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How do we create an incentive model that kills the “parked domain” industry without out pricing people who want to host a legitimate non-commercial personal sit

• Kinrany 5y ago
  This is the same problem as land value tax that was never solved.
  • syshum 5y ago
    it was not solved by those that advocate for land value tax because it is not seen as a problem, just like many do not see domain "squatting" as a problem
  • WhyNotHugo 5y ago
    It's solved in some [rather left leaning] countries. When you buy land you must put it to use, and if it's unused after X years, it's considered abandoned and it goes up for sale again. TBH, I think it's a solid model -- buying a finite resource like land merely with the intent to deprive others of it and make a profit in the long term is as unethical as it gets. Though completely legal is most places, of course.
    • loonster 5y ago
      With land, not using it is the equivalent to a privately funded conservation site. Its not necessarily a bad thing. Many capitalistic countries also have adverse possession laws, where if someone uses the land for X number of years, it becomes theirs.
      • have_faith 5y ago
        This loophole is solved by making it that declaring the land as such status means the land is commited to that use for a minimum number of years that makes the conservation meaningful. Something like a decade minimum with a high bar for converting it for other usage afterwards. Farmers in the UK for instance already have some incentives to leave some fields alone.
    • InitialLastName 5y ago
      This is effectively the justification that was used to repeatedly confiscate land from the indigenous peoples of the current US: "They aren't building visible improvements on the land in the way that settlers will, so move them off and give it to settlers".
      • WhyNotHugo 5y ago
        Yeah, the justification is sensible to take land from organisations under your jurisdictions, that are part of your society, not civilizations that were there before you landed from another continent. But the US has a mentality of "our jurisdiction is infinite", so I'm not surprised they'd do that.
    • flashgordon 5y ago
      But how hard is it really to put a domain to use? Put up a hugo generated page that is even remotely related to the topic and off you go. Worse save a few related pages and reupload to a static site provider. A genuine entity wanting the domain will look to purchase even with "valid looking" content in there no? Surely "put to use" doesnt imply profiting? If it does put up banner ads? I am not saying this is ethical - just hard to make it discernible from ethical use. Atleast with land building something on it costs real money so it is easier to validate the "put to good use" clause! Sigh!
      • WhyNotHugo 5y ago
        You make valid points, and, ultimately, what constitutes a "valid use" and what doesn't falls back on the registrar or the entity in charge. If it's a for-profit, you're gonna have a hard time, but if it's more of a non-profit, or government organisation, you might have better luck. It's a huge "it depends" to be honest. FWIW, if someone buys a huge amount of land next to the big city, and puts up some ads, I wouldn't consider that giving it "proper use", and if someone needs to build a house, I'd consider that land abandoned and unused -- but I can understand that opinions (and even laws on the subject) will vary greatly around the world. The big question is: do you care about allowing people to have access to unused land to buy houses, or do you care about a corporation's right to own everything in sight?
• athenot 5y ago
  At this point, there are many alternative gTLDs that can be used for personal sites, and quite a few are super cheap. Maybe the squatters will catch up and eventually buy them all up but for now there's a decent availability.
  • RicoElectrico 5y ago
    Can you suggest one? I'm interested in a gTLD that won't raise its prices suddenly and is of good reputation - so FB and co. won't block it.
    • callahad 5y ago
      .org is controlled by a non-profit and I believe it has reasonable controls on price increases. (Private equity recently tried to obtain .org and jack up the prices, but the acquisition was blocked by ICANN https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/05/icann-blocks-controversial-sale-of-org-domain-to-a-private-equity-firm/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/05/icann-blocks-con...)
      • account42 5y ago
        > the acquisition was blocked by ICANN Putting it that way is very charitable towards ICANN. They only blocked it after much public outcry and after the CA attorney general started an inquiry [0]. There is no reason to believe that they won't try again after the frog is sufficiently boiled. [0] https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/17/icann_california_org_sale_delay/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/17/icann_california_org_...
  • account42 5y ago
    The problem is that if you are already on .io (or another domain that increases the price) moving to another TLD means breaking all incoming links, email addresses, etc. Not really a good option.
