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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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.

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.

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