email, and my primary email has been on that domain for all that time. There are several hundred companies that have that email address on file as a contact address and/or as an account identifier, and all my friends and acquaintances use it to correspond with me.
How would I prove I was using it if someone tried to get it transferred to them on grounds of non-use? To prove significant use of it for email seems hard to do without having to share a lot of personal and private information.
[1] Oddly, there is one page on it that for most of that time was the #1 hit on Google if you searched for the thing that page is about, although recently it has slipped a few spots, and is still #1 on Bing and DDG and Yahoo. The page is just plain text with some tables and some bolded headings, has never been publicized, has no SEO, and according to Google only has one outside site linking to it (in a comment I made seven years ago in a forum), and there are numerous other pages out there that cover the same thing I did and usually better. I am completely baffled as to why mine ranks so high.
They say:
> So what's the problem, isn't this a legitimate business? On its face, yes - but it is value-destructive as hell. [reference to supposedly legitimate businesses] The world is better for these companies' existence. ... Domain-Parking is nothing like that. If it wasn't for domain parkers, you'd still get your domain - just for 10$, rather than 10.000$.
You wouldn't get your domain for $10, because someone else would get your domain for $10 instead. It is that simple, they'd beat you to it. How is that any more fair of a determining factor than raising the cost/price? It's not, it's a purely subjective opinion that one determing factor is better than the other, or more fair than the other. It's an argument that having capital to allocate to purchase a domain for eg $10,000 is unfair to everyone else without that much capital. It's false.
By that basis, it's unfair for a business to have $500,000 to buy a nice plot of land in a town square to open a new retail shop. Golly gee, what about all the other people that don't have that money. This is a perpetually reducing argument that goes all the way down to the last person with $0 (the person who gets to own the universe because they have nothing, and everything is unfair toward them accordingly; which then breaks the system morally, which lets you know it's a fraud, it's self-contradictory). It means having enough money to purchase a McDonald's franchise - which is like a magic ticket to a forever nice return on your money (at least historically) - is unfair to everyone else that can't (which is 99% of the world's population). It applies to all routine economic activity, all business function (without exception), and is similarly absurd when applied.
This business over here can't afford new $10k equipment. It's unfair, the competition can afford it. That equipment therefore should be $1 and it's first come first serve. The company making that equipment must be forced to supply it at a loss forever. All equipment derives from natural resources somewhere (which derives from land ownership/control), it's unfair some people can access those natural resources and others can't.
This business over here can't afford to buy a new building. Their competitor can afford a nice new building that draws more customers. It's unfair. Some building owner should be forced to turn over a nice building for pennies on the dollar. Who are these people that get to decide that natural resources like land or building materials are worth something? It should all be $0.01, first come first serve.
Norway and Canada should have to give me their oil resources, I want to screw around with a million barrels of oil per day. I have an idea I want to put into action. Who are they to control natural resources? It should be first come first serve, $0.0001 per barrel of oil. Because I say that's fair. Why should someone with a lot of money be able to buy a million barrels of oil and I can't?
Everyone that owns a house or yard with more space than deemed fair (who decides? the authoritarians of course), must be forced to turn that space over to someone else that wants to use it (for any purpose). You have no choice in who gets to move into your (whoops, it's not your space really) unused space, it's first come first serve. Welcome to hell.
It's unfair that someone else had more time than I did to watch for domain names to buy for $10 in the new system. The counters never stop, that's because the author's alternative will always fail and will never produce the supposed fairness.
Any application of this author's premise would implode into absolute disaster economically. Only authoritarian technocrats woul...
We might just regulate how a TLD works so that there is no domain parking industry and problem is then solved. The party who runs the TLD is surely not going to sell them at a loss since they aren't getting those 5k or 100k amounts even today. They just get 10$ or 100$ per yer or whatever.
If someone doesn't use a domain anymore and someone else has a claim on it, then it just gets moved to a new owner.
Example:
In Finland this is how the .fi domain works, you can get yourcompany.fi if you own yourcompany Oy (Ltd) and someone is just hoarding it. There's a process for this. It works.
Hah, that's exactly what he complained about (the part I quoted in my other comment) - even if it doesn't work, there's no reason to claim that "it works" and keep insisting on central planning.
What if there's no YourCompany Oy in Finland? Why should someone need to go through the bureaucratic procedure of registering a company in order to get yourcompany.fi? Or why should the domain be wasted? What if there's YourCompany Pets and YourCompany Swimming Pools, who gets YourCompany? Or two John's Bakery Oy? More bureaucracy, more rules, more lawsuits, more unused domains, higher taxes, etc.
