4 ms·

The lions share of issues with domains would go away if we made squatting illegal, or at the least, extremely expensive. Tbh I'm increasingly thinking that jus

The lions share of issues with domains would go away if we made squatting illegal, or at the least, extremely expensive. Tbh I'm increasingly thinking that just about any speculative instrument in the economy is just grift and drag. If you want to make money, make things. Stop trying to extract rent or exorbitant prices for land, for domains, for PS5s, etc. Feels like 9/10ths of the economy now is nothing but fucking middlemen, when we have a dearth of need of ANY middlemen at all anymore.

gruez 2y ago
>The lions share of issues with domains would go away if we made squatting illegal, or at the least, extremely expensive. How do you define squatting? Is the owner of nissan.com "squatting" on it because he wouldn't sell to the japanese car company? How much interest do you need in a given domain before it's not squatting?
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  I would argue if you aren't doing some combination of: - Hosting a website - Operating email accounts - Infrastructure (mail, DNS, etc.) - Misc. Services (Minecraft server, TeamSpeak server, something) Then you're squatting. Like if you own turkeyonapig.com and it's literally just a web page with a picture of a turkey sitting on a pig? Not squatting. It's odd but it's clearly doing exactly what it's meant to be doing. If you own turkeyonapig.com and are doing nothing but advertising that fact, and that someone can buy it? Squatting. > Is the owner of nissan.com "squatting" on it because he wouldn't sell to the japanese car company? I mean, it depends. One would argue that people going to nissan.com are clearly looking for the Japanese car company, so it's in the public's interest that that domain be sold to them. On the other hand, if someone owns it and is using to run a Nissan fan website? Well I suppose that's trickier, but that would also probably be better suited to something like nissanfans.com. It's a tricky thing but not impossible to figure out.
  - dist-epoch 2y ago
    > a web page with a picture of a turkey sitting on a pig? Not squatting GPT/Cursor will create that page for you in 5 min. I bet a NotSquattingAsAService startups will appear which will create the "not squatting" fake site for you for $2.
    - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
      I mean, that's an improvement in my mind over millions of insipid "BUY THIS DOMAIN!" web pages. At the least the internet would be more interesting? But also like, then you aren't advertising it for sale. So I'm wondering how many offers you're going to get to sell that domain, which is the point of squatting it.
      - dist-epoch 2y ago
        That's not how most squatting pages are sold. They are registered for sale in places like NameCheap and you can see it directly when you search for domains.
    - reaperducer 2y ago
      NotSquattingAsAService startups will appear which will create the "not squatting" fake site for you for $2. That's an improvement. Adding $2 to $5 to the cost of a squatted domain will start to dissuade people who squat on tens of thousands of domains, if they have to suddenly have to pay $20,000 to $50,000 for the not squatting service.
      - gruez 2y ago
        >That's an improvement. Adding $2 to $5 to the cost of a squatted domain will start to dissuade people who squat on tens of thousands of domains There's no way static site hosting and a email service costs $2-$5 per year per domain, especially for bulk users. Even if we take that price at face value, a .com domain already costs around $10/year. A 20%-50% increase will only change behavior at the margins. It won't make chat.com magically become available, and at best will make some D tier domains available. Ironically the introduction of gTLDs probably had the same effect. Squatting harrisonburgrealty.com is suddenly going to be less profitable when there's harrisonburg.{realty,realestate,realtor,homes,house,place,properties,rent,apartments} available as well.
- jltsiren 2y ago
  It's not a particularly hard problem. Most countries have rules on what you can use as a business name or register as a trademark. Domain names are just more of the same. And you don't really own your domain. You are just renting it from whichever authority is responsible for the TLD. If you stop paying, the authority will eventually take it back.
  - zokier 2y ago
    Trademarks are specific to the field it is used on. Classic example is Apple Records vs Apple Computers, which one should get apple.com?
    - jltsiren 2y ago
      And there are also businesses with identical names. But the basic idea was already established long before the internet. If you have a legitimate claim to a name, you have a legitimate claim to that name. There may be multiple entities with a legitimate claim to a particular name, in which case the first one that used it in a particular context gets to use it in that context. And if you think that someone is using a name you have claimed in a misleading way or acting in bad faith, you can sue them and let the courts decide.
      - zokier 2y ago
        The problem is that as you note, trademarks and company names are not unique, but domain names are required to be unique. So that n to 1 relationship between trademarks/names and domain names intrisically creates problem, how to allocate the domains when there are many equally legitimate pre-existing claimants. This is not solved problem the way you portray it, because domain names have this novel uniqueness requirement. Of course this raises valid question if using names in this way at all is a good idea. For example telephone system and lots of banking stuff is based on simple numerical identifiers, and lots of countries have also some unique (numerical) identifiers for companies and persons. So there is fairly strong precedent for using assigned ids instead of names when uniqueness/specificity is required. But somehow we have jumped to the conclusion that for example IP addresses would be too confusing to average joe, and in attempt to hide them we have created even more confusing system.
foxglacier 2y ago
If you're starting a new company, squatters are not a real problem. Just pick another name. If your favorite name is so valuable that it's squatted, then it's valuable! The squatter was reserving it for you, the only company that could really make good use of it, instead of some random personal blogger who happened to walk in first and would wasted its high value. Also, what's the difference between a squatter and a personal blogger?

gruez 2y ago

>The lions share of issues with domains would go away if we made squatting illegal, or at the least, extremely expensive. How do you define squatting? Is the owner of nissan.com "squatting" on it because he wouldn't sell to the japanese car company? How much interest do you need in a given domain before it's not squatting?

