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Comment by ishansharma | Hacker News Reader

Surely, it is legal and indeed a hack. But still, not morally correct!

After he sold to NameMedia, of which he still owns a 15 percent stake, Mann had a noncompete that kept him away from the domain game for about four years. Instead, he worked on his many other ventures, such as SEO.com and a nonprofit called Grassroots.org.

From grassroots.org:

The mission of Grassroots.org is to help charities succeed by providing them with modern technologies and best practices at no cost.

I don't know if it's morally correct or not, but Mann doesn't otherwise seem like a morally bankrupt individual.

Grassroots.org appears to just be away for him to funnel more cash to himself. The charity gives away his SEO services - i.e. donors are just paying for his salary.

It's not amoral. I've been frustrated myself over domains I couldn't get, but I fail to understand how this is amoral. Too often we are quick to make moral judgments based on distaste (of which I share).

a·mor·al ( -môr l, -m r -). adj. 1. Not admitting of moral distinctions or judgments; neither moral nor immoral

Why is it not morally correct? He is just speculating as speculators do in all different industries. And kudos to him - it's technically non-trivial, carries a lot of risk and clearly requires a lot of business acumen to work.

I don't think $10/yr is a lot of risk.

So why don't you go and buy a 1,000 domains? Presumably you'll be confident you'll get at least $10/year on average from them all....

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