5 ms·

> Plus there were the squatters, of course, since no one was looking after the namespace anymore. Explain how ideally you think this should have been handled t

by gist 7y ago

> Plus there were the squatters, of course, since no one was looking after the namespace anymore. Explain how ideally you think this should have been handled then? Specifically someone wants to register a domain name and how should they go about doing so and what specifically should be required of them prior to registering and what should happen if they don't 'use' the domain and how are you going to define 'use the domain exactly' and how you will review fairly whatever the interpretation is? How would you setup an alternate system for doing so and practically implement it? Squatters by the way are a myth that was invented in the 90's by the media and used in an obviously pejorative way.

neilv 7y ago
> Squatters by the way are a myth that was invented in the 90's by the media and used in an obviously pejorative way. How do you mean it was a myth? You remember all the domain name for sale landing pages, the faux SEO (not really) pages, the domain name marketplace sites full of massive numbers never-used domains (sometimes domains with some token SEO-ing done on them to increase the rank they could mention), the registrars who helped automate massive buying of domain names, and all the people (including people you knew personally, not made up) talking about how they were buying up domain names for their value rather than to use (and the people themselves sometimes said they were "squatting")? Are you saying something else?
- gist 7y ago
  No the idea that there is something wrong with that is what I challenge. Why? Because it assumes that there is either a practical solution to preventing that behavior or that that behavior is in some way bad. For whatever the reason even though the internet is commercial people seem to think that domain names in particular (and specifically .com) is some kind of public trust that it's wrong to profit off of. Everyone knows that there are other ways to use a domain name they just decide they want (mostly) the .com. And it's not different because it's the internet. So for example let's say you want neilv.com but someone has it figuring they can sell it to someone at some point. There is nothing preventing you from picking (especially today) neilv.somethhingelse or neilvonline.com and so on. But you have decided (most people) they want the .com. Then they feel entitled to having that .com when they come around to needing it. And they also think there should be some perfect system developed to decide who is the valid user and use of that domain when that practically would never happen. Now if the little old flower shop choose neilv.com and was 'using it' but not 'using it' is that more legit? Not really. The average person might still try to entice that owner with money so they could use the domain name. Lastly people think that as a group others will or should not seek to profit and that trying to profit off an opportunity that you spot (that someone else doesn't; or in advance of them) is wrong in some way. But it's not. It's human nature and it's acceptable it's just that it pisses people off so they try to paint it in a negative way. And if someone decides to take a chance and grab domains with the intent of waiting for the right buyer to come along that is not any different than other ways people will try to make money. The media of course (and bloggers) feeds into this and stokes it in many ways. If it was so obvious that buying domains or trying to hoard them was a way to make money why didn't everyone do it? Not because they thought it was the wrong thing to do. Because they didn't think of doing it and/or didn't have the money to do it or weren't around or weren't creative enough. Not because they felt it was wrong. > the registrars who helped automate massive buying of domain names Exactly and anyone can do this. It's not tax medallions dolled out by politicians. Anyone can buy up domain names.
  - neilv 7y ago
    Thank you for clarifying and explaining. I could possibly see your argument, but ICANN's early actions ("Now everyone can get money by being a registrar middleperson, for what's still necessarily a central registry! And sure, one person can buy thousands of namespace entries, to scalp them!") didn't give me the impression that they'd worked through all the possibilities for the goal of managing this resource. The best anyone could come up with was throwing away the prior rules, unhinged profiteering handouts, and assuming an unregulated market will work it out in the end? FWIW, just a small counterexample to the assertion that people weren't stopped from buying domain names on any possible wrong-ness of it... I distinctly recall being surprised and disapproving when I first heard of someone registering a generic word (not based on the name of their organization) as a domain name. It was like the reaction when the first Usenet spammers started. It's not that nobody had thought of that, but there was some sense of stewardship and respectability that precluded such things (and also, at one point, rules about commercial use). We onboarded a large number of people into some of the thinking with every new college frosh class, every September. I'm not saying that that particular notion of decency was sustainable during a gold rush, but "they felt it was wrong" was the barrier sometimes.
    - phicoh 7y ago
      The thing is, by definition, the registry is a monopoly for a certain TLD. So the idea was that those registries need to be regulated. What if they would just ask insane prices? A registry has an 'easy' part, and that is actually maintaining a list of names and associated data, and providing that as DNS zones. The hard part is dealing with individual customers. Providing service, collecting money, etc. So the idea at the time was to have lots of registrars competing on what service they provide for what price and having more or less regulated registries that provide a fixed service at an agreed price. By and large this system worked. Early on, it was not clear if large zones like .com would actually scale. So there was some restraint of registering silly names, because that could lead to problems. At some point, computers got fast enough and big enough memories that large zones were no longer a serious worry and everybody moved in to get all the nice domains.
