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Comment by mden | Hacker News Reader

But then a lot of people wouldn't be able to afford owning a domain, which to me seems more evil than domain squatting. Artificially raising the prices hardly seems like a fair solution.

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I'm not advocating this, but you could always have cheap registration for a .poverty domain, or some such.

I'll bet you just don't understand why the tech crowd is becoming vilified in San Francisco, too.

I'd really like to think it was a clever, self-aware, parody comment.

(The "I'm not advocating this" part seems to weaken this, though. )

Well, I tend to agree with you that this a political impossibility. But I think it's worth thinking a bit about why you find it so outrageous. If the problem is "domain name registration might be unaffordable for the impoverished", what's the negative side to letting anyone at all have extremely cheap registration just by claiming to be poor? It's hassle-free price discrimination. Is it morally offensive to you when e.g. a company lets you use their software with prominent branding attached for cheap, or the same software, whitelabeled, for dear?

If the problem isn't "domain name registration might be unaffordable for the impoverished"... maybe it's worth thinking about what the problem is?

It's outrageous because the argument is that it would be really cool to brand poor people with a big red letter because you couldn't get pets.com when you wanted it.

Most of the world can't seriously afford $100/year for a domain registration. Get out of your bubble.

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