[raganwald]

You know this and I know this, but the way the marketplace works is that if nobody intervenes, people buy food that kills them, cribs that kill their babies, pajamas that catch on fire and stick burning plastic to their skin, and so forth.

So we draw a line somewhere and say that those products and services over there, caveat emptor. These over here, OTOH, must have a minimum standard of safety.

I am personally not convinced that domain registration should be left up to the marketplace. What if someone gets a user's password and then redirects their web addresses to a site that dispenses malware?

The victims in this case aren't even the domain registrar's customers, they're people who had absolutely no say in the question.

But any ways, I wasn't really trying to suggest we regulate it so much as suggest that laughing at Hover.com is looking in the wrong direction. There is a large social problem isomorphic to the "disable your security software if you want to see a video of dancing babies" problem. That problem is far more interesting and important than the "greedy businesspeople are greedy" problem.