
I Got Milk.com - entelechy
http://milk.com/value/
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iso1210
Good for him.

milk.com was registered back in July 94, same month amazon was created. I
suspect that many people have attempted to get control over it via naferious
means in the past, however I also get the feeling the value of domain names
has decreased since the early 00s -- how many normal people still type in
domain names, rather than typing in "milk" and clicking the first result.

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underyx
Way to really milk ownership of the domain.

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ksaj
At first I thought this was a Reddit-style pun response, but then I read the
linked page. I read it to mean "Yea, I really want to sell it, but it's going
to be costly. Otherwise I'm happy to sit on it until a satisfactory offer
comes around." Of course, there's nothing wrong with that at all.

The page states that research has been done, and there is a perceived value
that as of yet hasn't been offered. The domain owner is clearly uninterested
in haggling - give the right offer, or no deal.

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danfuzz
FWIW I don't think he actually ever intends to or expects to sell.

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Gibbon1
I have a couple of friends who own various single word or three letter domain
names. They universally say that companies attempting to buy their domains
tend offer seriously not life changing amounts of money and often resort to
threats when rejected.

Consider what if Land o Lakes owned milk.com and you demanded they sell it to
you for $5k? Bwhahaahahaha!

~~~
ksaj
> not life changing amounts of money

I don't know how high the offers can go these days. But then again, we're not
exactly in the dot-com bubble anymore. In 2001 I bet it could have attracted
life changing amounts.

~~~
Gibbon1
The most a friend of mine got offered for a four letter com domain during the
dot com years was $5k. He said he would have sold it for $15k.

I checked he still has it.

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fingerlocks
Business.com was sold for $7.5 million at height of the dot com boom. Have you
ever visited that site? Neither have I.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business.com](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business.com)

~~~
Gibbon1
Yeah sometimes people spend inane amounts of money for things. If someone was
willing to pay $7.5 million for milk.com it'd be theirs. But no ones offered
even 0.1% of that. So the market says milk.com really isn't worth very much.
And the owner of milk.com and my other two friends that own single word
domains are using them for their personal websites not squatting on them.

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sfusato
Check Dan's responses to emails he received over the years. Hilarious!

[http://milk.com/experiments/](http://milk.com/experiments/)

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tga
Did anyone ever come up with a workable method of preventing this kind of rent
seeking that plagues domain names?

The best scalable and impartial methods that I’ve seen mentioned were high
renewal prices and limits on the number of domains one could own, but I get
the feeling neither one would work when there is even a remote chance of
extracting >$10M in the end.

Given the current system it’s hard to blame him either — I don’t know whether
I would find the altruism to let such a domain expire.

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danfuzz
What "rent" is he seeking?

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tga
"In public choice theory, as well as in economics, rent-seeking means seeking
to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-
seeking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking)

~~~
danfuzz
I didn't ask for a definition.

In what way does that apply to milk.com? Is the owner seeking to get wealthy
from it? And if so, is he also somehow failing to create sufficient wealth in
the process?

What should he be doing differently right now to not fall on the wrong side of
the line?

~~~
tga
He (like most domain squatters) is blocking milk.com from being used for a
practical purpose (from what I can tell), hoping to get $10M+ for no other
reason than being the first to register it. He is definitely not creating any
wealth in the process.

~~~
danfuzz
My read on his "value" page is that he doesn't actually want to sell. Assuming
he just wants to keep using the domain for his personal site and have the same
email address he's had since 1994, would that make it okay for him? Would that
still somehow be immoral rent-seeking? What makes those uses of the domain
"impractical?" Who is he morally obligated to give or sell the domain to, and
if it is to be sold what is a fair value that wouldn't make it "rent-seeking?"

~~~
tga
Yes, those are good questions.

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danfuzz
Pretty sure the main answer is that he's not actually engaging in rent-seeking
in any pejorative sense.

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Shorn
Domain name registration related shenanigans is so weird to me.

Lately I've been getting mail from various folks notifying me that the `.com`
equivalent of one of my `.net` domains is going to be available. It's weird to
me that it would be worth doing, but I'm assuming they're making money out of
it.

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rognjen
This gets posted every few months. Every time I wonder how it's not been taken
away for squatting. I wonder if (or rather how often) he's had to go to court.

Nissan.com has been the target of a few attacks if I recall correctly and is
arguably less valuable and much more defensible (since the person who owns it
is actually called Nissan).

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danfuzz
In what way is this site "squatting?" I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure you
can't get a trademark on simple English words like "milk."

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dest
what about Apple then?

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danfuzz
Apple doesn't in fact have a blanket trademark on the word "apple."

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codegladiator
Why is this being up voted ?

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mwakerman
It might be unrelated but this page was mentioned in a fairly highly upvoted
comment on a recent top story here. Dan Bornstein is also a relatively well
known engineer.

