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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 revo

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. What exactly is difficult to understand here?

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
> You appealed to some people with guns 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.
- mdpopescu 6y ago
  > ... 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 :)
  - krapp 6y ago
    >Yeah, this is the fundamental disconnect I have with (apparently) most people. Rights come from God. Please objectively prove the existence of the specific God from which you assert that all rights derive.
    - mdpopescu 6y ago
      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 :) [1] https://www.firstthings.com/article/1996/02/001-why-we-cant-all-just-get-along https://www.firstthings.com/article/1996/02/001-why-we-cant-...
  - AlexandrB 6y ago
    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.
    - mdpopescu 6y ago
      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.
      - hansjorg 6y ago
        In the specific case you're railing against, arbitration by the complaints board is just a contractual provision in that private transaction. There is no "theft". Your whole understanding of this issue is absurd.
  - moate 6y ago
    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.
  - wonderwonder 6y ago
    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.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  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'?").
distances 6y ago
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.
- pistolpeteDK 6y ago
  just to clarify; 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.
pistolpeteDK 6y ago
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....
- Dracophoenix 6y ago
  >>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.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    > 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.
MikeUt 6y ago
> They had paid for that right. 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?

disgruntledphd2 6y ago

> You appealed to some people with guns 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.

mdpopescu 6y ago
> ... 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 :)
- krapp 6y ago
  >Yeah, this is the fundamental disconnect I have with (apparently) most people. Rights come from God. Please objectively prove the existence of the specific God from which you assert that all rights derive.
  - mdpopescu 6y ago
    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 :) [1] https://www.firstthings.com/article/1996/02/001-why-we-cant-all-just-get-along https://www.firstthings.com/article/1996/02/001-why-we-cant-...
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  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.
  - mdpopescu 6y ago
    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.
    - hansjorg 6y ago
      In the specific case you're railing against, arbitration by the complaints board is just a contractual provision in that private transaction. There is no "theft". Your whole understanding of this issue is absurd.
- moate 6y ago
  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.
- wonderwonder 6y ago
  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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
shadowgovt 6y ago
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'?").

distances 6y ago

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.

pistolpeteDK 6y ago
just to clarify; 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.

pistolpeteDK 6y ago

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....

Dracophoenix 6y ago
>>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.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  > 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.

MikeUt 6y ago

> They had paid for that right. 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?