the solution here in Denmark is very, well - socialdemocratic; The Complaints Board for Domain Names.
"A complaint may be submitted by any person who has a sufficient interest in the outcome of the case. The chairman of the Complaints Board decides whether the complainant has a sufficient interest.
The Complaints Board decides whether the registration of a domain name is to be maintained, deleted, suspended or transferred to the complainant or to a natural or legal person appointed by the complainant. In addition, the Complaints Board can confirm, cancel, change or refer back a decision made by DK Hostmaster/DIFO about compliance with the terms and conditions of business (”Terms and conditions for the right of use to a.dk domain name”)."
(from the official page: https://www.domaeneklager.dk/en)
We've used the board in our business once. When we first started our SaaS the domain name we wanted was already taken by another person who seemed to use it for something genuine. So we contacted him/her and decided to wait.
In the meantime, a competitor managed to contact the other owner directly and bought the domain name. He then changed the site into one big ad+redirect for his own competing service.
We complained to the board, and presented our arguments(+screenshots). He did the same, and we won.
The domain was transferred free-ofcharge to us, and we've owned it since.
DK's a small country, and something similar might not work for larger countries, but it does limit the domainparking issue.
I'm a big fan of it!
There is a loose analogy between Domain parking and land speculation (though it's not perfect -- you can make more domains, but you can't make more land).
Another approach you can try instead of a formal complaint department is to apply a universal "use it or lose it" tax to the asset at risk of speculation, as economist Ramin Shokrizade famously did in EVE Online to oust speculators and solve problems with recessions:
What's hilarious is that in doing so, he unwittingly rederived Henry George's Land Value Tax from first principles.
Applying a properly sized tax that disincentives holding assets for speculation can actually reduce the price overall, because speculators stop jacking the price up knowing they can HODL forever.
The book Radical Markets proposes the following tax (to replace most other taxes), quote:
Every citizen and especially corporation would self-assess the value of assets they possess, pay a roughly 7% tax on these values and be required to sell the assets to anyone willing to purchase them at this self-assessed price.
This is a horrible proposal. Do I have to put a price on my family's home? And if I price it just right, be forced to sell to some speculator who wants it just because he has more money than I do?
Another way to think about it is, that you adjust the price continuously. If a speculator offers you money, you are in the position to take the offer or raise your own valuation and pay the increased tax. At some point a sensible person would be like: screw this, I am moving out of the city because the offers are so high, resulting in very high taxes, which is the intended effect.
Maybe can work for some types of assets one doesn't use, like parked domains
In your example, you could also say "I have to put a price on our cat, and...?" Or your glasses, or your jeans and underpants. But the proposal probably didn't have such things in mind
First, under this system, long-term speculation is not really viable, due to the high tax. So the buyer must have some reason for paying higher than the price you set, which you don't see, i.e. you under-utilize the asset. Google/Facebook ads work this way - every slot is always up for auction. Also similar dynamics in partnership agreement's "shotgun clauses", etc.
Second, you can always factor in your sentimentality into your price, then the buyer will buy your neighbor's house instead. But you have to pay for it in the form of a higher tax. This is like a penalty for obstructing economic efficiency.
Third, this system pretty much does away with the strict idea of private property, into what they call "partial common ownership". It's basically a way to have shared ownership (as in communism) without the central planning, i.e. in a way that might actually work. (In fact, it quite reduces the role of government.)
I'm not advocating for this system, but I think it's fun to think about.
A bit on the pedantic side, but you can make more land; there are dozens of artificial islands around the world, some of which have resulted from the need for more land.
The costs, of course, as well as other considerations (legal...) are of a different scale.
Land in this context is more of a mathematical concept: yes, you can make more land, but the surface of the oblate spheroid that we call "Earth" has a finite surface area, and it's that finite supply that gives land its population-proportional value.
Even if we're willing to stretch into a third dimension, that oblate spheroid has a finite volume, and the overwhelmingly vast majority of it is inaccessible to meaningful possession/occupation; you can only dig so far down or build so far up.
Two responses to this: Georgists classify “land” as both territory and all natural resources (really nature itself) so the “new land” the Netherlands makes is classified as an improvement to the pre-existing sea bed.