In past 20 years I squatted on few domains but never sold any of them (I just thought I'd first buy them and later see what to do with them, if anything).
But most commenters here are upset about people like me even though I didn't make any profit - in fact I spent hundreds of dollars to hang onto them for years, subsidizing cost of running a registrar, and everyone benefited from it.
> Only authoritarian technocrats would propose it could work and be managed, and they'd come up with all sorts of absurd regulations and systems that had to be followed & implemented perfectly in order for it to even function badly.
They know that, but they still want it. Because all you need it to make work is to improve algorithms. Nothing has been learned by these folks since Hayek wrote "The Intellectuals and Socialism".
One way to rephrase arguments in favor of squatters is: if they didn't exist, domain name you like would be cheaper and therefore used (not for domain resale purpose) by someone who needs it less than you do. They should be grateful that the domain name you want is $5,000 and not $9.99. :-)
Sure, programmers like sweet and short domains, but customers don't care if your domain is widget.com, widget.net, widgetapp.com or companyname.xy/widget
Spending 5000 on a domain name is probably not worth it for the vast majority of startups.
There are some exceptions. If you are an email provider and your customers will use the domain in their email address it probably is a good idea to get a good domain.
But I really don't think that domain matters as much as founders think they do.
That said, as a non-US person I'm not personally on-board with .com-for-everything, but I understand that Joe Public in the USA thinks differently.
Generally, I'm not sure. But I (and I think the majority of the people I know) were beyond that stage a long time ago or never cared/understood to start with. As you mention, not being in the US might bias my opinions and the opinions I'm exposed to on the matter, so YMMV.
I'm not sure if it confers any SEO advantage, but I don't particularly care about that (the things I have hosted are only useful to people who already know about them, so SEO isn't a concern).
> trustworthy
That might be the wrong concept for the discussion though. Another key factor is whether somthine.com is more memorable or guessable than something.co.uk, something.site, something.link, ...
I think, as a start, any domain is fine but when you have gone big, you should acquire dotcom.
I’d say that engines are now smart enough, typically, to get you to the most likely place no matter what.
It's not - and I doubt it ever was - about SEO in the technical sense (the hypothesis being that .com has some kind of innate SE ranking benefit compared to other TLDs).
To me it's far more that if you have a company called, say, 'YCombinator' then a huge number of people will simply assume you are to be found at YCombinator.com, simply because their experience is that all the other well-known brands live at .com, so why wouldn't you?
Why would you choose to fight that if you didn't have to?
Getting sales from big corps, for example, is often partly about your perceived current state of established-ness.
In Sweden we've "solved" this problem by a rule that says that if you incorporated the business XYZ then you're entitled to the domain XYZ.se. Incorporating requires $2500 in capital and you can't incorporate as "pizza" or any other common word, so squatting is not a problem there.
What happens if the domain is already registered? I think I've seen .se used as the ending of english words like say impul.se (first try, seems to be unused or squatted).
That being said, I’d be scared about domain names raising the price 200x - all providers could literally hold domain renters hostage here, so it’s a double edged sword I guess..
Also, ICANN should directly auction expiring domain names themselves. It's infuriating that when a domain name expires, whoever has the fastest script pays $10 and then immediately resells it for $100K to whoever actually needed it.
ICANN and the registries are just bigger drug dealers, they too will use that money to do more bad.
I can only speak for myself, but if prices doubled overnight, owning a domain would not be feasible for me because I don't conduct business or earn income on the domain I own, and the only reason I went for this fairly obscure TLD is because it was the cheapest decent one I could afford. Some of us aren't "businesses", and unless you think we don't deserve a corner of the internet, you'll find there's tons of us.
Sorry but yes, if you’re not making enough money from your .com to pay (say) $50/year, I think it’s perfectly fine that you can’t use it for your random hobby project. The lost value that comes from .com being messed up is so much greater.
.com is very clearly commercial so what I had to say isn't applicable to it (which is why I mentioned I use a relatively obscure TLD like .site or .xyz).
Way to stereotype though.
These services would have existed regardless, opersting under other names hd those domain names not been available for purchase in the start up phase. That’s by supply and demand.
The new-generation TLD owners already do this with "Premium" names. Google does it with .app. A price is arbitrarily decided for your first year. Who knows what price it might be in a few years' time.