- username444 7y ago
  Remember it? There's a squatter on a domain I want, who is offering to _rent it_ for $2000 _per month_. An archive.org search shows it was rented for 2 months in the last 7 years. I don't agree with ICANNs proposal in the article, but squatting is an issue.
deogeo 7y ago
"If you don't provide an ideal solution, your criticism is invalid."
- penguinalgebra 7y ago
  More like "if you can't even suggest a marginally better solution than the status quo, your criticism is invalid" since you're tacitly admitting that as far as you know, the status quo is already the best solution.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    The first step to a solution or improvement, is identifying there is a problem.
mort96 7y ago
Have you even _tried_ registering a domain? Any time I go looking for nice domain names, either for fun or for a purpose, I go through a ton of excellent domain names owned by squatters who sell the domains for ridiculous or undisclosed prices, before finding a few less desirable domain names which are actually available. How are squatters a "myth" in any way?
- phicoh 7y ago
  A few years ago I wanted a domain for a project. I had no trouble coming up with a nice 6 letter word and registering the .com and .org. Everybody wants the same popular words, but if you get a little bit creative, the domains are usually free.
  - webmaven 7y ago
    This appears to be a previously-unknown-to-me definition of the word "free". Care to explain a bit?
    - girvo 7y ago
      As in, "unregistered to someone else", no? I could be misunderstanding both of you however, and have no stake in this discussion
    - phicoh 7y ago
      See https://thesaurus.yourdictionary.com/free https://thesaurus.yourdictionary.com/free number 3.
      - webmaven 7y ago
        Oh. So, Free as in Memory, I suppose.
- gist 7y ago
  > either for fun or for a purpose So if for example the name you wanted 'for fun' was grabbed years ago by someone else who wanted it 'for fun' that would bother you less? Or you would then think (honestly) 'wow what a waste that person uses it for 'fun' and I have an actual real (and importantly better) use for the name. My point in part is that if there were no people buying domain names to sell them there is most likely going to be a situation where someone will (in year 2019) have gotten to the 'good' name first and it wouldn't be available. Lastly in a capitalistic society do you feel justified in being unhappy because there is physical real estate in desirable places (not startup desirable either but just desirable like Miami Beach let's say) where someone bought land or buildings years ago before you were born and now you can't afford to live there and have to pick a less desirable location?
StillBored 7y ago
'how are you going to define 'use the domain exactly'' Well for starters, it might be useful to have actual name resolution rather than nothing but a whois record. Back 30+ years ago or so, I sorta randomly named my home subnet of the form firstinitiallastname.net, then when wifi came out I similarly named the ssids. Then a couple years later I decided it might not be a bad idea to register the name but some guy was using it as a vanity domain. That lasted for about two years and then it got picked up by a domain squatter and has been sitting there completely unused for > 10 years. Today the whois record points at ename.com, which I contacted a few years ago to find out how much it was going to cost to transfer the domain. Apparently they have some kind of bidding garbage, but it counter-bid the $25(or similarly low amount I offered) to something like $15,000. I have another domain, i've been planning on using, but updating a 100 wifi devices passwords is a PITA.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> How would you setup an alternate system for doing so and practically implement it? The simple solution is to prohibit the sale of domain names. This is also how trademarks work in the US -- you can't sell a trademark. Businesses get around this by transferring the trademark in connection with the sale of the "goodwill" associated with it, and typically also the rest of the company that holds the trademark. They could then do the same thing here -- transfer a domain along with the business that owns it. You're selling the business and not the domain name, the domain name just comes with it. But you can't sell only the domain name, which puts the squatters out of business. What squatters would then attempt to do is to sell some nominal asset in conjunction with the domain name and claim that the sale is of the other thing and not the domain name, but judges are not idiots. If you're selling a valuable domain attached to a $1 knickknack for $5000, it's clear that the price is being paid for the domain name and not the knickknack. Moreover, even if it doesn't solve 100% of the problem, it makes the squatter's life harder and makes it more difficult for them to advertise the sale of domain names etc., which would at least be an improvement with no major cost to legitimate users.
- tedunangst 7y ago
  Are you going to prohibit domain leasing?
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    Could prohibit charging money for it.
- gist 7y ago
  > This is also how trademarks work in the US -- you can't sell a trademark. You can do that (as you are pointing out) so I am not sure why you are even saying that. > They could then do the same thing here -- transfer a domain along with the business that owns it. So now you are going to define what 'a business' is and further saying that a domain name can only be used for 'a business' and not by a person? Or are you going to extend this to what you think are 'legit' personal uses of domains? What you are trying to say is that you don't think that someone should be allowed to be 'in the business of selling domain names and we know it when we see it', right? So you are now going to take away all of the property that someone 'in the business of selling domain names' has and then what are you going to do with that exactly? Setup a system to then decide what an appropriate use of those domains are?

