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by lmm 699 days ago
You'd tax them some proportion of the fair market value of the domain, not their revenue, just like with any other form of land.
1 comments

How would you calculate the FMV of milk.com?
What's the highest offer for it that you've rejected? That seems like a fair lower bound.

(Not that I necessarily support a Georgist tax in this case, since it seems that your interest in the domain is noncommercial in nature)

Wouldn't that allow random people to increase your tax on domains you obviously don't want to sell ?

E.g. if you owned and actively used greyface-.com and I'd make an offer of 10 000$ just for the fun of it, either you literally give up your name (I eat the cost but that's a risk I could want to take) or you're stuck with a percent of that to pay every month/year even as nothing else changed for you.

> E.g. if you owned and actively used greyface-.com and I'd make an offer of 10 000$ just for the fun of it, either you literally give up your name (I eat the cost but that's a risk I could want to take) or you're stuck with a percent of that to pay every month/year even as nothing else changed for you.

If you're willing to pay $10000 for it, even if only out of spite, then it's worth that much yeah. The domain is suddenly in more demand than it was, taking it out of circulation is a bigger imposition on society than it was before, so isn't it right that the tax on that goes up?

I'm still not sure it works. If I end up paying for your domain after a malicious move I coukd as well try to milk it out and may recover my cost by burning through your brand image. If I actually got more from it than expected, I'd rince and repeat making people's life miserable. Same way if an attacker got tesla.com by pushing enough, they might extract more value from it than a flailing Tesla could, and the customer base would be worse for it.

As a society I think we don't want to encourage adversarial pricing on taxes, the same way property tax isn't just based on raw demand (or even linked to it at all depending on the country) and has elements of controls to prevent too much gaming of it.

> I eat the cost but that's a risk I could want to take

You also have to eat the increased tax going forward. Which could be spent on eg universal healthcare.

I know of no truly serious offers for the domain, but why should that matter? I'm pretty sure residences aren't taxed based on un-accepted offers, for example.
Residences are taxed based on appraised market value; I think offers made can be taken into account on that? If not then they should be.
At least where I live (California US), that's not true. There are certain things which trigger a change in taxable value, but they're mostly only indirectly connected to appraised value. Un-accepted offers 100% definitely don't factor in and (for reasons already argued by others on this discussion) would probably cause more problems than they would solve if they _were_ taken into account.
California's property tax system is notoriously terrible and a significant contributor to the housing crisis in that state.
You'd have an assessor compare it against domains that had traded recently (someone else mentioned beer.com), perhaps ask interested buyers to give a quote.
Are you proposing every domain name registrant pay for an annual appraisal, whether or not they are planning on selling?