In fact, I'm sure you could liken the rush to squat domain names to many present-day internet gold rush crazes. People didn't know for sure that they would be valuable and scarce, don't forget.
So yeah - obviously it being hard to get domains you want is annoying, but that seems quite a simplistic and outdated rant for this place.
Somebody else decides your car is perfect for them and is willing to buy it off you for far more than it has cost you.
At what price would you sell the car?
The same applies to domains. Some people don’t care if they need to add an extra word, or pick a different extension. To other people it matters a lot.
Importantly, unless you literally tell a given seller that you won't settle for a different make/model, they have to assume that you might, and thus in their minds, they're competing for you with a lot of other people. As a buyer, you'd have to work really hard to get an unreasonable quote.
Even mass produced cars are rarely identical. From new, there are a huge number of ways cars can be optioned, and on the resale market there are myriad variables that can make a car more or less desirable to different buyers.
1. If I haven't used the domain in 2 years, it's never going to happen so I will let it lapse
That in itself may not be enough, as you may become attached to some of the names, because they're just too good. So there is also rule 2:
2. Max 12 domains at any time (1 for each month), to keep costs reasonable.
If I'm at 12 domains, and I have a really good idea for another one... I have to weigh it against the existing domains and either not register it -- or immediately turn off auto renew for whichever other domain lost against my brilliant new idea.
I disagree, they provide value by keeping premium domains available for people with money.
> Thanks to Uber you now can seamlessly hail a ride to wherever you are. Thanks to AirBnB you now have a great alternative to hotels.
Uber started as UberCab.com , AirBnB started as AirBedandBreakfast.com . Premium domain name is not required to start a successful business.
> If it wasn't for domain parkers, you'd still get your domain - just for 10$, rather than 10.000$.
Or not, it could have been claimed (possibly unused) with the owner not checking their email. I think domain parkers solve this very problem.
how does keeping domains away from people with little money provide any value?
> Or not, it could have been claimed (e.g. for a hobby project that's permanently work in progress) with the owner not checking their email.
As long as the owner pays the fee who gives a f? What makes a hobby project less worthy then a professional product?
The value is that the market becomes more efficient.
True, it doesn't. Then again, how is it different from property prices? A business that wants to open a shop in a premium location has to pay a higher price. I may be not seeing something, but to me this looks similar.
> As long as the owner pays the fee who gives a f?
I think other market users would become annoyed. Businesses would still have trouble coming up with names, but now they would have no way to solve that with money. And users would have to deal with more "creative" names.
"A complaint may be submitted by any person who has a sufficient interest in the outcome of the case. The chairman of the Complaints Board decides whether the complainant has a sufficient interest.
The Complaints Board decides whether the registration of a domain name is to be maintained, deleted, suspended or transferred to the complainant or to a natural or legal person appointed by the complainant. In addition, the Complaints Board can confirm, cancel, change or refer back a decision made by DK Hostmaster/DIFO about compliance with the terms and conditions of business (”Terms and conditions for the right of use to a.dk domain name”)." (from the official page: https://www.domaeneklager.dk/en)
We've used the board in our business once. When we first started our SaaS the domain name we wanted was already taken by another person who seemed to use it for something genuine. So we contacted him/her and decided to wait. In the meantime, a competitor managed to contact the other owner directly and bought the domain name. He then changed the site into one big ad+redirect for his own competing service. We complained to the board, and presented our arguments(+screenshots). He did the same, and we won. The domain was transferred free-ofcharge to us, and we've owned it since.
DK's a small country, and something similar might not work for larger countries, but it does limit the domainparking issue. I'm a big fan of it!
I fail to understand this mentality. It's extremely common, of course, but I just can't wrap my head around it.
Private ownership becomes more and more challenged these years. The original comment is set in Denmark. I am also Danish, and I can verify that we have another view on ownership than what you experience in the US.
I'd argue that, since there's a limited amount of useful - domain-wise - words in the English dictionary, the number of available domains are bound to run dry faster if domainparking is not discouraged somehow. One might argue that the new TLD's are merely a 'bandaid' on a systemic problem with domains not being released properly, when no longer in proper use.
What exactly is difficult to understand here?
Actually, the whole set of up all laws derives from people with guns. Like, if there was no government, then we probably wouldn't have the internet, so domain names couldn't be taken away.
Like, are you saying that rights of property are more fundemental than government?