by gist 7y ago

neilv 7y ago

> Squatters by the way are a myth that was invented in the 90's by the media and used in an obviously pejorative way. How do you mean it was a myth? You remember all the domain name for sale landing pages, the faux SEO (not really) pages, the domain name marketplace sites full of massive numbers never-used domains (sometimes domains with some token SEO-ing done on them to increase the rank they could mention), the registrars who helped automate massive buying of domain names, and all the people (including people you knew personally, not made up) talking about how they were buying up domain names for their value rather than to use (and the people themselves sometimes said they were "squatting")? Are you saying something else?

gist 7y ago
No the idea that there is something wrong with that is what I challenge. Why? Because it assumes that there is either a practical solution to preventing that behavior or that that behavior is in some way bad. For whatever the reason even though the internet is commercial people seem to think that domain names in particular (and specifically .com) is some kind of public trust that it's wrong to profit off of. Everyone knows that there are other ways to use a domain name they just decide they want (mostly) the .com. And it's not different because it's the internet. So for example let's say you want neilv.com but someone has it figuring they can sell it to someone at some point. There is nothing preventing you from picking (especially today) neilv.somethhingelse or neilvonline.com and so on. But you have decided (most people) they want the .com. Then they feel entitled to having that .com when they come around to needing it. And they also think there should be some perfect system developed to decide who is the valid user and use of that domain when that practically would never happen. Now if the little old flower shop choose neilv.com and was 'using it' but not 'using it' is that more legit? Not really. The average person might still try to entice that owner with money so they could use the domain name. Lastly people think that as a group others will or should not seek to profit and that trying to profit off an opportunity that you spot (that someone else doesn't; or in advance of them) is wrong in some way. But it's not. It's human nature and it's acceptable it's just that it pisses people off so they try to paint it in a negative way. And if someone decides to take a chance and grab domains with the intent of waiting for the right buyer to come along that is not any different than other ways people will try to make money. The media of course (and bloggers) feeds into this and stokes it in many ways. If it was so obvious that buying domains or trying to hoard them was a way to make money why didn't everyone do it? Not because they thought it was the wrong thing to do. Because they didn't think of doing it and/or didn't have the money to do it or weren't around or weren't creative enough. Not because they felt it was wrong. > the registrars who helped automate massive buying of domain names Exactly and anyone can do this. It's not tax medallions dolled out by politicians. Anyone can buy up domain names.
- neilv 7y ago
  Thank you for clarifying and explaining. I could possibly see your argument, but ICANN's early actions ("Now everyone can get money by being a registrar middleperson, for what's still necessarily a central registry! And sure, one person can buy thousands of namespace entries, to scalp them!") didn't give me the impression that they'd worked through all the possibilities for the goal of managing this resource. The best anyone could come up with was throwing away the prior rules, unhinged profiteering handouts, and assuming an unregulated market will work it out in the end? FWIW, just a small counterexample to the assertion that people weren't stopped from buying domain names on any possible wrong-ness of it... I distinctly recall being surprised and disapproving when I first heard of someone registering a generic word (not based on the name of their organization) as a domain name. It was like the reaction when the first Usenet spammers started. It's not that nobody had thought of that, but there was some sense of stewardship and respectability that precluded such things (and also, at one point, rules about commercial use). We onboarded a large number of people into some of the thinking with every new college frosh class, every September. I'm not saying that that particular notion of decency was sustainable during a gold rush, but "they felt it was wrong" was the barrier sometimes.
  - phicoh 7y ago
    The thing is, by definition, the registry is a monopoly for a certain TLD. So the idea was that those registries need to be regulated. What if they would just ask insane prices? A registry has an 'easy' part, and that is actually maintaining a list of names and associated data, and providing that as DNS zones. The hard part is dealing with individual customers. Providing service, collecting money, etc. So the idea at the time was to have lots of registrars competing on what service they provide for what price and having more or less regulated registries that provide a fixed service at an agreed price. By and large this system worked. Early on, it was not clear if large zones like .com would actually scale. So there was some restraint of registering silly names, because that could lead to problems. At some point, computers got fast enough and big enough memories that large zones were no longer a serious worry and everybody moved in to get all the nice domains.
username444 7y ago
Remember it? There's a squatter on a domain I want, who is offering to _rent it_ for $2000 _per month_. An archive.org search shows it was rented for 2 months in the last 7 years. I don't agree with ICANNs proposal in the article, but squatting is an issue.

