[gruez]

>The lions share of issues with domains would go away if we made squatting illegal, or at the least, extremely expensive.

How do you define squatting? Is the owner of nissan.com "squatting" on it because he wouldn't sell to the japanese car company? How much interest do you need in a given domain before it's not squatting?

[ToucanLoucan]

I would argue if you aren't doing some combination of:

- Hosting a website

- Operating email accounts

- Infrastructure (mail, DNS, etc.)

- Misc. Services (Minecraft server, TeamSpeak server, something)

Then you're squatting. Like if you own turkeyonapig.com and it's literally just a web page with a picture of a turkey sitting on a pig? Not squatting. It's odd but it's clearly doing exactly what it's meant to be doing. If you own turkeyonapig.com and are doing nothing but advertising that fact, and that someone can buy it? Squatting.

> Is the owner of nissan.com "squatting" on it because he wouldn't sell to the japanese car company?

I mean, it depends. One would argue that people going to nissan.com are clearly looking for the Japanese car company, so it's in the public's interest that that domain be sold to them. On the other hand, if someone owns it and is using to run a Nissan fan website? Well I suppose that's trickier, but that would also probably be better suited to something like nissanfans.com.

It's a tricky thing but not impossible to figure out.

[gruez]

>I would argue if you aren't doing some combination of: [...]

cloudflare offers free website hosting and email forwarding, so it's basically free for a squatter to check those boxes.

>I mean, it depends. One would argue that people going to nissan.com are clearly looking for the Japanese car company, so it's in the public's interest that that domain be sold to them.

So you basically want the Kelo v. City of New London decision to be applied to domains as well? You own "erictrump.com" but aren't the president-elect's son? Well tough luck because it's "in the public's interest" that president-elect's son gets it rather than you.

[ToucanLoucan]

> cloudflare offers free website hosting and email forwarding, so it's basically free for a squatter to check those boxes.

Sure. But it still takes time, or as someone else suggested, a GPT query. Putting literally even the tiniest amount of work in front of squatting will reduce the amount of squatting.

> So you basically want the Kelo v. City of New London decision to be applied to domains as well? You own "erictrump.com" but aren't the president-elect's son? Well tough luck because it's "in the public's interest" that president-elect's son gets it rather than you.

I mean, it is. And putting the phrase in scare quotes isn't a counterpoint.

One could argue in fact that one of the multitude of reasons for the rise of platforms is that it's so hard to find anything on the actual internet, and part of that in turn can be blamed squarely on squatting.

[SoftTalker]

You can boil it down to: are you offering it for sale? If yes, squatting. If not, early bird gets the worm. You should be able to own a domain name and not be required to do anything with it beyond paying the registrar to legitimize your ownership.

[jocoda]

> It's a tricky thing but not impossible to figure out.

Good to hear. So after that you'll be sorting out world peace - right?

[beeflet]

I really don't think eliminating domain squatters is some impossible task. you could probably just tax sales of domain names to death (90% sales tax on any resold domain names) to disincentivize it vs registration upkeep costs.

Squatters are a massive blight on the internet.

[jocoda]

The problem goes way beyond domain squatting. You have a limited resource, say nissan.com, and you have several valid claimants. Who gets to decide what's fair? First past the post? Heaviest pocket book? Biggest stick? Popular acclaim? ...

Is not unique to domains, this is why the world is uts.

[beeflet]

I don't intend to solve this problem entirely, just to displace this business model of squatting domains, which is a massive waste of domain space.

First past the post is "good enough" for me if the intrinsic value of the domain to you is greater than the domain registration fee of like 3-10 bucks a month.

There shouldn't be a major reselling market, that would be like if the majority of space in the yellow pages was just advertisements that said "your business ad here!"

[foxglacier]

Make the transaction in a country that doesn't have such a tax?

[beeflet]

The tax would be done by the registrar or ICANN or whatever (although throwing more money at them might increase corruption of their bureaucracy, oh well). You could burn the money for all I care.

If you get caught, the domain is blacklisted. Ownership transfer is public, so there is little incentive for buyers to go with this route.

[foxglacier]

Do they or even should they have the authority to demand that people correctly report the prices they trade domain names for?

[echoangle]

And you think a domain squatter would be deterred by high pricing and not just point every single domain to a VPS with a „Hey guys buy my domains“ page? Or even just point them to any random IP, since DNS is one of the legitimate uses you named?

