[perching_aix]

I really disagree with pulling the power dynamic angle into focus here. Injustice can also be carried out by the "little man", sometimes even at scale, and is every bit as awful to remedy if not even more so.

The issue is with the issue: people/systems (big and small) blacklisting an ownable identifier pointing to some ownable content without any care for the lifecycle of either.

Painting this with a social brush is extremely unhelpful and is guaranteed to derail conversations for no benefit whatsoever.

[cj]

> The issue is with the issue: people/systems (big and small) blacklisting an ownable identifier pointing to some ownable content without any care for the lifecycle of either.

Does the lifecycle matter much, though?

Kind of like a carfax report. Tells you whether a vehicle you’re buying has been in an accident before (if it has, the value goes down because maybe there’s some latent issue that isn’t obvious at the time of purchase)

It would be nice if ICANN had some equivalent of a carfax for domains, perhaps even with a requirement that registrars expose at time of purchase whether a domain has been misused in the past (and who the prior owners were, or at the very minimum what the historical DNS records were).

Basically you want to avoid buying a “lemon” domain by accident.

I place zero fault/blame on “powerful entities” maintaining lists of domains used for spam/scams. How else will we protect grandma?

[CityOfThrowaway]

For readers: you could build Namefax as a startup! Pure-partnerships based model... distribute it through registrars.

"Heads up, this is a pre-owned domain. Do you want to get the Namefax for $0.99 before you buy?"

[teddyh]

A carfax report lists issues with the actual car. You don’t want a car with “car exploded” in the carfax report, since this would translate to actual damage in the car, damage which could actually affect you if you were to drive the car.

On the other hand, a domain reputation at Google et al. is more like Carfax reporting “This car was once parked at the same street where a horrific mass murder took place.” If this was a problem since, let’s assume for the sake of argument, the police would pull you over all the time if you drove it, it would still not be a problem with the actual car; the problem would be the police, and fixing police behavior would be the only workable solution. Using Carfax as an analogy still places the blame on the domain owner, not on Google et al.

[perching_aix]

But in this scenario there are many more parties involved than just "the police". So you can't "just fix the police behavior" for a "solution". You'd have to "fix" any and every party that already exists or pops up in the future.

This kind of issue is inherent to any system where identifiers are recycled, particularly when that recycling happens on demand. It's not "fixable", at best it's combatable. And trying to language police away the symptom and blaming it all on the pivotal participants supports and achieves neither.

[teddyh]

The analogy is not perfect, but there aren’t myriads of parties, there’s basically only Google, plus a handful of others of greatly decreasing importance.

If it was a reputation problem where, say, end clients with web browsers would each have a separate and uniquely derived negative opinion about domain names, this would indeed be a “bad reputation” problem and not a Google problem, since the problem could not be fixed at the Google side. But with domain reputation being so centralized, the problem is at the center.

[perching_aix]

> Does the lifecycle matter much, though?

How could it not? It's essentially the same issue as an unmaintained phonebook or a map. What's at a given address or phone number changes, and if your solution is not equipped to handle that change, your solution is bad.

[cj]

I agree.

But that’s not a fixable problem in my eyes. At least not without extreme and sweeping changes driven by some kind of government regulation or ICANN mandates which, if enacted, would probably be highly criticized on HN.

There are just too many block lists for domains (literally thousands if you include open source ad blockers).

The lifecycle “should” matter in a perfect world, I agree.

[perching_aix]

Oh I don't think it's full-on fixable either. What I wanted to challenge was just the characterization of the issue itself.

As you say there are plenty of volunteer maintained blocklists as well, and there are also the countless privately deployed filters using those lists, which may or may not get updated properly. That's the "little man" part, and is why I think the characterization the thread starter was trying to push is ill-fitting.

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

I couldn't disagree more. What you've written is both apologetics and simply untrue.

[perching_aix]

Sorry to hear you feel that way.