Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be a progression of MBA-ification of the Internet domain name namespace management.

Originally, there was what seemed to be a custodian role, looking after the namespace. Then it seemed to possibly be getting confused as a profit center, with fees. Then ICANN happened. Then there was inexplicably created a bizarre cottage industry of numerous middleperson "registrars", effectively selling or renting domain names they didn't own. And a few big businesses, including Superbowl ads. Plus there were the squatters, of course, since no one was looking after the namespace anymore. Then an explosion of TLDs were sold. So now we have business people talking about "market share" of TLDs, and "consumer" options:

> Allowing .org and future domain names to move to market-based pricing makes sense with today’s healthy TLD market, which is populated with many choices for consumers to choose from. The .org domain name is well known as one of the first TLDs in the market available for public registration, but it still only holds 5.5 percent market share, with just over 10 million names in the .org space compared to almost 140 million domain names and 75 percent market share for .com.

> "registrars", effectively selling or renting domain names they didn't own.

I don't mind paying a fee for a registrar to handle the task of making sure the world knows that I own a particular domain. The problem is that the fee I'm paying appears to be viewed as me having to periodically re-purchase a domain I already own.

Remember that domains used to be free before 1997, before Network Solutions started charging $100/year.

The data a registrar stores for your domain is well under 1KB, including name server records, name, address, etc. This is highway robbery and pure profit to the registrar.

The expense of hoarding domain names is probably the only reason there are any left.

You would rather the Registry had a monopoly - I don't (as an ex member of poptel the .coop registry) have much good to say about ICANT but really.

Would you rather have a tld or country code be a monopoly and milked? The Irish domain .ie was famous for this as it was a for a long time effectively one eccentric guy.

> Plus there were the squatters, of course, since no one was looking after the namespace anymore.

Explain how ideally you think this should have been handled then? Specifically someone wants to register a domain name and how should they go about doing so and what specifically should be required of them prior to registering and what should happen if they don't 'use' the domain and how are you going to define 'use the domain exactly' and how you will review fairly whatever the interpretation is? How would you setup an alternate system for doing so and practically implement it?

Squatters by the way are a myth that was invented in the 90's by the media and used in an obviously pejorative way.

> Squatters by the way are a myth that was invented in the 90's by the media and used in an obviously pejorative way.

How do you mean it was a myth? You remember all the domain name for sale landing pages, the faux SEO (not really) pages, the domain name marketplace sites full of massive numbers never-used domains (sometimes domains with some token SEO-ing done on them to increase the rank they could mention), the registrars who helped automate massive buying of domain names, and all the people (including people you knew personally, not made up) talking about how they were buying up domain names for their value rather than to use (and the people themselves sometimes said they were "squatting")? Are you saying something else?

No the idea that there is something wrong with that is what I challenge. Why? Because it assumes that there is either a practical solution to preventing that behavior or that that behavior is in some way bad. For whatever the reason even though the internet is commercial people seem to think that domain names in particular (and specifically .com) is some kind of public trust that it's wrong to profit off of. Everyone knows that there are other ways to use a domain name they just decide they want (mostly) the .com. And it's not different because it's the internet.

So for example let's say you want neilv.com but someone has it figuring they can sell it to someone at some point. There is nothing preventing you from picking (especially today) neilv.somethhingelse or neilvonline.com and so on. But you have decided (most people) they want the .com. Then they feel entitled to having that .com when they come around to needing it. And they also think there should be some perfect system developed to decide who is the valid user and use of that domain when that practically would never happen. Now if the little old flower shop choose neilv.com and was 'using it' but not 'using it' is that more legit? Not really. The average person might still try to entice that owner with money so they could use the domain name.

Lastly people think that as a group others will or should not seek to profit and that trying to profit off an opportunity that you spot (that someone else doesn't; or in advance of them) is wrong in some way. But it's not. It's human nature and it's acceptable it's just that it pisses people off so they try to paint it in a negative way. And if someone decides to take a chance and grab domains with the intent of waiting for the right buyer to come along that is not any different than other ways people will try to make money.

The media of course (and bloggers) feeds into this and stokes it in many ways.

If it was so obvious that buying domains or trying to hoard them was a way to make money why didn't everyone do it? Not because they thought it was the wrong thing to do. Because they didn't think of doing it and/or didn't have the money to do it or weren't around or weren't creative enough. Not because they felt it was wrong.

> the registrars who helped automate massive buying of domain names

Exactly and anyone can do this. It's not tax medallions dolled out by politicians. Anyone can buy up domain names.

Thank you for clarifying and explaining.

I could possibly see your argument, but ICANN's early actions ("Now everyone can get money by being a registrar middleperson, for what's still necessarily a central registry! And sure, one person can buy thousands of namespace entries, to scalp them!") didn't give me the impression that they'd worked through all the possibilities for the goal of managing this resource. The best anyone could come up with was throwing away the prior rules, unhinged profiteering handouts, and assuming an unregulated market will work it out in the end?