You might reasonably say this isn’t what most people mean by “land” to which the reply is, the amount of “new land” you can make in this manner is pretty limited and usually the reserve of states or state owned enterprises.
Comparatively, nothing stops you from tripling the number of domains overnight.
Regarding whether it's "pretty limited", yes and no, imo:
Yes, compared to, say, the size of a continent, the amount of new land is tiny.
However, new land is usually made in highly sought-after (high-density, high-value etc) areas [citation needed]. So it would make better sense to compare the surface of the new land to the surface of the adjacent area.
For example, the polders in the Netherlands significantly augment the country's surface. The artificial islands in Tokyo Bay significantly add to the real estate of the harbour. The artificial islands in Dubai and Bahrain significantly add to the coastline.
I think that this is enough for OP's analogy between domain parking and land speculation to reasonably stand.
The LVT is this but... more. The idea of a full land-value tax is based on a principle related to universal basic income. In both cases, the argument is that by applying the tax/income to every stakeholder indiscriminately, it removes bureaucratic complexity and motivation to "cheat" the system.
Since the effect is the same no matter what, we don't need a huge statute listing what does and does not apply as X.
> The idea of a full land-value tax is based on a principle related to universal basic income.
And tangentially: seeking a minimal state that exists solely to collect LVT (and possibly Pigovian and severance taxes) and distribute the proceeds evenly as UBI is the basic idea around geolibertarianism.
There's an entire economic school of thought dedicated to railing against the specific problem of sitting on physical land just to keep it out of use until someone else pays you a higher price:
It's fun to note the game Monopoly was designed as a teaching exercise for Georgism (it's meant to be awful; it's designed to show the unfairness of existing landholder/landlord structures), though the pack in rules (for somewhat obvious reasons) no longer include the pro-Georgism text and counter-rules that illustrate that the game is far more boring, but quicker and more fair under a Georgism-like model.
Quite. The original rules document is in the public domain now and is a fascinating read of turn of last century economic thought that is still relevant today (as this larger discussion shows). Maybe someone could do a quick interesting reskin for "The Domainparker's Game".
Yes, but they do it to the exact opposite effect. Squatting property actually puts it to its intended use (living, agriculture etc.) Domain squatting is meant to prevent the domain from its intended use (access to a meaningful service). For gold and bitcoins, there is (or at least there should be) taxation to make sure you're not sitting on them.
Around the world there are actually laws regulating physical squatting [1, 2], because it seen as a socially positive outcome (compared to leaving houses/land disused). And there are also often provisions that allow you to prevent squatting [3], but you have to give something back (e.g. dirt-cheap short-term rentals).
Worth adding, at least in some countries, the laws allow physical squatters to legally take over ownership of land or property, if they can document they lived there / put it to productive use over many years (IIRC 20, in Poland), while the original owner didn't use it in any way.
I don't think the parallel to be drawn here is against physically squatting in property the occupants do not own, but with people who buy property and use it as a value sink; as seen with a sizable portion of non-domestically owned property investment in London, Vancouver and other high value regions.
Such property can be seen to sit unused by anyone, but it's lack of availability (when it could otherwise be used) contributes to the scarcity of property in that district, and thus inflation of property prices in that area (be it naturally occurring or otherwise)
I don't have to care which specific instance of them I have (mostly, land is where it gets funny but that's more secondary effects like transport hubs, taxation, regulations etc at which point it's not "land" it's a location I'm after).
A domain name? It's a unique registration on a global index. It's value is in that uniqueness.
I'm interpreting (disregarding possible narrator bias) OP as that the person who lost the claim bought a domain unrelated to their business other than it being the company name of a competitor, and redirected all traffic to their own company.
Are you interpreting it the same way as me? If so, yes the domain was indeed taken from the person squatting it (but actually worse than squatting, since it took you somewhere else than where you as a consumer wanted to go). And that's something I'm entirely ok with, and in fact applaud.
He does not explain the link the parent comment, no. But one could guess that he thinks of domains as private ownership and something you can steal. However, that view on domain is very problematic, as you have to renew it which indicates a right to use under specific terms, even for .com domains. The terms are just different for different domains, which is not too controversial.
