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Comment by Befittd | Hacker News Reader

I'm amazed that this provocative title hasn't thrown up any discussion about the truly broken part of this system - the fact that people who buy and sell domains with no intention of ever using them even exist. It's a modern day tragedy of the commons - a public resource that anyone lacking a moral compass can profit from at the expense of the people who actually want to produce something valuable with it.

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I always have the same feelings when I go to the central market. All those people owning houses and running low profit businesses. This is so unfair. I would be much better owning them. This system is so unfair!

I imagine this is trolling, but nonetheless: it's not so much about it being unfair, as it being horribly inefficient. It's a completely arbitrarily defined market over which we (strictly, ICANN) have total control. In your central market the only person who stands to lose out from any inefficiency is the owner of the property, who could get more money by selling it to you, if you truly could make more money from it than they could. In this market anyone can buy a new domain name, so it's not unfair, but the rules of the market have been defined such that people profit from it without providing any value. I'm not complaining about it, I'm merely suggesting that it's an opportunity to increase market efficiency - it's not a trivial problem but our current solutions to it seem very poor. A service, for example, that would hunt out truly great domain names for a particular purpose, buy them and then sell them on at a profit having helped the purchaser find them would be providing great value, but if the process is "search for your own domain name and then purchase it from whoever previously thought of it", it's a bit disappointing.

Domain speculators do "provide value" to ICANN in the form of annual registration fees, which they pay ICANN irrespective of whether any end user wants that domain [in that year]. They "provide value" to buyers in relinquishing ownership of a good they wanted more last time it went on sale; same as any other secondary market transaction. Sure, ICANN could be "more efficient" and charge premium prices on some domains, but the only thing worse than being gouged by speculators is being gouged by a monopolist.

I can't see why the existence of domain speculators prevents people from profiting from "helping purchasers find" names, if there's really a substantial value add in having imagination and the ability to use a WHOIS search.

i wonder. how much of wanting a specific domain name is vanity and how much of it is stats/market research/etc? is being more flexible/imaginative with one's domain name really that painful? do people advertise their web business on tv or radio that often? i find it hard to imagine typing in full urls everytime i visit a site..theres auto complete and theres google and there're links..

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