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> Domains cost money because they have to cost money. That's not entirely true. They cost money because they're market commodities and thus have market value.
by hnbad 3y ago
> Domains cost money because they have to cost money.
That's not entirely true. They cost money because they're market commodities and thus have market value. Making them cost non-trivial amounts of money to register is a way to de-incentivize scalping by reducing the profit margin but it's mostly done because it enables registries to pocket the premium that would otherwise go the the scalpers (aka "squatters").
Of course it would be entirely possible to devise a system that treats them less as a commodity or enforces usage-based rights but to do so in a less rigid and mindless way than "no activity in N cycles equals forfeiture" (like Twitter and Google have done or announced their intent to do before) is hard and doesn't play well with pretending to be a neutral actor enabling a free marketplace of ideas.
- ahepp 3y agoOne big problem I see with this, is it sounds like you're proposing we dramatically expand the scope of registrar duties while also proposing we stop paying them. Where are they going to get the money to fund their nuanced and mindful enforcement of usage based rights? Is a team of legal specialists going to review domain applications for less than $15/y? It sounds like your concern is that private companies are making a lot of rent off public goods. I could have an incorrect understanding of this, but isn't it all run by ICANN at the end of the day? A solution might be to make sure the rent captured on domains goes back into funding public goods. Like a digital land value tax.
- hnbad 3y agoI'm not talking about changing anything. I'm saying the registrar system is set up this way. It's never easy to completely rearchitect a system once it is already in place and well-established. I'm simply arguing that the way it works isn't a law of nature but a consequence of the underlying ideology and economic system.
- ahepp 3y agoThe glaring hole in the alternative you proposed has nothing to do with the existing system being well established.
- hnbad 3y agoSorry, I must have missed the part where you pointed out a glaring hole because all I read was an explanation of how it's hard to change things after the fact (which I agree with) and some gesturing at human nature (which is contextual, i.e. it's human nature to act a certain way within a given environment but that doesn't mean it's not also human nature to act differently within a different environment). As others have pointed out, domain names didn't start out as a highly valued commodity. Arguably they only became that during the dot-com boom when domains functioned as brands. I'd even go as far as saying they largely lost most of their value from that time period in the Web 2.0 days when startups started slapping random syllables together and dropping letters and have instead become more of a speculative asset, especially with the flood of new TLDs nobody can keep up with. In fact, there are market restrictions enforced by various registrars like requiring legal presence in a given country for ccTLDs or providing content in Catalano and/or information about Catalonian culture for dot-cat domains. Of course there are workarounds for most of these but as I said these are just bandaids bolted on after the fact, just like premium pricing tiers.
- ahepp 3y agoIf we're going to discuss this, I'd like to keep things on point. My specific question was, how do you propose paying for this system of allocation when the entire premise is to eliminate non-trivial domain fees. As a brief example: mycattest123.com: $17.75 plus $23.99/y mycattest123.cat: $13.00 plus $49.99/y
- hnbad 3y agoI'm sorry, I thought we were talking about market incentive structures not alternative funding schemes.