3 ms·
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 be
by 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 agoThank 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 agoThe 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.
- walshemj 7y agoNot so easy the technical requirements are not cheap and are quite rightly demanding - ie you can survive the continent failure mode.
- phicoh 7y agoFor big zones it is relatively cheap (i.e, the cost per domain is low). Since the invention of anycast routing, it is technically no longer complex. If a continent fails, then either all BGP announcements are already gone, or you need a way to stop them. Then traffic will be routed to other continents. It is not trivial, but for big zones if you get 1 euro per domain per year, you can do a lot of stuff. And that is the sort of prices people cared about back then. On the other hand, providing support, nobody has any idea how to spec that. What is a reasonable cost? The same goes for payment options.
- walshemj 7y agowhen I worked for .coop it was multiple ha systems per continent in all four main continents.