Private ownership becomes more and more challenged these years. The original comment is set in Denmark. I am also Danish, and I can verify that we have another view on ownership than what you experience in the US.
"But one could guess that he thinks of domains as private ownership and something you can steal." - I think you're right, also about the view on ownership.
I'd argue that, since there's a limited amount of useful - domain-wise - words in the English dictionary, the number of available domains are bound to run dry faster if domainparking is not discouraged somehow.
One might argue that the new TLD's are merely a 'bandaid' on a systemic problem with domains not being released properly, when no longer in proper use.
Yet, the poster did devote a paragraph to the topic. That different people draw the line of theft at different places is immaterial to the actual discussion existing in the comment.
He did not. It might be subtle, but the paragraph your refer to explains his view on the people in question, not the link between domains and stealing.
Someone else had the right to use a domain. They had paid for that right. You appealed to some people with guns, they decided to use the threat of force to revoke that right, and you benefitted.
Owning a domain-name is not some fundamental right or need. It's an artificial thing, whose operation is, in many countries, paid for by taxpayer money. The entire history of the Internet, and related inventions, are also filled with a lot of taxpayer funding(CERN, DARPA).
IMO it's a flaw in the system that allowed domainparking in the first-place, there should have been a built-in way to mitigate that issue.
It would be a lot different if this was say; a twitter-handle or an ICQ-number (like in the old days where the simple ICQ numbers could be sold for a lot of money), but the Internet is so close to being a public utility that it should be operated as such, and not like a town in the Wild West....
>>Owning a domain-name is not some fundamental right or need. It's an artificial thing, whose operation is, in many countries, paid for by taxpayer money.
Owning real estate isn't a fundamental right or need either. That doesn't mean property rights have no relevance or value simply because of their "artificiality". Property rights exist whether it is for houses or for domain names.
>>The entire history of the Internet, and related inventions, are also filled with a lot of taxpayer funding(CERN, DARPA). IMO it's a flaw in the system that allowed domainparking in the first-place, there should have been a built-in way to mitigate that issue.
DARPA was no longer involved with the internet/ARPANET by 1984. CERN had nothing to do with the Web besides the fact that one of its physicists made a GUI and a markup language. They both have nothing to do with DNS, URLs/URI, or IANA/ICANN. SRI/INTERNIC, a private research institute, was responsible for it's creation. As far as domainparking is concerned, the built-in limitation used to be the number of IPv4 addresses. But with IPv6, the point is made moot.
> That doesn't mean property rights have no relevance or value simply because of their "artificiality".
It kinda does, actually. Without the existence of a state enforcing said property rights by threat of monopolized violence, any sort of land "ownership" beyond physical occupation is meaningless; there would be nothing stopping someone else from inhabiting "your" land unless you're able and willing to infringe on their rights to life and liberty.
Given that dependence on the state, land "ownership" is naturally subject to its whims.
>>Without the existence of a state enforcing said property rights by threat of monopolized, any sorry of land "ownership" beyond physical occupation is meaningless.
Then by your standards, a state would be just as artificial. Without the existence of a sufficient number of individuals capable and invested in engaging in violence for the defense of property, any concept of a state would be just that: a concept. An imaginary plaything. Enforcement of property rights can only come from people, not papers or buildings. And since a people precede a state, so to do their rights to own property.
>> There would be nothing stopping someone else from inhabiting "your" land unless your able and willing to infringe on their rights to life and liberty.
You're contradicting yourself. If one owns land, no one else has any right to life or liberty with respect to it. In other words, your rights end where mine begin.
Proof of this is the fact that (contiguous) United States isn't bordered by Mexican Gulf, the Pacific Ocean, and the 49th parallel because nature or belief willed it. It's there because people physically occupied territory long enough to obtain legitimacy, people purchased other colonial territories (i.e Alaska, Colonial Louisiana), or people negotiated treaties that says they owns certain areas. None of this is any different from how ordinary people obtain or historically obtained ownership despite your claim of insufficiency in their case. If that's so, what makes it be inherently different for a so-called state?
