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A domain can now say it is for sale, in DNS

specification.website

81–90 of 114 posts

Re: A domain can now say it is for sale, in DNS

#81
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Domain names are a mess in my opinion. Even though we have over a thousand TLDs only a very small handful are considered for commerce or even thought to be valid. I have a domain name with the TLD of "today". Many people think my email is [email]@[domain].today.com. It's not just the common person's fault but also software engineers / product managers who still have a very restrictive view of what a TLD is (under 3 t…

Habituation is difficult to overcome. If domain names had been freeform from the start, we wouldn’t have this particular issue. Domain names are still a finite space, given that a full domain name can be at most 253 characters, and each domain label at most 63 characters. “Requiring” a .com/.org/.net/.CC at the end isn’t really that much of a restriction. By the way, madamelic.com appears to be available.

> If domain names had been freeform from the start...

I'd argue that they're not freeform now. You need to pay ICANN something like 250k USD to consider your application for a new TLD, plus I think you need to convince them that you actually can operate the infrastructure required to reliably serve queries and subdomain registrations for that TLD.

I do agree that we have _way_ more TLDs now than the five or ten we had back in the 1990s, but the barrier to creating a new one is so large that I'd not describe them as "freeform".

Re: A domain can now say it is for sale, in DNS

#83

Sigh, I'm not a fan of domains becoming the new kind of real estate. Wonder how hard will it be in 20 years to get a good, unused name in a reasonable price.

Have you tried getting a good, unused name today? Anything remotely close to a dictionary word, if unused, is squatted with a $xx,000 price tag. Do registrars get a cut of these sales prices because it seems ridiculous to allow squatting.

Many registrars operate as brokers for domain sales indeed (i.e. godaddy, namecheap). Then you have tlds operators with their "premium" domains that go for 1000x the regular price. Premium usually being defined as the top 10k english words and every kind of l33t spelling of sexual words.

Neither registrars nor tld operators care about squatting, even when they don't get a cut. Why would they? The squatter is paying them the same as you'd pay them.

Re: A domain can now say it is for sale, in DNS

#84
post #78

I noticed few commenters mention something like a rule: If you say your domain is for sale, they will take it from you because..... And was wondering, few years back, twitter was sold to mr Elon. I will just say it like this: Did they lose all their trademarks and rights to all domains, if someone register twitter.cc or twitter.it or similar, because twitter is for sale and they did not need the trademark for busines…

The concern is if you own a domain that you don’t own the trademark for.

Twitter owned both the domain and all trademarks so it’s a non issue.

Basically in fairly limited circumstances you can have your domain taken off you if someone else holds a matching trademark. Saying you are selling it can go some way to demonstrating you are not holding it in good faith.

Re: A domain can now say it is for sale, in DNS

#85
post #29

Yeah cause we really had to improve domain squatters lives. In my opinion domain squatting should be banned instead.

I'm wondering if this can be used to hunt down squatters and take domains from them, for example, if they have the domain marked as for sale in DNS, while also renewing the domain. If a renewal happens while someone has a domain listed for sale, they should give up all rights to that domain and it should go back on the open market for a sane price.

Re: A domain can now say it is for sale, in DNS

#86
post #29

Yeah cause we really had to improve domain squatters lives. In my opinion domain squatting should be banned instead.

Like a lot of things, society would probably benefit if we had caps on how much a single entity could own.

Or maybe just a heavy tax on arbitrage.

Re: A domain can now say it is for sale, in DNS

#87
post #22
post #6

my slop detection instinct is so good that I can tell it's slop before even clicking the link. I precogged the neon colors of the website, the pill modals, the 'it's not X, it's Y', the emdashes...

It's indeed written by Claude, like most of the website: https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website/commit/99b1...

I feel that this period before the AI bust is mostly a veeeery long window for people to commit reputational suicide.

The game is to see who survives the longest without submitting to committing blunders that reveal an intrinsic incorrectible untrustworthy personality and low quality of work standards. And each month that goes by, more people around us are joining the game, some people fall through social pressure, and some feel more comfortable to display their antisocial/low quality traits as those around us do.

I personally feel comfortable holding on my anti AI purity comfortably even if 95% of people around me do it, I always suspected it anyways, let them keep on outing themsleves.

Re: A domain can now say it is for sale, in DNS

#89
post #49
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initial underscore is a reserved namespace for this reason.

Is that universally true on all sites that allow a user to create a sub-domain?

It certainly should be. Filtering user-registrable names that will end up in host names or URL paths is table stakes. You want to block names like www, admin, root, robots.txt, .well-known, _*, and so forth.

Re: A domain can now say it is for sale, in DNS

#90
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried getting a good, unused name today? Anything remotely close to a dictionary word, if unused, is squatted with a $xx,000 price tag. Do registrars get a cut of these sales prices because it seems ridiculous to allow squatting.

Registrars get a lot more domains registered at 5-20 $/year this way. How would our lives improve if squatting were "not allowed"?

For anyone trying start a small business, it’s frustrating to go through dozens to hundreds of potential company names before you can find a reasonable URL that isn’t being squatted for 4-5 figures.

What positive outcome comes from squatters sitting on unused domains?

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