That seems like an odd argument, given that rights to property would seem to derive from government, at least in the modern world.
Yeah, this is the fundamental disconnect I have with (apparently) most people. Rights come from God. The idea that they come from governments is, in the words of a famous person, "not even wrong".
Anyway, this was an informative exchange. I learned that I'm in a minority, at least in this corner of the world :)
Please objectively prove the existence of the specific God from which you assert that all rights derive.
"The answer is that a reasonable person is a person who believes what Augustine believes and who, like Augustine, can only hear assertions contrary to that belief as absurd."
I genuinely see opinions different from mine as absurd. As in, "you cannot possibly believe this, which means you are lying" absurd. It's why I generally dismiss the common saying "do not attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence". NOBODY is that incompetent, and therefore whatever I disagree with is in fact malice.
I realize it's a minority opinion. I am fine with that situation, though I continue to be surprised when people disagree :)
[1] https://www.firstthings.com/article/1996/02/001-why-we-cant-...
Instead governments and NGOs manage limited "intellectual property" rights on DNS servers everyone agrees to connect to so the internet can actually be useful and not a free-for-all. The same applies to copyrights and patents. There is no natural right to exclusive ownership of an idea or written text. These things are "naturally" meant to be copied. Intellectual property "rights" are entirely constructed by government decree.
Someone bought the right to use a specific domain from a specific domain name provider. It was a private transaction between two parties, freely agreed to between them.
There is no "theft". Your whole understanding of this issue is absurd.
"Rights" are more properly understood as "a social agreement among people of a culture". If a culture doesn't value something, no rights for it exist. When cultures intersect, "rights" get real muddy real fast.
If my rule book says women are second class citizens, then is that just it? They have no rights? Or if my rule book says homosexuality is bad, but another interpretation of the rule book says its fine, then who's rule book is correct? Who settles that argument? Government.
Only other answer is a holy war and the survivors rule book is supreme. Until the next holy war.
Some do believe property rights exist independent of government (and existed before the concept of governments, as webs of individual agreements between people with no over-arching enforcement authority, i.e. "This belongs to me because if you try to take it from me I will kill you. That belongs to you because you would do the same to me. We have an understanding between us, but is an understanding between two people a 'government'?").
I do see how someone with, say, more adversarial US background may have a different opinion.
Our product: A was a direct competitor to the other product: B. We tried to purchase domain: C - without any luck, we could not get in touch with the owner since he did not reply to the publicly listed email address.
B's owner(our competitor) purchased domain C from it's owner; B was better at location contact-information I guess.
So suddenly domain C contained logo, image, and redirect to product B; and that was when we complained. We had no intention(or right) to complain when domain C was still in use by its original owner.
It would be a lot different if this was say; a twitter-handle or an ICQ-number (like in the old days where the simple ICQ numbers could be sold for a lot of money), but the Internet is so close to being a public utility that it should be operated as such, and not like a town in the Wild West....
Owning real estate isn't a fundamental right or need either. That doesn't mean property rights have no relevance or value simply because of their "artificiality". Property rights exist whether it is for houses or for domain names.
>>The entire history of the Internet, and related inventions, are also filled with a lot of taxpayer funding(CERN, DARPA). IMO it's a flaw in the system that allowed domainparking in the first-place, there should have been a built-in way to mitigate that issue.
DARPA was no longer involved with the internet/ARPANET by 1984. CERN had nothing to do with the Web besides the fact that one of its physicists made a GUI and a markup language. They both have nothing to do with DNS, URLs/URI, or IANA/ICANN. SRI/INTERNIC, a private research institute, was responsible for it's creation. As far as domainparking is concerned, the built-in limitation used to be the number of IPv4 addresses. But with IPv6, the point is made moot.
It kinda does, actually. Without the existence of a state enforcing said property rights by threat of monopolized violence, any sort of land "ownership" beyond physical occupation is meaningless; there would be nothing stopping someone else from inhabiting "your" land unless you're able and willing to infringe on their rights to life and liberty.
Given that dependence on the state, land "ownership" is naturally subject to its whims.
Then by your standards, a state would be just as artificial. Without the existence of a sufficient number of individuals capable and invested in engaging in violence for the defense of property, any concept of a state would be just that: a concept. An imaginary plaything. Enforcement of property rights can only come from people, not papers or buildings. And since a people precede a state, so to do their rights to own property.
>> There would be nothing stopping someone else from inhabiting "your" land unless your able and willing to infringe on their rights to life and liberty.