Nothing stops Canada from invading a la 1812 except for pieces of paper that merely claim it "can't". Canada chooses not to, not because it lacks a dedicated army with sufficient capability to capture some land, but because because it obtains benefits from an alliance and because provoking a potential retaliatory occupation by it's nearest neighbor isn't currently in the country's personal interest as a result of what violence would likely ensue.
Ownership is not a power that comes with the prima facie existence of a state. It's not even granted. Individuals have those rights to begin with. It is the exercise of those rights to pursue either agreement or defense that demonstrate ownership.
> Then by your standards, a state would be just as artificial.
Indeed it would be.
> And since a people precede a state, so to do their rights to own property.
Except that the concept of private land ownership without a state has yet to be demonstrated, specifically because said private land ownership is wholly a function of the state.
> If one owns land, no one else has any right to life or liberty with respect to it.
Says who? There's a reason why the rights to "life, liberty, and property" are in that order: property is meaningless without life and liberty, and liberty is in turn meaningless without life.
And further, because the state - like the notion of land ownership - is artificial, your ownership of land is at the mercy of those fellow members of society and their collective conjuring of the state - and its powers to enforce ownership over imaginary concepts like parcel boundaries - into existence. That said society happens to currently tolerate your exclusive claim on some parcel of land (without receiving anything even remotely resembling reciprocal compensation for the incurred opportunity costs) is a privilege, and one which can be revoked when it conflicts with the rights to life and liberty.
> Ownership is not a power that comes with the prima facie existence of a state.
With respect to land, unless you live in Bir Tawil or have decided to invest in deep sea and deep space real estate, said ownership quite literally is a power that comes with the prima facie existence of a state. That the state itself exists (ostensibly) as an action of the people it governs doesn't change the fact that your "ownership" of land is more of a lease, and that a superior landlord - the state - continues to exist.
If you disagree, then you're encouraged to brush up on your understanding of the difference between "fee simple" and "allodial" titles - hint: if you own land in a common law jurisdiction like the US, your land is almost certainly under the former kind of title, not the latter.
Actually, the whole set of up all laws derives from people with guns. Like, if there was no government, then we probably wouldn't have the internet, so domain names couldn't be taken away.
Like, are you saying that rights of property are more fundemental than government?
That seems like an odd argument, given that rights to property would seem to derive from government, at least in the modern world.
This is a deep well of theory of society, and reasonable people disagree based on how they answer that question.
Some do believe property rights exist independent of government (and existed before the concept of governments, as webs of individual agreements between people with no over-arching enforcement authority, i.e. "This belongs to me because if you try to take it from me I will kill you. That belongs to you because you would do the same to me. We have an understanding between us, but is an understanding between two people a 'government'?").
> ... rights to property would seem to derive from government...
Yeah, this is the fundamental disconnect I have with (apparently) most people. Rights come from God. The idea that they come from governments is, in the words of a famous person, "not even wrong".
Anyway, this was an informative exchange. I learned that I'm in a minority, at least in this corner of the world :)
Problem with this argument is: What god and under what rule book?
If my rule book says women are second class citizens, then is that just it? They have no rights? Or if my rule book says homosexuality is bad, but another interpretation of the rule book says its fine, then who's rule book is correct? Who settles that argument? Government.
Only other answer is a holy war and the survivors rule book is supreme. Until the next holy war.
My God says you have no rights except those derived from governments. Now what do we do?
"Rights" are more properly understood as "a social agreement among people of a culture". If a culture doesn't value something, no rights for it exist. When cultures intersect, "rights" get real muddy real fast.
This is silly. God gave no right to domain names. If the internet was a libertarian utopia, I would just run my own DNS server and could "own" google.com, apple.com, etc. Except no one would use my DNS server.
Instead governments and NGOs manage limited "intellectual property" rights on DNS servers everyone agrees to connect to so the internet can actually be useful and not a free-for-all. The same applies to copyrights and patents. There is no natural right to exclusive ownership of an idea or written text. These things are "naturally" meant to be copied. Intellectual property "rights" are entirely constructed by government decree.
I don't believe in Imaginary Property (aka Intellectual Property). It's not what I was talking about.
Someone bought the right to use a specific domain from a specific domain name provider. It was a private transaction between two parties, freely agreed to between them.