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
I would argue if you aren't doing some combination of: - Hosting a website - Operating email accounts - Infrastructure (mail, DNS, etc.) - Misc. Services (Minecraft server, TeamSpeak server, something) Then you're squatting. Like if you own turkeyonapig.com and it's literally just a web page with a picture of a turkey sitting on a pig? Not squatting. It's odd but it's clearly doing exactly what it's meant to be doing. If you own turkeyonapig.com and are doing nothing but advertising that fact, and that someone can buy it? Squatting. > Is the owner of nissan.com "squatting" on it because he wouldn't sell to the japanese car company? I mean, it depends. One would argue that people going to nissan.com are clearly looking for the Japanese car company, so it's in the public's interest that that domain be sold to them. On the other hand, if someone owns it and is using to run a Nissan fan website? Well I suppose that's trickier, but that would also probably be better suited to something like nissanfans.com. It's a tricky thing but not impossible to figure out.
- dist-epoch 2y ago
  > a web page with a picture of a turkey sitting on a pig? Not squatting GPT/Cursor will create that page for you in 5 min. I bet a NotSquattingAsAService startups will appear which will create the "not squatting" fake site for you for $2.
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    I mean, that's an improvement in my mind over millions of insipid "BUY THIS DOMAIN!" web pages. At the least the internet would be more interesting? But also like, then you aren't advertising it for sale. So I'm wondering how many offers you're going to get to sell that domain, which is the point of squatting it.
    - dist-epoch 2y ago
      That's not how most squatting pages are sold. They are registered for sale in places like NameCheap and you can see it directly when you search for domains.
  - reaperducer 2y ago
    NotSquattingAsAService startups will appear which will create the "not squatting" fake site for you for $2. That's an improvement. Adding $2 to $5 to the cost of a squatted domain will start to dissuade people who squat on tens of thousands of domains, if they have to suddenly have to pay $20,000 to $50,000 for the not squatting service.
    - gruez 2y ago
      >That's an improvement. Adding $2 to $5 to the cost of a squatted domain will start to dissuade people who squat on tens of thousands of domains There's no way static site hosting and a email service costs $2-$5 per year per domain, especially for bulk users. Even if we take that price at face value, a .com domain already costs around $10/year. A 20%-50% increase will only change behavior at the margins. It won't make chat.com magically become available, and at best will make some D tier domains available. Ironically the introduction of gTLDs probably had the same effect. Squatting harrisonburgrealty.com is suddenly going to be less profitable when there's harrisonburg.{realty,realestate,realtor,homes,house,place,properties,rent,apartments} available as well.
jltsiren 2y ago
It's not a particularly hard problem. Most countries have rules on what you can use as a business name or register as a trademark. Domain names are just more of the same. And you don't really own your domain. You are just renting it from whichever authority is responsible for the TLD. If you stop paying, the authority will eventually take it back.
- zokier 2y ago
  Trademarks are specific to the field it is used on. Classic example is Apple Records vs Apple Computers, which one should get apple.com?
  - jltsiren 2y ago
    And there are also businesses with identical names. But the basic idea was already established long before the internet. If you have a legitimate claim to a name, you have a legitimate claim to that name. There may be multiple entities with a legitimate claim to a particular name, in which case the first one that used it in a particular context gets to use it in that context. And if you think that someone is using a name you have claimed in a misleading way or acting in bad faith, you can sue them and let the courts decide.
    - zokier 2y ago
      The problem is that as you note, trademarks and company names are not unique, but domain names are required to be unique. So that n to 1 relationship between trademarks/names and domain names intrisically creates problem, how to allocate the domains when there are many equally legitimate pre-existing claimants. This is not solved problem the way you portray it, because domain names have this novel uniqueness requirement. Of course this raises valid question if using names in this way at all is a good idea. For example telephone system and lots of banking stuff is based on simple numerical identifiers, and lots of countries have also some unique (numerical) identifiers for companies and persons. So there is fairly strong precedent for using assigned ids instead of names when uniqueness/specificity is required. But somehow we have jumped to the conclusion that for example IP addresses would be too confusing to average joe, and in attempt to hide them we have created even more confusing system.

foxglacier 2y ago

If you're starting a new company, squatters are not a real problem. Just pick another name. If your favorite name is so valuable that it's squatted, then it's valuable! The squatter was reserving it for you, the only company that could really make good use of it, instead of some random personal blogger who happened to walk in first and would wasted its high value. Also, what's the difference between a squatter and a personal blogger?