FWIW, just a small counterexample to the assertion that people weren't stopped from buying domain names on any possible wrong-ness of it... I distinctly recall being surprised and disapproving when I first heard of someone registering a generic word (not based on the name of their organization) as a domain name. It was like the reaction when the first Usenet spammers started. It's not that nobody had thought of that, but there was some sense of stewardship and respectability that precluded such things (and also, at one point, rules about commercial use). We onboarded a large number of people into some of the thinking with every new college frosh class, every September. I'm not saying that that particular notion of decency was sustainable during a gold rush, but "they felt it was wrong" was the barrier sometimes.

The thing is, by definition, the registry is a monopoly for a certain TLD. So the idea was that those registries need to be regulated. What if they would just ask insane prices?

A registry has an 'easy' part, and that is actually maintaining a list of names and associated data, and providing that as DNS zones.

The hard part is dealing with individual customers. Providing service, collecting money, etc.

So the idea at the time was to have lots of registrars competing on what service they provide for what price and having more or less regulated registries that provide a fixed service at an agreed price.

By and large this system worked.

Early on, it was not clear if large zones like .com would actually scale. So there was some restraint of registering silly names, because that could lead to problems.

At some point, computers got fast enough and big enough memories that large zones were no longer a serious worry and everybody moved in to get all the nice domains.

Not so easy the technical requirements are not cheap and are quite rightly demanding - ie you can survive the continent failure mode.

For big zones it is relatively cheap (i.e, the cost per domain is low).

Since the invention of anycast routing, it is technically no longer complex.

If a continent fails, then either all BGP announcements are already gone, or you need a way to stop them. Then traffic will be routed to other continents.

It is not trivial, but for big zones if you get 1 euro per domain per year, you can do a lot of stuff.

And that is the sort of prices people cared about back then.

On the other hand, providing support, nobody has any idea how to spec that. What is a reasonable cost? The same goes for payment options.

when I worked for .coop it was multiple ha systems per continent in all four main continents.

I'd say the many-registrar-middlepersons approach system worked badly. All we needed was the registry to do very straightforward things, under contract. Instead, we got additional complexity and inefficiency, gobs of money being handed out to opportunists, people newly arriving to the Internet interfacing with certain "registrars" that used dark patterns to upsell, whois frontends rumored (and I've seen this myself) to grab the domain you're checking and then offer to sell it at an inflated price, and typically the domain name you wanted for your startup or other project was already registered by a squatter (I saw this many times) requiring you either to pay up the gouging scalper rates or keep trying to outpace the dictionary combinatorics attacks, and domain names more accessible to the deep-pocketed.

Yes, they had this before 1997. There were no registrars. The InterNIC / registry was it...

Think about the current state of ICANN. And now ICANN has to award contracts to monopolies for gTLDs like .com and .net.

What could possibly go wrong?

The registry part is easy to specify.

For the registrar, look at how google normally operates: everything they can automate works well and is cheap. As soon as something goes wrong and the they lock you out of an account it becomes hopeless. Imagine that google would be the only registrar for .com or .net

Of course, with a free market come shady parties. But with a bit of effort it is possible to find registrars that work quite well.

With just one monopoly per gTLD, it is likely that bad things will happen in the long run.

I don't know why we're still talking about monopolies. It should be a contracted clerical registry doing a very straightforward thing, according to rules.

Reality is that this lasts for a few years. And then the contracted party finds ways to raise prices or make a mess or both.

Look at the history of decisions taken by ICANN. Contracts get awarded with hardly influence from the larger internet community.

Remember it? There's a squatter on a domain I want, who is offering to _rent it_ for $2000 _per month_.

An archive.org search shows it was rented for 2 months in the last 7 years.

I don't agree with ICANNs proposal in the article, but squatting is an issue.

"If you don't provide an ideal solution, your criticism is invalid."

More like "if you can't even suggest a marginally better solution than the status quo, your criticism is invalid" since you're tacitly admitting that as far as you know, the status quo is already the best solution.

The first step to a solution or improvement, is identifying there is a problem.

Have you even _tried_ registering a domain? Any time I go looking for nice domain names, either for fun or for a purpose, I go through a ton of excellent domain names owned by squatters who sell the domains for ridiculous or undisclosed prices, before finding a few less desirable domain names which are actually available. How are squatters a "myth" in any way?

A few years ago I wanted a domain for a project. I had no trouble coming up with a nice 6 letter word and registering the .com and .org.

Everybody wants the same popular words, but if you get a little bit creative, the domains are usually free.

This appears to be a previously-unknown-to-me definition of the word "free". Care to explain a bit?

As in, "unregistered to someone else", no? I could be misunderstanding both of you however, and have no stake in this discussion

See https://thesaurus.yourdictionary.com/free number 3.

Oh. So, Free as in Memory, I suppose.