This [1] is by far the best answer I have ever seen to that question / request. Since it is quite long, I will attempt to summarize: that is what I start from. I am more certain of the existence of God than I am of my own existence - the first one is an axiom, the second one is a theorem ("I think, therefore I am").
"The answer is that a reasonable person is a person who believes what Augustine believes and who, like Augustine, can only hear assertions contrary to that belief as absurd."
I genuinely see opinions different from mine as absurd. As in, "you cannot possibly believe this, which means you are lying" absurd. It's why I generally dismiss the common saying "do not attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence". NOBODY is that incompetent, and therefore whatever I disagree with is in fact malice.
I realize it's a minority opinion. I am fine with that situation, though I continue to be surprised when people disagree :)
The obvious disconnect is whether they actually did have the right to use this domain. Where I'm from you may not mislead with advertising, which includes buying Google ads with your competitors' names. I place this domain name issue squarely in the same bucket.
I do see how someone with, say, more adversarial US background may have a different opinion.
Our product: A was a direct competitor to the other product: B.
We tried to purchase domain: C - without any luck, we could not get in touch with the owner since he did not reply to the publicly listed email address.
B's owner(our competitor) purchased domain C from it's owner; B was better at location contact-information I guess.
So suddenly domain C contained logo, image, and redirect to product B; and that was when we complained.
We had no intention(or right) to complain when domain C was still in use by its original owner.
The terms of that domain ownership included the possibility of losing it in the manner described. The buyer knew those terms and implicitly agreed to them at time of purchase. It's all perfectly libertarian.
Or do you think you know better, and want to limit what kinds of contracts/ownership terms people can enter? And enforce those limits with men with guns?
"Stealing" and "ownership" are defined by the set of rules (usually national laws) surrounding a thing. In this case, the GP didn't steal anything, they entered a dispute and acquired ownership in accordance with the rules surrounding domain allocation in Denmark.
> $10k buys you three months of rent and ramen noodles which might be enough to get your project off the ground and make the world a startup richer, but if these 10k go towards a domain name, that might never happen.
If your startup success depends on a 10k domain name then you should probably rethink the whole thing anyway ...
I also chuckled at the idea of resigning to ramen instead of moving somewhere where $10k will buy you way more than just 3 months of rent with plenty left for proper food.
Not really on topic but I've never understood why a country like the US, with the underlying ideology being what it is, wouldn't allow anyone in the world to live in the US as long as they don't use any social services.
For example, if someone has enough money for one year of rent and health insurance, and is not deemed a security risk, why not instantly admit them? If they get a job and pay tax, you let them stay as long as they pay tax. If they keep this up for X amount of years, offer them a citizenship.
And just how do you intend to enforce that? It sounds nice, but we can't deal with fraud - let alone trying to determine who should and shouldn't get something on that kind of scale.
How about the rest of the world adopting more of what makes people want to come to the US? Seems to be more rational (and sustainable) than advocating that everyone should just be able to come to the US.
Obviously the current legislation is made with current circumstances in mind. If tourists can't get financial aid for college there's no reason these hypothetical renters must.
This could be an interesting experiment, but I don't think that this would be really practical for two reasons:
a) you can't realistically expect this class of immigrants not to use any social service (especially emergency), there will be costs that US isn't prepared to pay
b) there are bound to be negative consequences for having a explosively growing number of poorly integrated people that are treated as second class by the government
a) you could have a mandatory one time cost that reflects the average likelihood and cost of them using it (ie up front insurance)
b) the US is already filled with "poorly integrated" people, the whole country was founded on immigration. The only way you'd necessarily be treated as "second class" is by not being eligible to vote, which tourists also aren't and they don't seem to mind much.
The specifics of what to charge and what to demand are obviously flexible, but to me the net positive seems pretty obvious.
By that logic you shouldn't allow tourists either, as far as I know they don't pay for emergency services, or most of the roads, or whatever else public costs there are.
(And in addition, nothing is stopping you from charging them for the average possibility of them using it)
There was an article on the frontpage today about a fintech startup named pipe with url www.pipe.com. I really wonder how much investor money went in the domain.