You're contradicting yourself. If one owns land, no one else has any right to life or liberty with respect to it. In other words, your rights end where mine begin.
Proof of this is the fact that (contiguous) United States isn't bordered by Mexican Gulf, the Pacific Ocean, and the 49th parallel because nature or belief willed it. It's there because people physically occupied territory long enough to obtain legitimacy, people purchased other colonial territories (i.e Alaska, Colonial Louisiana), or people negotiated treaties that says they owns certain areas. None of this is any different from how ordinary people obtain or historically obtained ownership despite your claim of insufficiency in their case. If that's so, what makes it be inherently different for a so-called state?
Nothing stops Canada from invading a la 1812 except for pieces of paper that merely claim it "can't". Canada chooses not to, not because it lacks a dedicated army with sufficient capability to capture some land, but because because it obtains benefits from an alliance and because provoking a potential retaliatory occupation by it's nearest neighbor isn't currently in the country's personal interest as a result of what violence would likely ensue.
Ownership is not a power that comes with the prima facie existence of a state. It's not even granted. Individuals have those rights to begin with. It is the exercise of those rights to pursue either agreement or defense that demonstrate ownership.
Indeed it would be.
> And since a people precede a state, so to do their rights to own property.
Except that the concept of private land ownership without a state has yet to be demonstrated, specifically because said private land ownership is wholly a function of the state.
> If one owns land, no one else has any right to life or liberty with respect to it.
Says who? There's a reason why the rights to "life, liberty, and property" are in that order: property is meaningless without life and liberty, and liberty is in turn meaningless without life.
And further, because the state - like the notion of land ownership - is artificial, your ownership of land is at the mercy of those fellow members of society and their collective conjuring of the state - and its powers to enforce ownership over imaginary concepts like parcel boundaries - into existence. That said society happens to currently tolerate your exclusive claim on some parcel of land (without receiving anything even remotely resembling reciprocal compensation for the incurred opportunity costs) is a privilege, and one which can be revoked when it conflicts with the rights to life and liberty.
> Ownership is not a power that comes with the prima facie existence of a state.
With respect to land, unless you live in Bir Tawil or have decided to invest in deep sea and deep space real estate, said ownership quite literally is a power that comes with the prima facie existence of a state. That the state itself exists (ostensibly) as an action of the people it governs doesn't change the fact that your "ownership" of land is more of a lease, and that a superior landlord - the state - continues to exist.
If you disagree, then you're encouraged to brush up on your understanding of the difference between "fee simple" and "allodial" titles - hint: if you own land in a common law jurisdiction like the US, your land is almost certainly under the former kind of title, not the latter.
The terms of that domain ownership included the possibility of losing it in the manner described. The buyer knew those terms and implicitly agreed to them at time of purchase. It's all perfectly libertarian.
Or do you think you know better, and want to limit what kinds of contracts/ownership terms people can enter? And enforce those limits with men with guns?
Are you interpreting it the same way as me? If so, yes the domain was indeed taken from the person squatting it (but actually worse than squatting, since it took you somewhere else than where you as a consumer wanted to go). And that's something I'm entirely ok with, and in fact applaud.
Gold and bitcoins are not problematic as holding on to them does not inhibit value creation.
I don't have to care which specific instance of them I have (mostly, land is where it gets funny but that's more secondary effects like transport hubs, taxation, regulations etc at which point it's not "land" it's a location I'm after).
A domain name? It's a unique registration on a global index. It's value is in that uniqueness.
(Yeah, I know it’s not central to your point.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
Around the world there are actually laws regulating physical squatting [1, 2], because it seen as a socially positive outcome (compared to leaving houses/land disused). And there are also often provisions that allow you to prevent squatting [3], but you have to give something back (e.g. dirt-cheap short-term rentals).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squatting_in_the_Netherlands, [2] https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-associations-squatter..., [3] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikraak
EDIT:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usucaption
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession
Such property can be seen to sit unused by anyone, but it's lack of availability (when it could otherwise be used) contributes to the scarcity of property in that district, and thus inflation of property prices in that area (be it naturally occurring or otherwise)
Another approach you can try instead of a formal complaint department is to apply a universal "use it or lose it" tax to the asset at risk of speculation, as economist Ramin Shokrizade famously did in EVE Online to oust speculators and solve problems with recessions:
https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130405/189...
