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Comment by brohee | Hacker News Reader

It's a private entity that reaps the benefits of what is a public good presumably...

it's not private until it have an owner.

or are you normalizing the criminal behavior of godaddy where registrars can rush and buy the domain while you're doing the check out process just to sell back to you for more?

The private entities I was speaking about are the auctionning registrar, the public good is the right to serve .ro domain (which should benedit Romanians at large).

Also, presumably the additional cost on the .ro ccTLD from the bots hammering the servers is burdening the Romanian citizen, and the benefits are going to the offending registrars...

Citation for the GoDaddy claim?

OP is probably referencing domain front running. Basically when you search a registrar for an available domain, if the domain is available they'll put a 5 day hold on the domain, making it available solely through that registrar but not others. It forces the searcher to buy it through that one registrar if they want it. I couldn't find any direct evidence of GoDaddy doing it, but there's a lot anecdotal reports of them doing it, and it's confirmed that Network Solutions was doing this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running

A comment in a previous discussion with some more information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4362961

Thanks. That's pretty lame but definitely not the same as buying up the domain and then raising the price. (Which would be shady but also probably a money-loser overall.)

A domain name is a private good, not a public good.

The exclusivity of the domain name is a public good. The right to use the domain name is a private, transferable good.

Were the auction site operated by Romania, the value of courses.ro would be determined by auction, paid by a willing buyer, and received by the Romanian polity. Instead, the Romanian polity receives 300EUR as an entrance fee to a race-track where luck is significant in determining the winner. There is nothing in the linked article suggesting that the number of entrants is limited.

It's an excludible good in the economic sense, but the value wasn't created by the private company, but by the public WWW itself. This is classic rent seeking.

Sure, just like the public's promise to keep off a chunk of land is a private good.

That's how our current system works, but it probably works that way primarily because the groups in charge wanted to raise money, not because it's a fundamental philosophical truth that it should work that way.

Can you clarify what you mean by that? Would you say that ICANN "owns" all domain names, then sells them in bundles, making them private goods?

A domain isn't a private good until it's actually owned by a private party.

"A domain name is a private good, not a public good.... until it is sold (or rented) to person x, with the understanding that he can renew it forever if he follows a few rules.

Country ones are owned by the country - TLD's are a bit more unclear.

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