    • djbusby 5y ago
• snarf21 5y ago
  You have to increase the yearly renewal even more (imo). $120/year is only $10 a month. That is two coffees at Starbucks. If that is too expensive for your legitimate non-commercial purpose, then you probably don't really need a domain. Yeah, some squatters may still try the long game but it starts to get cost prohibitive. The hope would be that if it is expensive enough, the squatters may only hold the most likely TLDs for a specific domain instead of holding all of them at almost no risk. I also think that we can extend this by adding lots and lots of new TLDs. Yeah, the single word domains will get snapped right up but the space becomes ever bigger and harder to corner the market. We could also make a rule that when there is a new TLD, that existing domain holders from the longest lived TLDs get first right of refusal. So if ".cars" is added, Ford would get the first shot at ford.cars This squatting is the same reason we need a LVT on land to prevent people from squatting on property that could be developed to provide housing.
  • bliteben 5y ago
    Some of the best sites on the internet are run for less than $120/year. > This squatting is the same reason we need a LVT on land to prevent people from squatting on property that could be developed to provide housing. Yes because private property all exists to become housing.
  • antifa 5y ago
    Your "solution" to squatters would be to make sure normal people can't afford domains at all, the only affect this would have on squatters is that they would be a little bit more picky about their inventory and raise prices to compensate.
  • stjo 5y ago
    > So if ".cars" is added, Ford would get the first shot at ford.cars Actually .cars exists and ford.cars is indeed taken by Ford.
  • sltkr 5y ago
    That's a very US-centric view. There are many countries in the world where median wages are below $1000/month, and then $10/month is 1% of your income, which is a significant expense. Increasing the price even further means that people from poor countries won't be able to afford domains (at least not a .io or .com), and this is bad for the open web, because it means that fan forums move to Reddit or Discord, small businesses move to Facebook and WeChat, and so on, until all content is inside these walled gardens instead of the open web.
• aimor 5y ago
  My thought is to require all domains be sold for the same set price (or at least constant for each TLD). If someone wants to register 1,000 domains let them, but don't allow them to profit off that. If someone breaks the rule, revoke the domain. I'd like to hear reasons why this is a bad idea so I can stop thinking about it every time I get priced out.
  • jerrre 5y ago
    If I understand your solution correctly this puts the risk on the buyer? ie I naively buy a domain for a too high price, and then the registrar revokes the domain? The seller ends up with the money, and I end up with nothing? A smart seller could possibly even snatch back the domain from the registrar?
  • jerbearito 5y ago
    Ship it!
  • andruby 5y ago
    that seems like a nightmare to check. if 100 parties want to buy a specific domain from me (say: database.io), the incentive to sugar the deal will be huge. Why wouldn't I sell it to the party that'll gift me a Tesla when I sell them the domain for the fixed price?
    • pawelk 5y ago
      Or just put on the invoice: domain transfer: $49.00 totally unrelated consulting services: $49,951.00
  • ameliaquining 5y ago
    That sounds totally unenforceable. ICANN doesn't have the resources to investigate in detail allegations that a domain was sold for more than face value. And certainly, nobody involved in such a sale will have incentives to report it, under normal circumstances. Also, most desirable names would not be put to productive use since there'd be no relationship between what you can do with a name and how likely you are to get it, though this is a handwavier point.
• KingMachiavelli 5y ago
  I thought domain squatting violated US law? Is there some loophole or is paying just cheaper/quicker?
  • dhosek 5y ago
    Not as far as I know. I worked for a while for a company whose main business was squatting and throwing up ads on the pages. At least I worked for the part of the company that was trying other revenue models like lead generation although LG is of only slightly greater social value.
  • gowld 5y ago
    Only if the domain is violating a trademark.
• orangepanda 5y ago
  How about hiding the address bar? Would make domain names irrelevant
  • dhosek 5y ago
    Not all navigation is through links.
    • gowld 5y ago
      What non-link navigation needs a domain name? IP addresses work fine, like phone nmbers and street addresses.
