15 ms·

> individuals should be able to have and own their own domain names We should probably remember that no-one "owns" a domain, at least not in the traditional se

> individuals should be able to have and own their own domain names We should probably remember that no-one "owns" a domain, at least not in the traditional sense of ownership.

IshKebab 4y ago
What traditional sense?
- josephcsible 4y ago
  With traditional ownership, you can pay a lump sum of money for something up front, and then it's yours forever unless you decide to get rid of it. With domains, you have to keep paying over and over or your "ownership" gets revoked.
  - iso1631 4y ago
    Ownership rights vary from culture to culture and from country to country. Even in the US you don't get to own something forever, you get to own it until someone takes it off you to build a shopping mall for example. In most countries, leased property is often referred to as "owned", yet you have to keep paying over and over to renew that lease.
    - mkmk3 4y ago
      Pretty surprising to me if others agree, if you lease a car you dont own that car, do you?
      - permo-w 4y ago
        my parents lease a car. I would regard it as their car, and possibly go so far as to say they own it, if I wasn't thinking too hard about it, and maybe even if I was. it's in their possession.
        em1sar 4y ago
        that's a ridiculous cope, they rent the car they do not own it, the bank owns it
        southerntofu 4y ago
        By this standard, nobody owns anything: as long as you pay property taxes, you're just renting from the State. I don't entirely disagree with this interpretation: as others have pointed out, whatever you "own" can be quickly expropriated by local powers to build a highway, airport, stadium...
        psychoslave 4y ago
        And local powers can be dismantled, or see part of its territory being annexed by an other sovereign power. As we say, nothing lasts forever. In that regard, ownership is more like "sizing the window in a large enough shape so that all stakeholders are convinced that it will never be required to put special attention on it again, despite ineluctable changes". Maybe privileges, responsibilities and liability are less delusional terms for that matter.
        hgomersall 4y ago
        Moreover, the state protects what you "own" from being appropriated by the person with the bigger club. "Private property" very much depends on public goodwill.
        gnuj3 4y ago
        If they will own it at the end of the payments (what we call Hire Purchase in UK) then yes, I’d regard it as their car. If they making monthly payments over certain amount of time and after that time they need to give the car back then no - they just renting it.
        logifail 4y ago
        > I would regard it as their car, and possibly go so far as to say they own it, if I wasn't thinking too hard about it, and maybe even if I was. it's in their possession. Thought experiment: If they were to damage their vehicle (but assuming it's still legal to drive), who gets to decide whether it should - or indeed must - be repaired? Your parents, or someone else? (Full disclosure: I recently added some scratches to my wife's car after a concrete pillar jumped out in front of me in an underground car park. I don't need to involve the insurance company, I don't need to talk to any bank or finance company, I can simply go to any local independent provider and have the car repaired. Or indeed not, if I decide it's not worth it.)
      - furyg3 4y ago
        Depends on how you think about it. You could say that you 'own' it but you have obligations (lease payments) or it will be seized. The same is true for property you 'own', if you don't pay your taxes or fail to manage the property, it will be seized.
        em1sar 4y ago
        not paying taxes on your property is different from not owning something and missing a recurring payment.
        sgjohnson 4y ago
        Not really. With property taxes, you lease the title to “your” land from the government.
        happymellon 4y ago
        Except that if you don't pay your taxes, they might not take your house. If you fail to pay your lease then they will reclaim that particular item.
        judge2020 4y ago
        > if you don't pay your taxes, they might not take your house. At least in the states they absolutely do. It starts off as a tax lien which is then sold to whoever wants to buy it, so that the private sector handles actually reclaiming the land and re-listing it on the stock market.
        happymellon 4y ago
        That is just how US law is structured though. They could just as easily say that they will reclaim the loss through recovery of your assets or by weight in blood. https://www.bristol.gov.uk/council-tax/what-happens-if-you-dont-pay https://www.bristol.gov.uk/council-tax/what-happens-if-you-d... In the UK the process is different, which just shows that they don't have to take your house to reclaim outstanding taxes. The point is that the government has options, if the property recovery value doesn't cover the missing taxes then I'm sure they will recover through other avenues. If you lease a car and don't pay, they can really only reclaim the car.
      - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
        leases are of two kinds technically. operating and finance lease. one gives you ownership at the start, the second one merely "rents" you the thing
      - NoboruWataya 4y ago