> either for fun or for a purpose

So if for example the name you wanted 'for fun' was grabbed years ago by someone else who wanted it 'for fun' that would bother you less? Or you would then think (honestly) 'wow what a waste that person uses it for 'fun' and I have an actual real (and importantly better) use for the name. My point in part is that if there were no people buying domain names to sell them there is most likely going to be a situation where someone will (in year 2019) have gotten to the 'good' name first and it wouldn't be available.

Lastly in a capitalistic society do you feel justified in being unhappy because there is physical real estate in desirable places (not startup desirable either but just desirable like Miami Beach let's say) where someone bought land or buildings years ago before you were born and now you can't afford to live there and have to pick a less desirable location?

I wasn't talking about buying a domian for fun, but about looking at what domains are available for fun with no intention of buying them then and there.

But yes, someone buying a domain and using it for something fun, be it just fun for them (and maybe their friends) or fun for the rest of the world (such as https://bad.solutions), is a lot better than someone buying a domain just to squat on it because they think someone else may want to buy it for a lot of money some day. Playfulness and fun is actually important.

> Lastly in a capitalistic society do you feel justified in being unhappy because there is physical real estate in desirable places (not startup desirable either but just desirable like Miami Beach let's say) where someone bought land or buildings years ago before you were born and now you can't afford to live there and have to pick a less desirable location?

I think would be justified in being unhappy about people buying land and buildings with no intention of doing anything with them, just because they think someone else will eventually buy that real-estate for more money. AFAIK, squatting is one of the important problems inherent to housing markets, and there are laws to prevent people from just sitting on empty houses until they can sell them for enough money (although IANAL).

'how are you going to define 'use the domain exactly''

Well for starters, it might be useful to have actual name resolution rather than nothing but a whois record.

Back 30+ years ago or so, I sorta randomly named my home subnet of the form firstinitiallastname.net, then when wifi came out I similarly named the ssids. Then a couple years later I decided it might not be a bad idea to register the name but some guy was using it as a vanity domain. That lasted for about two years and then it got picked up by a domain squatter and has been sitting there completely unused for > 10 years. Today the whois record points at ename.com, which I contacted a few years ago to find out how much it was going to cost to transfer the domain. Apparently they have some kind of bidding garbage, but it counter-bid the $25(or similarly low amount I offered) to something like $15,000.

I have another domain, i've been planning on using, but updating a 100 wifi devices passwords is a PITA.

> How would you setup an alternate system for doing so and practically implement it?

The simple solution is to prohibit the sale of domain names. This is also how trademarks work in the US -- you can't sell a trademark.

Businesses get around this by transferring the trademark in connection with the sale of the "goodwill" associated with it, and typically also the rest of the company that holds the trademark. They could then do the same thing here -- transfer a domain along with the business that owns it. You're selling the business and not the domain name, the domain name just comes with it. But you can't sell only the domain name, which puts the squatters out of business.

What squatters would then attempt to do is to sell some nominal asset in conjunction with the domain name and claim that the sale is of the other thing and not the domain name, but judges are not idiots. If you're selling a valuable domain attached to a $1 knickknack for $5000, it's clear that the price is being paid for the domain name and not the knickknack. Moreover, even if it doesn't solve 100% of the problem, it makes the squatter's life harder and makes it more difficult for them to advertise the sale of domain names etc., which would at least be an improvement with no major cost to legitimate users.

Are you going to prohibit domain leasing?

Could prohibit charging money for it.

> This is also how trademarks work in the US -- you can't sell a trademark.

You can do that (as you are pointing out) so I am not sure why you are even saying that.

> They could then do the same thing here -- transfer a domain along with the business that owns it.

So now you are going to define what 'a business' is and further saying that a domain name can only be used for 'a business' and not by a person? Or are you going to extend this to what you think are 'legit' personal uses of domains?

What you are trying to say is that you don't think that someone should be allowed to be 'in the business of selling domain names and we know it when we see it', right? So you are now going to take away all of the property that someone 'in the business of selling domain names' has and then what are you going to do with that exactly? Setup a system to then decide what an appropriate use of those domains are?

> So now you are going to define what 'a business' is and further saying that a domain name can only be used for 'a business' and not by a person? Or are you going to extend this to what you think are 'legit' personal uses of domains?

There is no need to get into any of that because you can't sell a person. It's only a problem for a business because you can sell a business and thereby try to use a sham business sale to de facto sell a domain name.

> What you are trying to say is that you don't think that someone should be allowed to be 'in the business of selling domain names and we know it when we see it', right?

This is not actually that hard. You shouldn't be able to sell a domain name by itself nor sell "other thing that includes a domain name" for more than the fair market value of the other thing by itself.

Sometimes determining the fair market value of something is non-trivial, but that doesn't stop us from doing it in any other case, e.g. when you receive non-monetary compensation from your employer and it has to have a market value assigned for tax purposes.

> So you are now going to take away all of the property that someone 'in the business of selling domain names' has and then what are you going to do with that exactly? Setup a system to then decide what an appropriate use of those domains are?

Without the ability to sell them, they would presumably no longer be inclined to keep paying the annual fees to uselessly hoard them and they would become unregistered names again.

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