How many .com domain names are unused? • Hacker News Board

Re: How many .com domain names are unused?

#181

Post by andmarios » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 2:07 PM UTC

prickledpear wrote: post #174

One intriguing proposal to limit domain name squatting is "Harberger Taxation"[1] Under this scheme, every owner of a domain would declare a value for the domains they own, and pay a percentage of that value as a tax (replacing the current annual registration fees). Owners are incentivized to post an accurate value for their domain because they must sell their domain for the price they list if anyone offers to buy at…

Once you do this, squatters will just find an easy way to make a domain seem active: email traffic, basic websites, etc.

Also sometimes there are legit uses, like squatting names in order to protect your brand. For example I could see google squatting google-search.com

Re: How many .com domain names are unused?

#182

Post by lunchables » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 2:08 PM UTC

banana_giraffe wrote: post #7

I'd be curious how many domain names are used, but not for the web or email. No idea how to measure this, and I'm sure it's tiny. For instance, I have a .io domain I use as my own little personal dynamic dns service since dyndns turned evil. The TLD doesn't do anything interesting, and any web pages served by the subdomains are done on nonstandard ports, so if this study scanned .io domains, they'd classify my domain…

I have to assume this kind of use represents such a small amount of domains it is not worth discussing.

Re: How many .com domain names are unused?

#183

Post by lunchables » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 2:10 PM UTC

GlitchMr wrote: post #141

Just because a domain may appear to be unused, it doesn't necessarily mean it is unused. For instance, I have a domain I use as a file hosting which I can link to when I want to share something (I used to use Imgur for this purpose before, but frankly I don't trust any image host at this point, so I set up nginx to host a single directory). As you need to know the file names to download them, the domain would appear…

And what percentage of domains do you think represent use cases like this? I don't think it significantly changes the statistical analysis. Sure, there are some tiny fraction of a percent of weird uses from people like us, but it's hardly worth even mentioning.

Re: How many .com domain names are unused?

#184

Post by belorn » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 2:10 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #121

zanny wrote: post #52

I'm not really well informed about the politics of DNS at the top, but I've always had the impression ICANN has been grossly negligent / corrupted over the last twenty years. At the end of the day there is profound capital interest in making name records unfair and noncompetitive in order to rent seek fortunes off the Internet and I see no indication ICANN is anything but compromised by those interests in the way the…

This is mathematically simple to fix. Charge US$0.50 per month ($6 per year) for every domain reservation regardless of who is reserving. The fee must be charged per month and not per year, which intentionally results in greater maintenance overhead. I don't care if you are a registrar, government, charity, school, or whatever. US$0.50 each and every month for each and every name. Registrars can slap whatever markup…

The benefit of increasing the registration fees is actually an concept that the Swedish registry is currently following. They found that by increasing prices the new registrations did not suffer, and the renewal actually increased, with the theory being that because people pay more they value the domain name ownership more.

A cheap registration price make sense when you look to expand new registrations to a fresh market, but what most parties in this industry want now is a higher rate of renewals. For that a higher price can actually be beneficial for both registries and registers.

Re: How many .com domain names are unused?

#185

Post by lunchables » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 2:12 PM UTC

Tepix wrote: post #143

Quote from the research: > the crawling server was only configured for IPv4 He may have misqualified 11% or more of those domains.

I seriously doubt 11% of domains are IPv6 only, but I'd love to see someone do some research on it. I would assume its only a fraction of a percent that ONLY responds via IPv6.

Re: How many .com domain names are unused?

#186

Post by lunchables » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 2:13 PM UTC

rjf72 wrote: post #134

Domain registration is one of the most perfect use scenarios for a blockchain type system. It would be entirely decentralized meaning no party has any unfair advantage which leads to these sort of systems where players obtain massive amounts of domains for non-market prices and then sit on them indefinitely relying on the occasional way over market price sale to justify the business model. And while views may vary he…

https://handshake.org/

Re: How many .com domain names are unused?

#187

Post by GilbertErik » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 2:19 PM UTC

prickledpear wrote: post #176

giancarlostoro wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While it makes sense in theory, I think there are some practical problems that would have to be addressed before such a system could be put into use. For example, what stops a company with a large bankroll from squashing competitors by purchasing their domain? They don't have to sell if the offer sucks.

The idea is that if I'm a startup that owns google-disruptor.com, I have to declare a value for that domain name (let's say $100,000), and pay a percentage of that value as a tax. I'm then obligated to sell the domain to anyone who is willing to pay $100,000. This prevents me from undervaluing the domain. Since Google has a much larger bankroll than me, they can purchase the domain for $100,000, and revalue the domai…

Since Google has a much larger bankroll than you, if they decided that they wanted prickledpear.com, wouldn't you have to sell it to them, or any other party with deep enough pockets?

Re: How many .com domain names are unused?

#188

Post by prickledpear » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 2:26 PM UTC

andmarios wrote: post #181

prickledpear wrote: post #174

One intriguing proposal to limit domain name squatting is "Harberger Taxation"[1] Under this scheme, every owner of a domain would declare a value for the domains they own, and pay a percentage of that value as a tax (replacing the current annual registration fees). Owners are incentivized to post an accurate value for their domain because they must sell their domain for the price they list if anyone offers to buy at…

Once you do this, squatters will just find an easy way to make a domain seem active: email traffic, basic websites, etc. Also sometimes there are legit uses, like squatting names in order to protect your brand. For example I could see google squatting google-search.com

This scheme has the advantage of it not mattering if something is active. Instead you pay fees based on what it's worth to you.

If someone is squatting on a high-value domain, they will have to pay high fees or sell the domain to someone who can make better use of it.

This prevents someone else from squatting on google-search.com and allows it to go to the highest value use -- protecting Google's brand.

Re: How many .com domain names are unused?

#189

Post by prickledpear » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 2:26 PM UTC

GilbertErik wrote: post #187

prickledpear wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is that if I'm a startup that owns google-disruptor.com, I have to declare a value for that domain name (let's say $100,000), and pay a percentage of that value as a tax. I'm then obligated to sell the domain to anyone who is willing to pay $100,000. This prevents me from undervaluing the domain. Since Google has a much larger bankroll than me, they can purchase the domain for $100,000, and revalue the domai…

Since Google has a much larger bankroll than you, if they decided that they wanted prickledpear.com, wouldn't you have to sell it to them, or any other party with deep enough pockets?

Yes, that is the problem I mentioned in the original comment that I'm not sure how to solve :)

Re: How many .com domain names are unused?

#190

Post by moduspol » Fri, Feb 01, 2019, 2:31 PM UTC

minikites wrote: post #90

BurningFrog wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you scan for uncorrupt institutions, how the hell do you end up on "governments the world over"?

I've never understood why governments (or labor unions) default to "corrupt" and private firms default to "virtuous".

Private firms aren't inherently "virtuous," but their motivations are at least clear. A business seeking to maximize financial returns for its owners isn't "corrupt," it's "working as expected."

The corruption of governments and labor unions often results in unexpected financial and non-financial returns for various people in ways that are more difficult to detect and measure.