        Maybe not in common parlance, but if you lease a building for hundreds or thousands of years at a nominal rent, it's difficult to distinguish that from what you might call "true" ownership. Believe it or not that is how a lot of property is owned in some common law jurisdictions. A well-known example is Guinness's famous brewery in Dublin, which was leased in 1759 for 9,000 years at £45 per year. Long-lease ownership is particularly common for apartments, where it is important that the owner of one apartment does not do anything to impair the structural integrity of other apartments or the building as a whole, and there may also be a common area that apartment owners are obliged to maintain. This means that you must impose certain covenants on the apartment owners and traditionally the only way to do that was through leasehold ownership. Ownership is a very fuzzy concept and it is interesting to think about what are its hallmarks. There is no single correct answer, but I think a lot of lawyers tend to think of ownership as being a right "in rem" (ie, a right in respect of a thing, which is theoretically enforceable against any third party) rather than a right "in personam" (ie, a right against a particular person, which is generally not enforceable against third parties). In that regard, a leasehold is a right in rem whereas, for example, a licence to dwell on a property for a period of time would be a right in personam.
    - kwhitefoot 4y ago
      Name some of those countries.
      - spacebanana7 4y ago
        Residential leasehold properties are often referred to as 'owned' in the UK [1] and Ireland [2] and can be bought with mortgages. However, the structure is quite controversial [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leasehold_estate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leasehold_estate [2] https://mullinstreacy.ie/freehold-vs-leasehold/ https://mullinstreacy.ie/freehold-vs-leasehold/ [3] https://www.ft.com/content/b8068d5f-b4b9-4be6-a67e-1866fee6896c https://www.ft.com/content/b8068d5f-b4b9-4be6-a67e-1866fee68...
      - qurashee 4y ago
        United Kingdom is one.
      - hnbad 4y ago
        Germany. All land belongs to the state, save for some historical claims held by the Catholic church and (I think) former aristocracy. Note that private property rights still exist on top of that but this is why the state can decide that e.g. an energy company's interest in your land is more beneficial to the people than yours. You'll still get reimbursed although legally speaking I'm not sure the state would have to do that in order to seize it. The difference is that they couldn't do this for land owned by the Catholic church for example. As a caveat note that not all land used by the Catholic church in Germany is owned by the Catholic church, this really only applies to historical claims and contracts the state decided to uphold.
        logifail 4y ago
        > Germany. All land belongs to the state Maybe that's a technicality (at first glance it feels like an almost outlandish claim), but in the spirit of enquiry I'll put it like this: can you share a source for that? FWIW I skimmed [0] and failed to come up with anything that comes close... [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundeigentum https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundeigentum
  - kickling 4y ago
    You do have the right to sell your domain for any price, but I guess it could be seen as owning a rental contract..
    - dazc 4y ago
      You are selling the rights of registration rather than the domain itself. So yes you are buying the domain so long as you keep paying the registration fees and comply with the rules set by the domain registry.
  - thepangolino 4y ago
    That's exactly how it works with land and housing. Except you have to both pay a lump sum and a yearly fee to keep your home otherwise the government comes and takes it away from you.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    To be fair, if I pay for my personal domain name - at 8.99 a year, for the next..6 decades, then that will last longer then I am likely to live. So the total outlay would be around $540. The biggest issue with that is the possibility the registrar ceases existing over that time period.
    - GTP 4y ago
      There is a maximum to the renewal time that I don't remember right now, but i think you can't renew your domain for 60 years in one go.
  - jotm 4y ago
    In many, if not most, countries, if you don't pay your property taxes, if you don't do "adequate upkeep" of the property, or if the government decides it's needed for something more important, it can be forcibly bought off and you'd be lucky if they pay you current market value and not the price you paid when you bought it. Or, in less developed places, they just confiscate it.
- logifail 4y ago
  > What traditional sense? In the sense of renting != owning
  - nix23 4y ago
    Na it's not really true, you don't rent it (the name), you pay for the administrative work, you still ~have the namerights, like google.com...they own that name, because they are the "creator" of it.
    - logifail 4y ago
      > you pay for the administrative work If you were truly buying a domain name, the administrative work would be one-time, indeed one might think the entire overhead of maintaining a registry would be significantly less.
      - southerntofu 4y ago
        Domain names were historically much cheaper and the price for acquiring one was effectively administrative fees before domain names became a highly profitable and competitive market. Some domains are still free, whether 3rd/4th level domain from eu.org, or 2nd level domain from public-service TLDs like .ml (Mali) or .ga (Gabon). It's a shame we have to pay at all for what is essentially a text entry in a database. I'm not opposed to having commercial domains (.com) or private TLDs paying off infrastructure for all other users, but i believe it's an essential component to a free Internet that anybody can own many names for free. Many projects would have died before birth if not for friendly operators giving away names or a shell account and some storage space on a server. Economic barriers kill innovation, especially from poorer countries where 10$/y is not cheap, or for people for whom access to banking services is not easy/guaranteed (such as homeless or indebted folks in western countries).
