5 ms·

Seems like a nice victory in a single battle. But in the context of a much larger war in the TLD space it doesn’t seem like domain registrants are winning: htt

Seems like a nice victory in a single battle. But in the context of a much larger war in the TLD space it doesn’t seem like domain registrants are winning: https://domainnamewire.com/2020/11/19/donuts-is-acquiring-afilias/ https://domainnamewire.com/2020/11/19/donuts-is-acquiring-af... EDIT to add: http://domainincite.com/26107-westerdal-offloads-two-more-gtlds-to-donuts http://domainincite.com/26107-westerdal-offloads-two-more-gt...

mr_toad 6y ago
Maybe the best outcome will be that Donuts gobbles up everything, gets sued for being an illegal monopoly, broken up, and then the whole sordid registry system can be replaced.
- noizejoy 6y ago
  Now you have me curious - what kind of better replacement do you have in mind?
  - wegs 6y ago
    Rules: 1) First-come-first-serve for your first handful of domains. Price is nominal (e.g. $1/year). 2) Increasing price with number of domains held. If I hold myname.com, it's $1. If I hold a thousand domain, the last 500 are at $1000/year. 3) Oversight for transfers. If sold, resale value is capped. Historic domains shouldn't be used for spam but perhaps go to archive.org or similar entities. 4) Managed by a government institution or not-for-profit with open meetings, salary caps, public records requests, and other (legally-enforceable) checks-and-balances. 5) Several TLDs, but you can't register in all of them. You can have mybusiness.com or mybusiness.mobi, but not all of the above. If I have the same business name as you (Apple records v. Apple computer), I go to a different TLD. 6) Rules for new TLDs. You can't pull the Coursera.org "We're a not-for-profit" shtick. Old domains grandfathered in. 7) Oversight/governing board with members from the EFF, FSF, OSF, and so on.
    - zrm 6y ago
      > Increasing price with number of domains held. If I hold myname.com, it's $1. If I hold a thousand domain, the last 500 are at $1000/year. People will just form a thousand LLCs or use straw men. > Managed by a government institution or not-for-profit with open meetings, salary caps, public records requests, and other (legally-enforceable) checks-and-balances. I think you're making this too complicated. Just prohibit them from ever raising the price or changing the terms on an existing registrant. The cost of hosting goes down over time, so the price should never increase. If you started off paying $10/year, it never goes up, the end. And then create more sensible top-level domains, like when they're industry-specific. Then there is more competition between TLDs and the value of good names stays lower, which discourages squatting because it's less profitable when good names are less scarce.
      - jlokier 6y ago
        > People will just form a thousand LLCs or use straw men. Replace "if I hold" with "if the Beneficial Owner holds" to stop that. Beneficial ownership is not masked by forming LLCs or using intermediaries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneficial_ownership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneficial_ownership
        vxNsr 6y ago
        How do you enforce that? Now you need to have a regulatory agency whose sole purpose is to investigate people, companies attempting to abuse, workaround the system.
        jlokier 6y ago
        You can't enforce it consistently - as another commenter said, in practice ownership is still masked. But if the price or terms of ownership of something like domain ownership were legally defined using a reference to beneficial owners, that would make ownership the result of fraud (if terms haven't been complied with) and therefore precarious when such owners are discovered later. The possibility of losing a valuable domain later due to discovery of that breach of terms would create an incentive against that kind of fraud. If the terms are just to set a higher price, without requiring beneficial owners to be named, potential owners might be willing to simply pay the higher amount without revealing who they actually are, to ensure they don't face the risk of losing the domain on discovery, and that would achieve the original goal of raising the price.
  - ohthehugemanate 6y ago
    I can't believe i'm saying this, but... this is probably a good use case for a blockchain with limited committers. Intermediary businesses can form to handle getting the three (or whatever) committers necessary, competition between committers keeps their fees low, competition between intermediary companies keep their fees low, distributed ledger keeps everyone honest about ownership. Do I get my VC check now?

mr_toad 6y ago

Maybe the best outcome will be that Donuts gobbles up everything, gets sued for being an illegal monopoly, broken up, and then the whole sordid registry system can be replaced.

noizejoy 6y ago
Now you have me curious - what kind of better replacement do you have in mind?
- wegs 6y ago
  Rules: 1) First-come-first-serve for your first handful of domains. Price is nominal (e.g. $1/year). 2) Increasing price with number of domains held. If I hold myname.com, it's $1. If I hold a thousand domain, the last 500 are at $1000/year. 3) Oversight for transfers. If sold, resale value is capped. Historic domains shouldn't be used for spam but perhaps go to archive.org or similar entities. 4) Managed by a government institution or not-for-profit with open meetings, salary caps, public records requests, and other (legally-enforceable) checks-and-balances. 5) Several TLDs, but you can't register in all of them. You can have mybusiness.com or mybusiness.mobi, but not all of the above. If I have the same business name as you (Apple records v. Apple computer), I go to a different TLD. 6) Rules for new TLDs. You can't pull the Coursera.org "We're a not-for-profit" shtick. Old domains grandfathered in. 7) Oversight/governing board with members from the EFF, FSF, OSF, and so on.
  - zrm 6y ago
    > Increasing price with number of domains held. If I hold myname.com, it's $1. If I hold a thousand domain, the last 500 are at $1000/year. People will just form a thousand LLCs or use straw men. > Managed by a government institution or not-for-profit with open meetings, salary caps, public records requests, and other (legally-enforceable) checks-and-balances. I think you're making this too complicated. Just prohibit them from ever raising the price or changing the terms on an existing registrant. The cost of hosting goes down over time, so the price should never increase. If you started off paying $10/year, it never goes up, the end. And then create more sensible top-level domains, like when they're industry-specific. Then there is more competition between TLDs and the value of good names stays lower, which discourages squatting because it's less profitable when good names are less scarce.
    - jlokier 6y ago
      > People will just form a thousand LLCs or use straw men. Replace "if I hold" with "if the Beneficial Owner holds" to stop that. Beneficial ownership is not masked by forming LLCs or using intermediaries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneficial_ownership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneficial_ownership
      - vxNsr 6y ago
        How do you enforce that? Now you need to have a regulatory agency whose sole purpose is to investigate people, companies attempting to abuse, workaround the system.
        jlokier 6y ago
        You can't enforce it consistently - as another commenter said, in practice ownership is still masked. But if the price or terms of ownership of something like domain ownership were legally defined using a reference to beneficial owners, that would make ownership the result of fraud (if terms haven't been complied with) and therefore precarious when such owners are discovered later. The possibility of losing a valuable domain later due to discovery of that breach of terms would create an incentive against that kind of fraud. If the terms are just to set a higher price, without requiring beneficial owners to be named, potential owners might be willing to simply pay the higher amount without revealing who they actually are, to ensure they don't face the risk of losing the domain on discovery, and that would achieve the original goal of raising the price.
- ohthehugemanate 6y ago
  I can't believe i'm saying this, but... this is probably a good use case for a blockchain with limited committers. Intermediary businesses can form to handle getting the three (or whatever) committers necessary, competition between committers keeps their fees low, competition between intermediary companies keep their fees low, distributed ledger keeps everyone honest about ownership. Do I get my VC check now?