[ToucanLoucan]

I mean that's basically what most do now. I'm saying the domain should direct to an actual website, irrespective of how useful or large it is.

See my example of turkeyonapig.com.

[dist-epoch]

> a web page with a picture of a turkey sitting on a pig? Not squatting

GPT/Cursor will create that page for you in 5 min. I bet a NotSquattingAsAService startups will appear which will create the "not squatting" fake site for you for $2.

[ToucanLoucan]

I mean, that's an improvement in my mind over millions of insipid "BUY THIS DOMAIN!" web pages. At the least the internet would be more interesting?

But also like, then you aren't advertising it for sale. So I'm wondering how many offers you're going to get to sell that domain, which is the point of squatting it.

[dist-epoch]

That's not how most squatting pages are sold. They are registered for sale in places like NameCheap and you can see it directly when you search for domains.

[reaperducer]

NotSquattingAsAService startups will appear which will create the "not squatting" fake site for you for $2.

That's an improvement. Adding $2 to $5 to the cost of a squatted domain will start to dissuade people who squat on tens of thousands of domains, if they have to suddenly have to pay $20,000 to $50,000 for the not squatting service.

[gruez]

>That's an improvement. Adding $2 to $5 to the cost of a squatted domain will start to dissuade people who squat on tens of thousands of domains

There's no way static site hosting and a email service costs $2-$5 per year per domain, especially for bulk users. Even if we take that price at face value, a .com domain already costs around $10/year. A 20%-50% increase will only change behavior at the margins. It won't make chat.com magically become available, and at best will make some D tier domains available. Ironically the introduction of gTLDs probably had the same effect. Squatting harrisonburgrealty.com is suddenly going to be less profitable when there's harrisonburg.{realty,realestate,realtor,homes,house,place,properties,rent,apartments} available as well.

[ToucanLoucan]

To be clear, when I said make it cost more, I was thinking more like taxes. Similar to how we should be taxing vacant homes to raise the cost of keeping empty properties and lower the rents in turn.

[spookie]

Nissan is the guy's name. Come on.

It doesn't matter if you're just a dude or a corporation, you play by the same rules. There isn't anything to solve here. These problems are solved between those those 2 parties and no one else.

Good Lord. It's in the public's interest it remains this way.

Another person here had it right, companies have been playing with fire with their URL shenanigans. From one time TLDs to abusing tracking parameters. Not to mention browsers in their insane quest to strip useful information out off their UIs, making you CLICK to see who owns the place. Clown world really.

[jltsiren]

It's not a particularly hard problem. Most countries have rules on what you can use as a business name or register as a trademark. Domain names are just more of the same.

And you don't really own your domain. You are just renting it from whichever authority is responsible for the TLD. If you stop paying, the authority will eventually take it back.

[zokier]

Trademarks are specific to the field it is used on. Classic example is Apple Records vs Apple Computers, which one should get apple.com?

[jltsiren]

And there are also businesses with identical names. But the basic idea was already established long before the internet. If you have a legitimate claim to a name, you have a legitimate claim to that name. There may be multiple entities with a legitimate claim to a particular name, in which case the first one that used it in a particular context gets to use it in that context. And if you think that someone is using a name you have claimed in a misleading way or acting in bad faith, you can sue them and let the courts decide.

[zokier]

The problem is that as you note, trademarks and company names are not unique, but domain names are required to be unique. So that n to 1 relationship between trademarks/names and domain names intrisically creates problem, how to allocate the domains when there are many equally legitimate pre-existing claimants. This is not solved problem the way you portray it, because domain names have this novel uniqueness requirement.

Of course this raises valid question if using names in this way at all is a good idea. For example telephone system and lots of banking stuff is based on simple numerical identifiers, and lots of countries have also some unique (numerical) identifiers for companies and persons. So there is fairly strong precedent for using assigned ids instead of names when uniqueness/specificity is required. But somehow we have jumped to the conclusion that for example IP addresses would be too confusing to average joe, and in attempt to hide them we have created even more confusing system.

[jltsiren]

Many countries already solved this problem with their ccTLDs decades ago. It only required taking the established practices and applying them to a new class of names. There are always some edge cases, but domain name assignment is pretty much a solved problem.