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
      They're not the creator, Verisign created it. And I don't know about Google's specific agreement (they may have paid decades in advance for all we know) but in general if a company forgets to pay they lose their name, there were a few high profile cases like that already. That isn't ownership, that's rent.
- bilekas 4y ago
  You lease it, you don't buy it. Like an appartment. Can lease it, or purchase it.
  - amenghra 4y ago
    Devil’s advocate: the appartement or land you own still requires paying annual government taxes (and sometimes various other fees) in most places.
    - bilekas 4y ago
      That isn't the apartment though ? I'm just demonstrating the difference for every day folks.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
  A traditional sense that makes no sense for intangible concepts like a domain name.
southerntofu 4y ago
Ownership is a nebulous concept with many interpretations. I'm guessing your referring to private property (from a capitalist interpretation) as "the traditional sense", in which case domain names are fairly similar: once you acquire the domain, it's reserved for you as long as you pay your dues (just like property taxes for land). If you don't, it will be put back on the market for other people to enjoy. To be clear, i'm not saying it's a good thing. I don't think we should be able to publish anything (read: pedonazi propaganda) and have it uncensorable, but i certainly believe DNS is not the layer where you want to apply regulation/censorship, as it's not hosting any content and disrupting a domain name can result in many other domains (from other, potentially legit users) becoming unavailable. That's why we have legal responsibility for hosts and you contact the host to get content taken down. I'd be curious what a DNS coop would look like. I was excited about the .org coop being setup due to the sellout scandal, unfortunately the nefarious deal was canceled so the coop was buried alive. It would be great to cut the middlepersons for commercial names, as well as mutualize domains to share free delegations from such as afraid.org, eu.org, or netlib.re is doing.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  > it's reserved for you as long as you pay your dues (just like property taxes for land). If you don't, it will be put back on the market for other people to enjoy. No, rent is not tax.
  - southerntofu 4y ago
    That's debatable, but in all cases domain name fees is certainly not "rent" in the traditional sense. At least most registries cannot by law/contract take your domain away from you as long as you keep paying your dues. Of course the same applies for rent depending on your local housing regulations: the difference is you cannot undergo serious modifications in an apartment you rent, but you can modify whatever you want in your domain zone. In that sense, domain names are closer to "ownership" than to "rent". Moreover, as was previously mentioned, domain name fees were previously introduced as administrative fees, not rent. It's a very modern invention that domains should be a profitable field.
tasuki 4y ago
Something something blockchain! I believe for "real" ownership of domain names, a blockchain would actually make sense.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  How would the blockchain saying that you "own" a domain make you own it more than currently? It is impossible for the blockchain to prove anything about anything that originates from outside of that particular blockchain. This is the reason why wanting to apply blockchain to everything such as land ownership is laughable and shows how little blockchain fanatics understand about the very technology they praise.
  - buro9 4y ago
    When you accidentally lose it (by losing your private keys), it will be impossible for anyone else to get it back for you. In a sense, this will prove to you that you did really own it and no-one else did.
    - ant6n 4y ago
      It sounds like I don't own the domain, but whoever has the Keys does. Imagine somebody suddenly "owns" my house because they pickpocketed my house keys, without any recurse. Then I really don't own the house, do I.
      - seanw444 4y ago
        It's the closest concept we have to physical ownership in the digital realm.
    - GTP 4y ago
      But IMHO this is an unwanted effect that we should avoid
  - gbalduzzi 4y ago
    > It is impossible for the blockchain to prove anything about anything that originates from outside of that particular blockchain True, but instead of having to trust a central authority for insertion, updating, removal and constant maintenance of your "ownership", the trust would only be required for insertion. Once you purchased a domain and it's inserted in the blockchain, no one (outside of yourself) should be able to revoke, change or question your ownership of the domain itself. Honestly it would be a pretty good use case for a blockchain, but it lacks a money incentive for any part involved so it will probably never happen
guerrilla 4y ago
Pretty cool that this started a discussion on ownership. SEP has great articles on this by the way [1] 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/property/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/property/