What's hilarious is that in doing so, he unwittingly rederived Henry George's Land Value Tax from first principles.
Applying a properly sized tax that disincentives holding assets for speculation can actually reduce the price overall, because speculators stop jacking the price up knowing they can HODL forever.
Since the effect is the same no matter what, we don't need a huge statute listing what does and does not apply as X.
And tangentially: seeking a minimal state that exists solely to collect LVT (and possibly Pigovian and severance taxes) and distribute the proceeds evenly as UBI is the basic idea around geolibertarianism.
The costs, of course, as well as other considerations (legal...) are of a different scale.
You might reasonably say this isn’t what most people mean by “land” to which the reply is, the amount of “new land” you can make in this manner is pretty limited and usually the reserve of states or state owned enterprises.
Comparatively, nothing stops you from tripling the number of domains overnight.
Regarding whether it's "pretty limited", yes and no, imo:
Yes, compared to, say, the size of a continent, the amount of new land is tiny.
However, new land is usually made in highly sought-after (high-density, high-value etc) areas [citation needed]. So it would make better sense to compare the surface of the new land to the surface of the adjacent area.
For example, the polders in the Netherlands significantly augment the country's surface. The artificial islands in Tokyo Bay significantly add to the real estate of the harbour. The artificial islands in Dubai and Bahrain significantly add to the coastline.
I think that this is enough for OP's analogy between domain parking and land speculation to reasonably stand.
Even if we're willing to stretch into a third dimension, that oblate spheroid has a finite volume, and the overwhelmingly vast majority of it is inaccessible to meaningful possession/occupation; you can only dig so far down or build so far up.
Every citizen and especially corporation would self-assess the value of assets they possess, pay a roughly 7% tax on these values and be required to sell the assets to anyone willing to purchase them at this self-assessed price.
In your example, you could also say "I have to put a price on our cat, and...?" Or your glasses, or your jeans and underpants. But the proposal probably didn't have such things in mind
First, under this system, long-term speculation is not really viable, due to the high tax. So the buyer must have some reason for paying higher than the price you set, which you don't see, i.e. you under-utilize the asset. Google/Facebook ads work this way - every slot is always up for auction. Also similar dynamics in partnership agreement's "shotgun clauses", etc.
Second, you can always factor in your sentimentality into your price, then the buyer will buy your neighbor's house instead. But you have to pay for it in the form of a higher tax. This is like a penalty for obstructing economic efficiency.
Third, this system pretty much does away with the strict idea of private property, into what they call "partial common ownership". It's basically a way to have shared ownership (as in communism) without the central planning, i.e. in a way that might actually work. (In fact, it quite reduces the role of government.)
I'm not advocating for this system, but I think it's fun to think about.
If your startup success depends on a 10k domain name then you should probably rethink the whole thing anyway ...
I've been much more sympathetic to concerns about domain name brevity and pronounceability ever since I ignored those concerns for my personal domain - something I regret anew every time I have to tell somebody my email address over the phone.
https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-ceo-gives-back-millio...
For example, if someone has enough money for one year of rent and health insurance, and is not deemed a security risk, why not instantly admit them? If they get a job and pay tax, you let them stay as long as they pay tax. If they keep this up for X amount of years, offer them a citizenship.
While the thing you're saying sounds reasonable it just practically isn't possible to workout in US politics.
a) you can't realistically expect this class of immigrants not to use any social service (especially emergency), there will be costs that US isn't prepared to pay
b) there are bound to be negative consequences for having a explosively growing number of poorly integrated people that are treated as second class by the government
b) the US is already filled with "poorly integrated" people, the whole country was founded on immigration. The only way you'd necessarily be treated as "second class" is by not being eligible to vote, which tourists also aren't and they don't seem to mind much.
The specifics of what to charge and what to demand are obviously flexible, but to me the net positive seems pretty obvious.
(And in addition, nothing is stopping you from charging them for the average possibility of them using it)
And just how do you intend to enforce that? It sounds nice, but we can't deal with fraud - let alone trying to determine who should and shouldn't get something on that kind of scale.
How about the rest of the world adopting more of what makes people want to come to the US? Seems to be more rational (and sustainable) than advocating that everyone should just be able to come to the US.
As for your second point it's just so far off topic I won't warrant it with a response. I never even insinuated that the US is a model country.
You'd think a country with a budget of multiple trillions of dollars a year could afford some fingerprint readers and a SQL database.
which is a pretty amazing story when I just started using social media.