I was in a similiar situation where I have the same name, spelling and all as a very famous person in my country. So this person had the .com domain and I waited 7 years for it to be dropped and eventually the person switched to our country's domain instead.
How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting
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Re: How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the terms by which value is measured?
In the paper by Glen Weyl linked above, the property tax should be set at about 1/normal turnover rate (e.g. 1/30 years = 3.3% per year), owners should declare their own assessed value for which they pay the tax (e.g. on the $1500 asking price in the article, the tax could be about $50/year assuming a 3.3% tax rate), and then if someone else wishes to buy the property they can purchase at the same self-assessed value…
That sounds terrible. Companies should not have to pay millions of dollars per year to keep their domain safe.
If a website-needing company pays based on how badly it would hurt them to lose that site, it would destroy their margins. If they pay a more reasonable amount, or if they're just a smaller company, they're vulnerable to competitors kicking them offline at a whim.
Land is pretty much the only area where taxing a significant percentage of value makes sense, and even then it's frustrating and awful to do it with a buyout system.
Re: How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you let it lapse, is "stole" a bit strong? I'd think "stole" would be getting your login/email and transferring the domain away while you had it registered?
I think stole, while not technically correct, is appropriate. The squatter had no intention of using the domain. They jumped on a domain that had just expired and registered it in the hope that the previous owner had made a mistake and might be willing to pay them an exorbitant amount of money to get it back.
I think it's more likely they registered it in the hope that it's valuable in general. Not that the previous owner had made a mistake.
Re: How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting
#74Took me a while to get mine. Glad more people can avoid the John Malkovich problem:
Re: How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting
#75Still waiting to get mine. I registered my first domain name from my national provider, and always wanted to move the domain aboard to the U.S. or a European registrar, however, the bureaucratic process of initializing a transfer is ridiculous. It's not an important domain name, so I decided to take the risk and allow the domain to expire, so I could re-register it. Unfortunately, the dropped domain was instantly caught by a broker.
Waiting mode...
Re: How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting
#76If it was 9 years, then the squatters definitely won.
No one won. The squatters lost money, the guy lost time.
I don't know about Game Theory, but is it correct to call this outcome a Nash Equilibrium?
Edit: I thought about it for a while, and it seems incorrect to say so. If the buyer's strategy is "always wait", and the seller's strategy is "always sell at an outrageous price", it should be a Nash Equilibrium, similar to a Prisoner's dilemma. But the buyer's strategy is actually "buy if the price is reasonable, wait if not", so the broker can always choose to lower the price to a reasonable level, both allowing the blogger to purchase the domain name, and profits from it. But the broker doesn't appear to be rational enough to choose this strategy, possible due to stupidity or limitations of the business model. What is the suitable term for this phenomenon?
Re: How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting
#77I don't think name as domain is important anymore since it's pretty much a numbers game - it is unlikely you'll get your name as a .com domain(the only domain that matters if you want more than a toy website) is going to either be squatted on or already occupied.
There needs to be some sort of TLD with authentication. Let's call it .name You only get .name if you do a KYC/register with the government.In case of collision you get bidding wars, however the money goes to a non profit internet charity. Instant SEO and a guarantee that you actually get to have a web presence without gatekeeping.
Re: How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People like to think that generic domain names are somehow common property or something, and anyone holding that property for profit is somehow evil. Buying property anywhere and then sitting on it without developing it is a negative for everyone in that community, so of course its "evil" and frowned upon. > It’s as if someone bought the lot across from your house, and then sold it for a profit and you say “Hey! Th…
You’re talking about housing developments where the owner of the land requires builders to build certain numbers of houses. That’s because they are in the process of developing it already and want it to be appealing to home buyers. Prior to that the land was owned, probably for a long period of time, before the area was deemed worthy of development. Do you really think there are just empty tracks of land waiting for…
Free market is how you've gotten cities where natives can't afford to buy property since non-natives(mostly chinese investors) own all the property and refuse to sell or rent at reasonable rates. I think the free market concept has fundamentally failed for non-renewable/expandable resources and should be recognized as such.
Re: How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
A .com is more valuable than .ca
I disagree. If the person is Canadian and the domain isn't for a "generic brand," then no, I'd actually say that .ca is more valuable than .com. It makes the name more personal to the individual and, in an industry where a lot of us have our own domains, uniqueness can be more valuable.
Op's comment says the .com is for 3500 USD so the market thinks a .com is more valuable.
Re: How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting
#80I don't think name as domain is important anymore since it's pretty much a numbers game - it is unlikely you'll get your name as a .com domain(the only domain that matters if you want more than a toy website) is going to either be squatted on or already occupied. There needs to be some sort of TLD with authentication. Let's call it .name You only get .name if you do a KYC/register with the government.In case of colli…
Of course there is actually a ".name". I co-founded the company that set it up, and the original idea was to share the second level so you'd get full control over firstname.lastname.name with e-mail forwarding from [first name]@[last name].name. This followed an e-mail service (Nameplanet) we set up when two of us were discussing how we were both basically blocking a whole [lastname].[tld] domain for ourselves.
Unfortunately .name largely proved too hard to communicate quickly enough, and meanwhile it's clear that people for the most part don't mind weird addresses and/or don't have an issue with seeing e-mail addresses as transient. Which I find quite weird, given I've had the same e-mail address for 20 years at this point. Today .name is operated by Verisign, and second level registrations were enabled years ago, and I do occasionally see them, but the original concept really was part of a wave of people talking about "digital identities" on the net that just died off, in part I think because it seems most of the time peoples identity is much more fluid outside of very official circumstances. E.g. you don't necessarily always want your e-mail address to give away your full name, or your name at all, and in the more formal contexts (e.g. work) you often have another e-mail address anyway and/or your e-mail address is not an important element.
Incidentally, in retrospect I wonder if ".nom" or ".nym" or one of the other proposed names would have been (marginally) easier - people often hear ".name" and think it's a placeholder for a name, especially when you try to explain that your e-mail address is [your first name]@[your last name].name. I use my .com of the same format, and it seems to lead to fewer questions than when I also had/used my .name.