> individuals should be able to have and own their own domain names We should probably remember that no-one "owns" a domain, at least not in the traditional sense of ownership.

IshKebab 4y ago

What traditional sense?

josephcsible 4y ago
With traditional ownership, you can pay a lump sum of money for something up front, and then it's yours forever unless you decide to get rid of it. With domains, you have to keep paying over and over or your "ownership" gets revoked.
- iso1631 4y ago
  Ownership rights vary from culture to culture and from country to country. Even in the US you don't get to own something forever, you get to own it until someone takes it off you to build a shopping mall for example. In most countries, leased property is often referred to as "owned", yet you have to keep paying over and over to renew that lease.
  - mkmk3 4y ago
    Pretty surprising to me if others agree, if you lease a car you dont own that car, do you?
    - permo-w 4y ago
      my parents lease a car. I would regard it as their car, and possibly go so far as to say they own it, if I wasn't thinking too hard about it, and maybe even if I was. it's in their possession.
      - em1sar 4y ago
        that's a ridiculous cope, they rent the car they do not own it, the bank owns it
        southerntofu 4y ago
        By this standard, nobody owns anything: as long as you pay property taxes, you're just renting from the State. I don't entirely disagree with this interpretation: as others have pointed out, whatever you "own" can be quickly expropriated by local powers to build a highway, airport, stadium...
        psychoslave 4y ago
        And local powers can be dismantled, or see part of its territory being annexed by an other sovereign power. As we say, nothing lasts forever. In that regard, ownership is more like "sizing the window in a large enough shape so that all stakeholders are convinced that it will never be required to put special attention on it again, despite ineluctable changes". Maybe privileges, responsibilities and liability are less delusional terms for that matter.
        hgomersall 4y ago
        Moreover, the state protects what you "own" from being appropriated by the person with the bigger club. "Private property" very much depends on public goodwill.
      - gnuj3 4y ago
        If they will own it at the end of the payments (what we call Hire Purchase in UK) then yes, I’d regard it as their car. If they making monthly payments over certain amount of time and after that time they need to give the car back then no - they just renting it.
      - logifail 4y ago
        > I would regard it as their car, and possibly go so far as to say they own it, if I wasn't thinking too hard about it, and maybe even if I was. it's in their possession. Thought experiment: If they were to damage their vehicle (but assuming it's still legal to drive), who gets to decide whether it should - or indeed must - be repaired? Your parents, or someone else? (Full disclosure: I recently added some scratches to my wife's car after a concrete pillar jumped out in front of me in an underground car park. I don't need to involve the insurance company, I don't need to talk to any bank or finance company, I can simply go to any local independent provider and have the car repaired. Or indeed not, if I decide it's not worth it.)
    - furyg3 4y ago
      Depends on how you think about it. You could say that you 'own' it but you have obligations (lease payments) or it will be seized. The same is true for property you 'own', if you don't pay your taxes or fail to manage the property, it will be seized.
      - em1sar 4y ago
        not paying taxes on your property is different from not owning something and missing a recurring payment.
        sgjohnson 4y ago
        Not really. With property taxes, you lease the title to “your” land from the government.
        happymellon 4y ago
        Except that if you don't pay your taxes, they might not take your house. If you fail to pay your lease then they will reclaim that particular item.
        judge2020 4y ago
        > if you don't pay your taxes, they might not take your house. At least in the states they absolutely do. It starts off as a tax lien which is then sold to whoever wants to buy it, so that the private sector handles actually reclaiming the land and re-listing it on the stock market.
        happymellon 4y ago
        That is just how US law is structured though. They could just as easily say that they will reclaim the loss through recovery of your assets or by weight in blood. https://www.bristol.gov.uk/council-tax/what-happens-if-you-dont-pay https://www.bristol.gov.uk/council-tax/what-happens-if-you-d... In the UK the process is different, which just shows that they don't have to take your house to reclaim outstanding taxes. The point is that the government has options, if the property recovery value doesn't cover the missing taxes then I'm sure they will recover through other avenues. If you lease a car and don't pay, they can really only reclaim the car.
    - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
      leases are of two kinds technically. operating and finance lease. one gives you ownership at the start, the second one merely "rents" you the thing
    - NoboruWataya 4y ago
      Maybe not in common parlance, but if you lease a building for hundreds or thousands of years at a nominal rent, it's difficult to distinguish that from what you might call "true" ownership. Believe it or not that is how a lot of property is owned in some common law jurisdictions. A well-known example is Guinness's famous brewery in Dublin, which was leased in 1759 for 9,000 years at £45 per year. Long-lease ownership is particularly common for apartments, where it is important that the owner of one apartment does not do anything to impair the structural integrity of other apartments or the building as a whole, and there may also be a common area that apartment owners are obliged to maintain. This means that you must impose certain covenants on the apartment owners and traditionally the only way to do that was through leasehold ownership. Ownership is a very fuzzy concept and it is interesting to think about what are its hallmarks. There is no single correct answer, but I think a lot of lawyers tend to think of ownership as being a right "in rem" (ie, a right in respect of a thing, which is theoretically enforceable against any third party) rather than a right "in personam" (ie, a right against a particular person, which is generally not enforceable against third parties). In that regard, a leasehold is a right in rem whereas, for example, a licence to dwell on a property for a period of time would be a right in personam.