      • ipaddr 5y ago
        We are moving to ip6 not away
      • dhosek 5y ago
        How about entering in a URL from an offline mention, whether that's a print ad, being mentioned in a podcast or shouted from the stage of an indie band playing in a bar? When I started a band in the 90s, there was a great deal of consideration made in choosing the name for there being an available domain name (at the time there were about two dozen English words which had not been registered as domain names, of which exactly one was a potential band name (osteoclasts) but we decided against that—we ended up with the suboptimal dream-in-color.net since the name was unavailable with neither dashless nor .com/.org options available). One important thing was that the domain name would be something that a semi-drunk person might remember later. Non-technical people will likely not recognize four three-digit numbers separated by periods as being an address for a website. And phone numbers have been largely supplanted by contact lists on phones (I've occasionally forgotten my own number). Looking over my call history, out of the last fifty outgoing calls, six are not in my phone book and all but one of these were dialed directly from search results on the phone.
      • 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
        Things like cloudflare "host" thousands of sites behind the same IP. Old-school shared hosting providers are doing the same.
• WhyNotHugo 5y ago
  In some countries, if you want to register a domain that's parked, you may appeal to the registrar, and they will take it away from the parker (unless they're legitimately planning to use it). The conditions of use of the domain state that you will give them _some_ use. "Planning to resell it" it is not considered a valid use. It's a public resource after all. As an analogy, imagine someone buys all the housing in town, just wanting to re-sell them at a higher price just because they bought them first. It's an obvious case for consumer protection to step in -- otherwise it's just angry mobs. Well, not in some countries.
  • paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Perhaps there could be a grace period? If you're clearly not using it within 6 months then it reverts and you get a partial refund?
  • ipaddr 5y ago
    Which countries?
  • 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
    Even if this is true, it is very easy to circumvent. Just host a blog with a few copy-pasted articles, a fake classifieds site, or a forum with registration closed, or something like that.
    • antifa 5y ago
      Too complicated, I'd like to start over with a new proposal. Get rid of bulk discounts on domains, enforce a fee on bulk purchases. First 15 domains per tax id are available at regular price. Additional domains have fees that escalate with scale. The companies using automated systems to scalp 100,000+ domains should disappear over night. This can attempted as an experiment for a new TLD first.
• BitwiseFool 5y ago
  I believe we should be using the term "Domain Scalping" rather than "Domain Squatting". At the most basic level, it re-frames the problem.
• InsomniacL 5y ago
  Don't Sell domains, instead sell a licence to use that domain. You cannot sell the licence to somebody else, however if you sell the business/website etc, the domain transfers with it. Sure, there will be a black market, however with the threat of having your domain licence revoked for breaking the licence agreement, I'm sure this will act as a sufficient deterrent. Kind of like an OS licence, I can sell the desktop and the licence stays with the hardware (aka website), but I cannot sell my OS licence separately to somebody else.
  • zhte415 5y ago
    Business: Unincorporated or incorporated? If the latter, just have a shell company and park some lorem ipsum, package some similar domains into the shell. This raises administrative hurdles, cost of enforcing, and makes it relatively easier for professional over a low barriers system. Domain name companies win. Interest: Who defines an interest, community or other? Personal? Website? Domains are used for a lot more than WWW on port 80 or 443.
    • InsomniacL 5y ago
      > business The logistics of setting up as many shell companies and domains which are squatted seems unreasonable. The onus is on the purchaser not to illegally purchase a domain against the licence agreement or the domain is revoked. Both of these would likely massively reduce the financial incentives domain squatters enjoy. > personal They can still licence a domain, but when they're done with it, it returns to the pool of available domains for others to purchase. > Websites sure, and websites are the major driving force behind domain squatting though. Maybe I'm explaining this poorly, and I know I haven't solved the worlds problems in a single post but it's fun to theorise, however if I purchase a software licence, I cannot sell that on. If a business purchases a software licence and that business changes ownership, the licence isn't always void.
• pavlov 5y ago
  For .io specifically, there are practically no legitimate non-commercial purposes since almost nobody lives in the British Indian Ocean Territories. Anybody with a .io domain is using it for branding rather than the original purpose of two-letter TLDs. It's like renting a space on a fashionable commercial street — if rent goes up, there's not much point complaining.
• AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > How do we create an incentive model that kills the “parked domain” industry without out pricing people who want to host a legitimate non-commercial personal site? The simplest solution would be to revoke domains with domain parking pages on them. If the domain contains an offer to sell the domain, you lose the domain. That wouldn't solve 100% of the problem, but it would solve 80% of the problem, and that's better than what we have.
