Should ICANN intervene here? It doesn't SEEM fair and I think there should be some restrictions to prevent this.
Furthermore, there could be an added regulation that no two domains could serve essentially the same data for more than a certain transition period, such as three months. Not only are such duplicates bad for spiders, but there is no essential reason why they need to exist. With redirects and load balancers, a site could easily be switched over from one domain to another in a relatively short time.
One of the fundamental rules of this world is that if something can be abused, it will be abused. And unlike infractions that are obvious and hurt a person's social reputation, domain registration is so hidden that a person can squat left and right without social repercussions. Hence, the only solution is regulation -- either technical, or legal.
Organizations are people too, or corporations end up getting special permits? Either one leads to trouble and groups that buy up to maximums since they want to use all their entitlements.
> no two domains could serve essentially the same data for more than a certain transition period
So now we all need different VPN gateway and email system homepages? Who is to say domains exists for HTTP? They are unique names for many protocols.
The main problem is the ability to sell them for value. Make that hard. For example, make parties prove it is a legal inheritance or court victory that requires a transfer otherwise push it into the pool where others can try to buy it faster and deny the old registrar involvement until it falls out of the next valid ownership chain.
I agree that targeting the selling aspect is another approach to consider, although I imagine there are some big hurdles there as well.
Then I would put exponentially increasing pricing on multiple domains per individual. Make it affordable to hold a small number of domains, but to hold many means it is very expensive and likely additional domains must return increasingly high value to justify holding.
I'm a little bit confused though by your first suggestion.
Thinking a bit more on it you'd likely have to split individual vs corporate domain ownership to protect business interest. Charge corporate a x100 multiple for holding domains to avoid someone setting up huge amounts of shelf companies, but companies can also own a small number of domains but at a price where squatting is hard.
>"keeping desirable domains available"
Eh, they're more like keeping the domains and selling them to the highest bidder. You're defining the "really really want" here as the entity with the biggest pocket. Domains cost so little for a reason, so everyone can afford them but obviously some people abuse this and it's why we need more oversight. IMO of course.
This is exactly right. Squatters are taking away from the people what the original designers of the system intended. If they had intended that only those with lots of money had short-length domain names, then they would have made them expensive from the start -- or made the price a function of the character-length.
We could make domain name registration work the same as trademark registration, or people just need to get used to registering trademarks and then using the trademark claim process.
Disclaimer: I haven't tried this. I'm afraid trademark claims might only be honored for big companies, not for the little guys.
Trademarks are industry/product/service specific. So just because someone else owns "Example's Flower Shop" doesn't mean you cannot use "Example's Bakery" since there is no reasonable expectation that a consumer could confuse the two (i.e. your bakery doesn't benefit from their Flower Shop's brand). So if you owned Example.com as the baking company, it is unlikely that the flower shop could take it from you even if they own a legitimate trademark.
Another note is that trademarks protect TRADE. If you own a registered trademark's domain but use the domain to host your collection of cat photos it is unlikely the company could take that from you (although they can force you to give it up by costing you thousands of dollars in lawyer fees for their frivolous suits, which companies have definitely done in the past).
All I am saying is, it isn't cut and dry. Trademarks aren't a magic bullet.
PS - But like all things, the party with the most money/influence almost always wins regardless of right/wrong, lawful/lawless. They can cost you tens of thousands of dollars even if you're completely right and on the right side of the law.
The "Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy"[1] seems pretty clear-cut against squatters. See section 4a and 4b. "Bad faith" includes "primarily for the purpose of selling, renting, or otherwise transferring the domain name registration to the complainant who is the owner of the trademark or service mark or to a competitor of that complainant, for valuable consideration in excess of your documented out-of-pocket costs directly related to the domain name." Basically a definition of squatting.
[1] https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/policy-2012-02-25-en
People asking questions, lost in confusion
Well, I tell them there's no problem, only solutions
- John Lennon
[1] https://geti2p.net/en/docs/naming
[2] Even http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko is susceptible to squatting by those who can invest (or rent) computing power.
PS: I had a chance recently to talk with a "DNSquatter": the doorman at a building I frequent. Poor guy bought tens of thousands of domain names, years ago, with money he had available for investment, and asked me for advice on how to cash out his investment. It seems to me that he's the victim of a chumpatron[3], rather than the scammer himself; although his actions do help keep the scam alive. I advised him to consider the money lost.
https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/web-o...
One of the advantages of it is that it can be used to mimic the DNS/SSL model or any other PKI just by imposing the right priority calculation rules, so you at least don't lose any capabilities with it.
Raise the price of a .com to $100 per year. This remains a minimal cost to any profitable business, and it's cheap enough for new startups to buy a domain for a year or two while attempting a new business.
If you can't afford it, well, you have countless other domain extensions you can choose from at a cheaper rate.
I'd much rather pay $100 per year for a .com that I want, instead of having a domain squatter asking $2k, and then having to settle for my fourth or fifth choice that's actually available to register.
The problem with squatting is that it doesn't create value. It may create scarcity, but that's not inherent value. For example, diamonds are scarce in the market, but they don't have an inherent value anywhere near their price. When you work producing software, you are bringing something of value into existence that didn't exist before. When you work long day on the railroad, you are organising matter in a way that helps society to function. When you squat on real estate, you are sitting on something waiting for society to create value in the surrounding areas. Society is creating the value that the land eventually sells for -- not the person squatting. When the squatter sells that property, they are deriving the ends from other people's work. This is akin to counterfeiting money: Sure it has value in the market, but the person counterfeiting didn't create that value.
But then the problem is, do we want someone policing what the definition of 'using' a domain is? Hell no.
I think that unfortunately the way it's going is that you basically use a different TLD, but even now it's beneficial to have the .com if you can (especially among non-developer audiences who aren't used to .ly, .io, etc etc). 'Just go to whatever.io' to your grandma isn't as obvious as 'Just go to whatever.com'.
Domain names are like the username you used to post the question. Your 'first mover advantage' secured the name. The next person can't claim your 'squatting' on that user name, or all the other usernames that you 'own', because now they want it.
perhaps not the best way, but certainly a way to go about it.
Squatting is a real problem, though. The cost of holding a domain until someone pays you stupid money for it is just far too low.