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Ask HN: Would the internet be better if domain squatting was made illegal?

2 points by iosystem ↗ HN
Seems like all domains that are either short or catchy are taken and nothing exists if I go to them. I'm curious what you all think. Should a policy be made to stop the bad behaviour? Would it make the internet better or would things stay the same? Sure, someone can always make a long domain name or use .whatever but it seems like the popular websites rarely ever follow that example.

20 comments

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akerl_
How do you identify who is squatting and who isn't?
iosystem
Someone could make a complaint with the registry if they see no changes after a period of time that's reasonable? I think it could be automated for many cases such as when domain squatters aren't even pointing their domains anywhere.
gus_massa
If someone dies and the family wants to keep the blog running as a memorial, it will be consider a squatter?

If someone serves adds in a few the typosquatting domains, there are changes all the time, and from time to time the squatter can change the formatting (like the background color, or change the add network, or swap the adds and the ring), will it be consider not squatting?

akerl_
How does that work? There's plenty of use cases for a domain that don't involve hosting a public website.

I own a domain to use for internal DNS for my systems. Am I squatting?

iwanttocomment
You're confusing the web for the Internet. As someone who has actively used a custom domain for email for literally decades but does not have or need a web presence, I can assure you that a domain name can have daily, extensive active use without any sort of obvious public-facing changes.
iosystem
Should still work for email as well. Domain registry can confirm if domain is setup for email.
iwanttocomment
I don't think you understand how all this works.
iosystem
I've setup a domain for email. So please explain to me how you don't think wherever you park your domain has access to that information?
akerl_
What’s the test? Your registrar can see if you have MX records, or they can send a test email to those records, but that just means squatters need to stand up 1 mail server and set all their MX records to point to it.
iosystem
Currently squatters aren't even bothering to setup the countless domains they own for that example. Sure, they could automate the process for their collection of domains but someone could always draft the policy to make a person abusing the system to get banned from the domain registry.
akerl_
What’s the hypothesis for that policy? How do you detect that somebody is abusing the system?
aurizon
Add fees, real users will pay those fees.
akerl_
Wasn't there a huge uproar when TLDs tried to increase the cost to register?
aurizon
yes, the squatters felt the knife at their throat...
akerl_
Do you have some kind of citation for the uproar being from squatters? If memory serves, the uproar was that most folks felt like registrars were trying to squeeze ordinary folks for more cash for a resource that costs them next to nothing to manage.
aurizon
Think like a herder, you have 10,000 cows = feed/milk/clean = time and $$, now you have a game with 10,000 virtual cows and each cow costs $2-3/year to pasture. So you want to sell one a year = sale price of $30K to break even. Ask the cowherd about the next cow = also $30K. To change this you have to change the basis of the game. What if it cost $500 for each virtual cow/year for virtual vet fees. So hos 10,000 cows now cost $500 each. I know we speak of cows, but we have now tossed a cat among his chickens = a huge ruckus will occur. His former model is broken, with annual vet bills for his 10,000 coes of $500 each = $5 million a year in vet fees. So this is the squatter game, it has been made dirt cheap to lock up domains for small annual fees. The way to change it is to make domains 'eat' Same thing in houses as rates went up, people who bought for 5% down with 1.5% corporate $$ and now stuck with 5-6% money = their morgtages are eating them alive.

Will changes occure? I hope so. The current squatterverse rewards the worst of people.

iosystem
It seems most things are broken when a person has endless amounts of money compared to other persons.
navjack27
No that won't do anything for the Internet at large
logicalmonster
IMO, this opens up a real bad can of worms regarding property rights where rich/powerful organizations are going to be able to bully individuals much easier to seize domains they want.

Imagine you have some snazzy domain for a project, but all of a sudden Coca-Cola or McDonald's marketing team wants to use it for some Super Bowl promotion next year. If they apply their full weight and pressure on both the "independent governing board" that determines disputes, as well as on you ("Better accept this one-time offer of $500 for your domain now or who knows what the board will decide?"), essentially you've really disadvantaged individuals.