  - kwhitefoot 4y ago
    Name some of those countries.
    - spacebanana7 4y ago
      Residential leasehold properties are often referred to as 'owned' in the UK [1] and Ireland [2] and can be bought with mortgages. However, the structure is quite controversial [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leasehold_estate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leasehold_estate [2] https://mullinstreacy.ie/freehold-vs-leasehold/ https://mullinstreacy.ie/freehold-vs-leasehold/ [3] https://www.ft.com/content/b8068d5f-b4b9-4be6-a67e-1866fee6896c https://www.ft.com/content/b8068d5f-b4b9-4be6-a67e-1866fee68...
    - qurashee 4y ago
      United Kingdom is one.
    - hnbad 4y ago
      Germany. All land belongs to the state, save for some historical claims held by the Catholic church and (I think) former aristocracy. Note that private property rights still exist on top of that but this is why the state can decide that e.g. an energy company's interest in your land is more beneficial to the people than yours. You'll still get reimbursed although legally speaking I'm not sure the state would have to do that in order to seize it. The difference is that they couldn't do this for land owned by the Catholic church for example. As a caveat note that not all land used by the Catholic church in Germany is owned by the Catholic church, this really only applies to historical claims and contracts the state decided to uphold.
      - logifail 4y ago
        > Germany. All land belongs to the state Maybe that's a technicality (at first glance it feels like an almost outlandish claim), but in the spirit of enquiry I'll put it like this: can you share a source for that? FWIW I skimmed [0] and failed to come up with anything that comes close... [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundeigentum https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundeigentum
- kickling 4y ago
  You do have the right to sell your domain for any price, but I guess it could be seen as owning a rental contract..
  - dazc 4y ago
    You are selling the rights of registration rather than the domain itself. So yes you are buying the domain so long as you keep paying the registration fees and comply with the rules set by the domain registry.
- thepangolino 4y ago
  That's exactly how it works with land and housing. Except you have to both pay a lump sum and a yearly fee to keep your home otherwise the government comes and takes it away from you.
- XorNot 4y ago
  To be fair, if I pay for my personal domain name - at 8.99 a year, for the next..6 decades, then that will last longer then I am likely to live. So the total outlay would be around $540. The biggest issue with that is the possibility the registrar ceases existing over that time period.
  - GTP 4y ago
    There is a maximum to the renewal time that I don't remember right now, but i think you can't renew your domain for 60 years in one go.
- jotm 4y ago
  In many, if not most, countries, if you don't pay your property taxes, if you don't do "adequate upkeep" of the property, or if the government decides it's needed for something more important, it can be forcibly bought off and you'd be lucky if they pay you current market value and not the price you paid when you bought it. Or, in less developed places, they just confiscate it.
logifail 4y ago
> What traditional sense? In the sense of renting != owning
- nix23 4y ago
  Na it's not really true, you don't rent it (the name), you pay for the administrative work, you still ~have the namerights, like google.com...they own that name, because they are the "creator" of it.
  - logifail 4y ago
    > you pay for the administrative work If you were truly buying a domain name, the administrative work would be one-time, indeed one might think the entire overhead of maintaining a registry would be significantly less.
    - southerntofu 4y ago
      Domain names were historically much cheaper and the price for acquiring one was effectively administrative fees before domain names became a highly profitable and competitive market. Some domains are still free, whether 3rd/4th level domain from eu.org, or 2nd level domain from public-service TLDs like .ml (Mali) or .ga (Gabon). It's a shame we have to pay at all for what is essentially a text entry in a database. I'm not opposed to having commercial domains (.com) or private TLDs paying off infrastructure for all other users, but i believe it's an essential component to a free Internet that anybody can own many names for free. Many projects would have died before birth if not for friendly operators giving away names or a shell account and some storage space on a server. Economic barriers kill innovation, especially from poorer countries where 10$/y is not cheap, or for people for whom access to banking services is not easy/guaranteed (such as homeless or indebted folks in western countries).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
    They're not the creator, Verisign created it. And I don't know about Google's specific agreement (they may have paid decades in advance for all we know) but in general if a company forgets to pay they lose their name, there were a few high profile cases like that already. That isn't ownership, that's rent.
bilekas 4y ago
You lease it, you don't buy it. Like an appartment. Can lease it, or purchase it.
- amenghra 4y ago
  Devil’s advocate: the appartement or land you own still requires paying annual government taxes (and sometimes various other fees) in most places.
  - bilekas 4y ago
    That isn't the apartment though ? I'm just demonstrating the difference for every day folks.
IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
A traditional sense that makes no sense for intangible concepts like a domain name.