deogeo 7y ago

"If you don't provide an ideal solution, your criticism is invalid."

penguinalgebra 7y ago
More like "if you can't even suggest a marginally better solution than the status quo, your criticism is invalid" since you're tacitly admitting that as far as you know, the status quo is already the best solution.
- deogeo 7y ago
  The first step to a solution or improvement, is identifying there is a problem.

mort96 7y ago

Have you even _tried_ registering a domain? Any time I go looking for nice domain names, either for fun or for a purpose, I go through a ton of excellent domain names owned by squatters who sell the domains for ridiculous or undisclosed prices, before finding a few less desirable domain names which are actually available. How are squatters a "myth" in any way?

phicoh 7y ago
A few years ago I wanted a domain for a project. I had no trouble coming up with a nice 6 letter word and registering the .com and .org. Everybody wants the same popular words, but if you get a little bit creative, the domains are usually free.
- webmaven 7y ago
  This appears to be a previously-unknown-to-me definition of the word "free". Care to explain a bit?
  - girvo 7y ago
    As in, "unregistered to someone else", no? I could be misunderstanding both of you however, and have no stake in this discussion
  - phicoh 7y ago
    See https://thesaurus.yourdictionary.com/free https://thesaurus.yourdictionary.com/free number 3.
    - webmaven 7y ago
      Oh. So, Free as in Memory, I suppose.
gist 7y ago
> either for fun or for a purpose So if for example the name you wanted 'for fun' was grabbed years ago by someone else who wanted it 'for fun' that would bother you less? Or you would then think (honestly) 'wow what a waste that person uses it for 'fun' and I have an actual real (and importantly better) use for the name. My point in part is that if there were no people buying domain names to sell them there is most likely going to be a situation where someone will (in year 2019) have gotten to the 'good' name first and it wouldn't be available. Lastly in a capitalistic society do you feel justified in being unhappy because there is physical real estate in desirable places (not startup desirable either but just desirable like Miami Beach let's say) where someone bought land or buildings years ago before you were born and now you can't afford to live there and have to pick a less desirable location?

StillBored 7y ago

'how are you going to define 'use the domain exactly'' Well for starters, it might be useful to have actual name resolution rather than nothing but a whois record. Back 30+ years ago or so, I sorta randomly named my home subnet of the form firstinitiallastname.net, then when wifi came out I similarly named the ssids. Then a couple years later I decided it might not be a bad idea to register the name but some guy was using it as a vanity domain. That lasted for about two years and then it got picked up by a domain squatter and has been sitting there completely unused for > 10 years. Today the whois record points at ename.com, which I contacted a few years ago to find out how much it was going to cost to transfer the domain. Apparently they have some kind of bidding garbage, but it counter-bid the $25(or similarly low amount I offered) to something like $15,000. I have another domain, i've been planning on using, but updating a 100 wifi devices passwords is a PITA.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

> How would you setup an alternate system for doing so and practically implement it? The simple solution is to prohibit the sale of domain names. This is also how trademarks work in the US -- you can't sell a trademark. Businesses get around this by transferring the trademark in connection with the sale of the "goodwill" associated with it, and typically also the rest of the company that holds the trademark. They could then do the same thing here -- transfer a domain along with the business that owns it. You're selling the business and not the domain name, the domain name just comes with it. But you can't sell only the domain name, which puts the squatters out of business. What squatters would then attempt to do is to sell some nominal asset in conjunction with the domain name and claim that the sale is of the other thing and not the domain name, but judges are not idiots. If you're selling a valuable domain attached to a $1 knickknack for $5000, it's clear that the price is being paid for the domain name and not the knickknack. Moreover, even if it doesn't solve 100% of the problem, it makes the squatter's life harder and makes it more difficult for them to advertise the sale of domain names etc., which would at least be an improvement with no major cost to legitimate users.

tedunangst 7y ago
Are you going to prohibit domain leasing?
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  Could prohibit charging money for it.
gist 7y ago
> This is also how trademarks work in the US -- you can't sell a trademark. You can do that (as you are pointing out) so I am not sure why you are even saying that. > They could then do the same thing here -- transfer a domain along with the business that owns it. So now you are going to define what 'a business' is and further saying that a domain name can only be used for 'a business' and not by a person? Or are you going to extend this to what you think are 'legit' personal uses of domains? What you are trying to say is that you don't think that someone should be allowed to be 'in the business of selling domain names and we know it when we see it', right? So you are now going to take away all of the property that someone 'in the business of selling domain names' has and then what are you going to do with that exactly? Setup a system to then decide what an appropriate use of those domains are?