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Let ICANN know if you support .com price hikes

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Re: Let ICANN know if you support .com price hikes

#81

Post by geofft »

fgonzag wrote: post #69
geofft wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Has been estimated" by others? I'm not a fan of government-style lowest-bidder procurement for something as critical as .com. Among other things, I assume this involves operating the .com DNS servers, and it seems like the current operators are probably uniquely positioned to understand what makes that different from operating e.g. .party or .racing, what weird load patterns it sees, maybe even how much to pay the f…

Critical infrastructure operated by a single company. That can't ever go wrong, provider redundancy is overrated.

Not that I disagree, but wouldn't that require increasing the price even more so you could pay both companies?

I don't think the argument for "We're paying Verisign too much to be a single point of failure, so let's pay someone else who's never done it less to be a different single point of failure" really holds up.

Re: Let ICANN know if you support .com price hikes

#82

Post by mekster »

franga2000 wrote: post #72
ryanlol wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it such a big problem that you have to pay more than $7 for a single word .com? Is it just that it feels unfair to you for someone to be profiting like this? I’ve been more than happy to buy domains from these squatters, they’re usually willing to accept prices far lower than the value I can extract from said domains.

I guess you're technically correct in that the several thousands of $ these domains usually go for is "more than 7$" and in fact, I don't have a problem paying a high price for something valuable to me. I have a problem paying an unpredictable unregulated price to a completely third party just because they "got there first". Buying from a squatter benefits the squatter (a 3rd party) and to some extent the providers (…

Maybe by that definition all the unused lands should be left as no one's property and not owned by landlords. I can't see how that works.

Re: Let ICANN know if you support .com price hikes

#83

Post by kerkeslager »

ryanlol wrote: post #38
franga2000 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but are you saying you haven't noticed the squatting problem? According to [0], there are only around 1000 single-word .COMs left. [0] https://www.domcomp.com/blog/the-last-coms.html

Why is it such a big problem that you have to pay more than $7 for a single word .com? Is it just that it feels unfair to you for someone to be profiting like this? I’ve been more than happy to buy domains from these squatters, they’re usually willing to accept prices far lower than the value I can extract from said domains.

> Is it just that it feels unfair to you for someone to be profiting like this?

There are other reasons, but I'm a bit confused why this isn't something you find objectionable.

In theory, a free market should incentivize people to create value. But here's a case where people are literally removing value which was previously available, and getting paid to do it: if there ever was a perverse incentive, this is it.

From reading your comments, it seems like you think that anything that "freedom" = "anything the free market does". This is pretty fundamentally misguided, because if you don't have any rules to prevent people from amassing too much power, you just end up with rules set forth by whoever you've let take power. If you refuse to make rules, you're simply accepting the rules made by someone who doesn't refuse to make rules.

Re: Let ICANN know if you support .com price hikes

#84

Post by kerkeslager »

jefftk wrote: post #23
kerkeslager wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be an undue burden to require people like you to put up a page saying, "This is my personal domain which I use primarily for email."? Can we just agree that nobody is posting the full proposed set of rules on HN, and nobody is trying to take away your domain? Every time this solution to domain squatting is proposed, someone counters with your objection as if it's a huge problem with the idea, but it just isn…

How do you write rules that allow "this is my personal domain that I use for email" and not squatting? Can't the squatters just say something along those lines?

Sure, they can say that.

And if they are a big company that owns hundreds of thousands of unrelated domains with no apparent email traffic, it would be pretty obvious that it's untrue.

So sure, a lot of small bad actors would get away with it. But it would could potentially take out the biggest bad actors.

Re: Let ICANN know if you support .com price hikes

#85

Post by kerkeslager »

davinic wrote: post #73
franga2000 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between domain names and let's say cars or boxes of paper, as you put it, is so obvious, I didn't think it needed saying. It's that (usable) domains are a unique and finite, whereas all your other examples are neither. You can't just wait for the next batch of domains to come out of the factory and buy them from their manufacturer (new gTLDs were an attempt at that and failed miserably). It's the same…

You are correct, but our entire economy is setup to reward the exact land hoarding that against which you are arguing. OP is asking why domain name ownership would be treated differently.

"would" and "should" are not the same word.