southerntofu 4y ago

Ownership is a nebulous concept with many interpretations. I'm guessing your referring to private property (from a capitalist interpretation) as "the traditional sense", in which case domain names are fairly similar: once you acquire the domain, it's reserved for you as long as you pay your dues (just like property taxes for land). If you don't, it will be put back on the market for other people to enjoy. To be clear, i'm not saying it's a good thing. I don't think we should be able to publish anything (read: pedonazi propaganda) and have it uncensorable, but i certainly believe DNS is not the layer where you want to apply regulation/censorship, as it's not hosting any content and disrupting a domain name can result in many other domains (from other, potentially legit users) becoming unavailable. That's why we have legal responsibility for hosts and you contact the host to get content taken down. I'd be curious what a DNS coop would look like. I was excited about the .org coop being setup due to the sellout scandal, unfortunately the nefarious deal was canceled so the coop was buried alive. It would be great to cut the middlepersons for commercial names, as well as mutualize domains to share free delegations from such as afraid.org, eu.org, or netlib.re is doing.

guerrilla 4y ago
> it's reserved for you as long as you pay your dues (just like property taxes for land). If you don't, it will be put back on the market for other people to enjoy. No, rent is not tax.
- southerntofu 4y ago
  That's debatable, but in all cases domain name fees is certainly not "rent" in the traditional sense. At least most registries cannot by law/contract take your domain away from you as long as you keep paying your dues. Of course the same applies for rent depending on your local housing regulations: the difference is you cannot undergo serious modifications in an apartment you rent, but you can modify whatever you want in your domain zone. In that sense, domain names are closer to "ownership" than to "rent". Moreover, as was previously mentioned, domain name fees were previously introduced as administrative fees, not rent. It's a very modern invention that domains should be a profitable field.

tasuki 4y ago

Something something blockchain! I believe for "real" ownership of domain names, a blockchain would actually make sense.

iLoveOncall 4y ago
How would the blockchain saying that you "own" a domain make you own it more than currently? It is impossible for the blockchain to prove anything about anything that originates from outside of that particular blockchain. This is the reason why wanting to apply blockchain to everything such as land ownership is laughable and shows how little blockchain fanatics understand about the very technology they praise.
- buro9 4y ago
  When you accidentally lose it (by losing your private keys), it will be impossible for anyone else to get it back for you. In a sense, this will prove to you that you did really own it and no-one else did.
  - ant6n 4y ago
    It sounds like I don't own the domain, but whoever has the Keys does. Imagine somebody suddenly "owns" my house because they pickpocketed my house keys, without any recurse. Then I really don't own the house, do I.
    - seanw444 4y ago
      It's the closest concept we have to physical ownership in the digital realm.
  - GTP 4y ago
    But IMHO this is an unwanted effect that we should avoid
- gbalduzzi 4y ago
  > It is impossible for the blockchain to prove anything about anything that originates from outside of that particular blockchain True, but instead of having to trust a central authority for insertion, updating, removal and constant maintenance of your "ownership", the trust would only be required for insertion. Once you purchased a domain and it's inserted in the blockchain, no one (outside of yourself) should be able to revoke, change or question your ownership of the domain itself. Honestly it would be a pretty good use case for a blockchain, but it lacks a money incentive for any part involved so it will probably never happen

guerrilla 4y ago

Pretty cool that this started a discussion on ownership. SEP has great articles on this by the way [1] 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/property/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/property/