  • Pxtl 5y ago
    This will only result in more sophisticated parked domain sites. That's what happens to phone numbers - companies buy phone numbers and put whatever trash phone services they can on them just to say "see we're using it for business we've got some pre-recorded phonesex running there".
    • AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      Do it anyway. It makes their lives harder. If someone can go to the domain and buy the domain, you lose the domain. It doesn't matter what else is there. If doesn't matter if nothing else is there. What matters is that something isn't: The ability to buy the domain. That means Joe Schmoe can't go to the domain, put in his credit card number and enrich the scalper. Because if he can, they lose the domain. If they come up with some convoluted scam to get around it, they'll get less business and scare away buyers who perceive it to be the subterfuge that it is, which is good. The best thing about it is the low cost to honest people not trying to sell domains for money, who shouldn't be affected at all.
  • ipaddr 5y ago
    What problem does this solve? Most domains are sold through exchanges
    • AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      So prohibit listing domains on exchanges? It's an offer to sell the domain that causes you to lose it, not where you put it. Putting it on the domain itself just makes it easy to find. But so does putting it on an exchange.
• Pxtl 5y ago
  > without out pricing people who want to host a legitimate non-commercial personal site Don't buy a .io domain for your personal site - stick to the gTLDs or national TLDs that are run by trusted governments (for reference, I have a .ca TLD because I trust the Canadian government to keep the cost roughly competitive with gTLDs). ccTLDs that have been bought by private companies are essentially privatized in a way that gTLDs and government-run ccTLDs are not.
  • account42 5y ago
    > ccTLDs that have been bought by private companies It should not even be possible for companies to buy ccTLDs.
    • Pxtl 5y ago
      Why not? ccTLDs were for countries to do with as they choose. If they sold/leased-so-loosely-that-it's-basically-sold their ccTLD to a private business to operate, who is ICANN to tell them different?
• Covzire 5y ago
  An app, perhaps call it ParkSurfing@Home that does nothing but silently visit parked domains in the background to burn up all their ad revenue without ever clicking on any links, making them completely worthless for advertising purposes. Wouldn't stop the main issue but it might kick in the rear.
  • gowld 5y ago
    That would have no effect. Ads are served from adservers, not content pages.
  • ipaddr 5y ago
    It would burn up your local resources and that of the adserver. Ads are loaded client-side.
• sombremesa 5y ago
  I believe if you kill the parked domain industry it will be harmful to legitimate businesses. Why? Because these domain squatters provide a valuable service - making sure domains are still purchasable by legitimate businesses, even if at a premium. Get rid of them, and people will go out and get various domains they like and might use one day (or redirect to the same spot), with no intention of selling them. More domains, not fewer, will languish.
• ricardo81 5y ago
  Nuking 'domain tasting' would be a start.
  • account42 5y ago
    I'd go one step further: Disallow corporations from selling public namespaces. Domain tasting exists because it encourages more registrations which is profitable for the registrars.
• notatoad 5y ago
  there was obviously some other issues with the whole scheme, but i think long-term the massive expansion of TLDs still holds promise to neutralize domain-parking. the big problem is the scarcity of .com domains along with people's insistence on needing the .com because it is "better".
• petilon 5y ago
  A related problem is, how do you make sure the domain goes to whoever values it most, as opposed to whoever thought of the name first? In the .com space a lot of good domain names are taken up by people who are not putting it to good use. I am not talking about parked domains, but people who upload an "under construction" gif and then don't update the page for the next 5 years. Maybe domain names should cost more.
  • account42 5y ago
    > A related problem is, how do you make sure the domain goes to whoever values it most Why should it go to whoever values it the most? And what do you even mean by thet? Whoever is willing to pay the most? Domains are most useful as a stable human readable name for a server/service. If someone comes along later with a "better" use is not a reason to take the name away since that (or doing so indirectly by increasing the cost past what the owner can/wants to bear) would destroy the main value of domains in the first place. And who are you to judge that an under construction gif is not a valid use of a domain. Maybe that gif is what the hoster wants to have there. Maybe there is more content that you don't know the path of. Maybe there are other non-HTTP services on that domain.