Re: Let ICANN know if you support .com price hikes

#86

Post by kerkeslager »

ryanlol wrote: post #76
franga2000 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you're technically correct in that the several thousands of $ these domains usually go for is "more than 7$" and in fact, I don't have a problem paying a high price for something valuable to me. I have a problem paying an unpredictable unregulated price to a completely third party just because they "got there first". Buying from a squatter benefits the squatter (a 3rd party) and to some extent the providers (…

Okay so the complaint is essentially “this doesn’t feel fair!”. I guess this really does come down to envy, just as another commenter pointed out. >but harms the end consumer It doesn’t though, without the second hand market someone would be using that domain for something silly and you wouldn’t get it anyway. > Consumer first, companies second, random third parties last But companies are the primary consumers in the…

> It doesn’t though, without the second hand market someone would be using that domain for something silly and you wouldn’t get it anyway.

Please explain why you think this.

Also, what could be more silly than doing nothing with it, except wait for a sufficiently-funded buyer?

Re: Let ICANN know if you support .com price hikes

#87

Post by ryanlol »

kerkeslager wrote: post #86
ryanlol wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay so the complaint is essentially “this doesn’t feel fair!”. I guess this really does come down to envy, just as another commenter pointed out. >but harms the end consumer It doesn’t though, without the second hand market someone would be using that domain for something silly and you wouldn’t get it anyway. > Consumer first, companies second, random third parties last But companies are the primary consumers in the…

> It doesn’t though, without the second hand market someone would be using that domain for something silly and you wouldn’t get it anyway. Please explain why you think this. Also, what could be more silly than doing nothing with it, except wait for a sufficiently-funded buyer?

>Please explain why you think this.

Because without the secondary market there’d be no incentive for anyone to give up a domain. At least now the domains actually end up with parties willing to pay a fair price for them.

Re: Let ICANN know if you support .com price hikes

#88

Post by franga2000 »

mekster wrote: post #82
franga2000 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you're technically correct in that the several thousands of $ these domains usually go for is "more than 7$" and in fact, I don't have a problem paying a high price for something valuable to me. I have a problem paying an unpredictable unregulated price to a completely third party just because they "got there first". Buying from a squatter benefits the squatter (a 3rd party) and to some extent the providers (…

Maybe by that definition all the unused lands should be left as no one's property and not owned by landlords. I can't see how that works.

I agree that probably wouldn't work for land, which is why I support a higher tax on unused land/realestate instead, to incentivise owners to keep lowering the prices until it sells, instead of setting the price to something unreasonable and holding it for years and years until people get desperate enough.

But I seem to have gone off track. Any situation where the consumer gets screwed because a completely third party wants to line their pockets is a situation I don't want to see. Namesquatting, ticket scalping, that thing where a company buys up the whole used market on something and then re-sells it for a premium, etc. are all examples of that and I am yet to hear a good argument for them other than "I have the right to be a capitalist dick with no regard for others", which I do not consider a basic human right.

Re: Let ICANN know if you support .com price hikes

#89

Post by kerkeslager »

ryanlol wrote: post #87
kerkeslager wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn’t though, without the second hand market someone would be using that domain for something silly and you wouldn’t get it anyway. Please explain why you think this. Also, what could be more silly than doing nothing with it, except wait for a sufficiently-funded buyer?

>Please explain why you think this. Because without the secondary market there’d be no incentive for anyone to give up a domain. At least now the domains actually end up with parties willing to pay a fair price for them.

Nobody is proposing we get rid of the secondary market, so you can stop proposing that straw man argument.

I'm not saying we should get rid of the secondary market. I'm saying the secondary market should consist of entities who are making a good-faith effort to make use of the domains, not middlemen who actively suck value out of the system while contributing nothing.

Re: Let ICANN know if you support .com price hikes

#90

Post by ryanlol »

kerkeslager wrote: post #89
ryanlol wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Please explain why you think this. Because without the secondary market there’d be no incentive for anyone to give up a domain. At least now the domains actually end up with parties willing to pay a fair price for them.

Nobody is proposing we get rid of the secondary market, so you can stop proposing that straw man argument. I'm not saying we should get rid of the secondary market. I'm saying the secondary market should consist of entities who are making a good-faith effort to make use of the domains, not middlemen who actively suck value out of the system while contributing nothing.

Doesn’t sound like that would really make a meaningful difference. You’d just end up with loads of automatically generated garbage websites.

Nothing less than the “strawman” of eliminating the secondary market is going to achieve anything at all.

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