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by __david__ 5720 days ago
> Nobody walks past a vacant block in a prime real estate location and goes "bastards, if they weren't squatting that land, I could snap it up".

For me the annoyance comes from the fact that most of the parcels of land that are owned are actively being used for something, while it seems most of the domains in existence are owned by these squatter bastards.
1 comments
user24 5719 days ago
oh rubbish. There are massive tracts of lands all over the world which are owned and just being sat on. There are a tonne of old warehouses just being left to crumble away in my town. Prime locations, just waiting for the right price.
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__david__ 5719 days ago
If we say ln = number of privately owned land parcels and lu = number of privately owned land parcels being actively used (as homes or businesses or being rented), then I contend that lu/ln > .5 (hence "most"). That does not rule out ln-lu being a very large number which makes what you said true, it just sounds like a different measurement that I was making.

If dn = number of domain names owned and du = number of domain names owned with valid DNS and no crappy domain squatter parking pages, then I contend du/dn < .5. In fact, I get the impression it's more like .1 or less (or perhaps something even more ludicrous).

Even if I'm totally wrong about the ratio of land used, there's no way that I'm wrong that lu/ln > du/dn.

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ultrasaurus 5719 days ago
There are some steps slowly being taken to deal with that, in Washington DC, apparently the tax on vacant property is %5 rather than 0.85% [1] (although I expect that's more to keep their revenue the same since vacant lots aren't worth much).

The equivalent first step for domains though is for Google to stop treating made-for-adsense domains as real sites, so the $10/year/domain can't be offset by tricking advertisers and web neophytes.

[1] http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2008/08/more_vacants/

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ohashi 5719 days ago
That's not us in most cases. Our parked domains generally aren't listed in Google. MFA stuff is mostly SEO types doing that. We get our traffic from type ins (and old links) which is more profitable to send directly to ads without any BS content.
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