I've been much more sympathetic to concerns about domain name brevity and pronounceability ever since I ignored those concerns for my personal domain - something I regret anew every time I have to tell somebody my email address over the phone.
So if you want to make a quick buck, you find a good domain name, build a fintech, use the investor money to buy your own domain and let the startup die out.
with all of the creative TLD's these days, it's still reasonably easy to come up with a nice domain name. Heck, I just recently registered a 5 letter .com.
Domain squatters are attempting to get the maximum value for a domain. Ideally, they are specializing in determining what that maxinum value is and thus refusing to sell a valuable domain for less than that price.
This is actually helpful as otherwise some person comes along and buys the domain and makes some crappy website on that domain and it is their pet project so they don't want to sell (or even worse they have no contact info available and the whois is protected).
The domain squatter only cares about selling it for maximum value. They want to facilitate a transaction.
A bunch of people using quality, high value domains for low value or mom and pop businesses is suboptimal too.
The domain squatter is more likely to prevent that and get the domain to the entity that values it the must (ideally).
There is a value to that. This guy's critique makes me think he doesn't understand the value of speculators in a market, which is ironic because he has spent part of his career building trading software and working at investment banks.
It sounds like you're saying that the quality of some person or organisation's contribution to the web can be judged primarily based on how much money they have to throw at their domain name? That's clearly nonsense.
These people provide no benefit to the web at large, they just game the system for free money. It's a clear example of a tragedy of the commons.
Analogy time - there's a part of your town where two roads come together. There's a gas station on that corner which makes you and everyone very happy, because it's a very convenient place for the gas station to be.
But how did that spot end up being a gas station? It's because the owner of the gas station valued that real estate more than the baker and the taxidermist. He paid more for it because he could earn more with it because that's what is most valuable for consumers there. These three things are connected.
Same reason GM will pay more for GM.com than a teenager named George Moore (or whatever) - because ultimately GM will generate more value for it's customers with that domain than George will.
I hope the analogy is helpful. That's how pricing of most things works.
This is the taxidermist and the baker looking at a vacant lot and wishing they could afford to open a shop there, but they can't because some asshole is sitting on it, waiting for Shell or BP to pay over the odds for the land when that won't happen because they can get land on both roads cheaper and put two of their own competing brands up to capture all the gas sales in the area.
In the real-estate world the "asshole" would rent it out to others (such as taxidermist or baker) for cheaper until She'll or BP would show up. I guess in the web world this is equivalent to the trashy ad-filled sites you see on parked sites. Why is it? I guess maybe taxidermist and bakers of the web are cheap and would rather pick another domain. Or is just not possible to legally 'rent' out a domain.
I'm sorry but that's a naive understanding of the realities of capitalism - for instance, what of the case of local baker versus the multinational? They sell the same thing (often the local store will provide better quality), but one can clearly outbid the other in order to muscle out the competition. Extraction of wealth and provision of value are overlapping but not identical concepts. Take high ticket luxuries as another example - what provides more value to a community, a Lamborghini dealership or a food bank? Most Lamborghinis spend their lives sitting in a garage. Which business earns more money? What is the value of $100 to a billionaire compared to Josie Average? To one it's a decimal point, to the other it might be the difference between eating or not that month.
So I disagree with your disagreement - you and/or the OP may couch it in the language of economics but it boils down to the same thing; more money == better.
> what of the case of local baker versus the multinational? They sell the same thing (often the local store will provide better quality), but one can clearly outbid the other in order to muscle out the competition
There's no magic there. The multinational was a local baker once - they figure out how to scale and deliver more bread at lower cost or greater quality which is what allowed them to get big. They serve more people, better.
The rest of your comment is just commie slogans, not sure how it's connected to the topic so I'll just leave you to your views there, but let me know if there's something you think needs a response.
No I don't think there's any value in us chasing each other in ideological circles, thanks, although
> commie slogans
made me smile and I do have a (genuine) follow up question about that: when I hear people use phrases like that I often wonder if they see 'pure' (let's say, US-style) capitalism and communism as a binary choice, or two ends of a spectrum. What's your viewpoint? Like I said, not a loaded question.
Not a fan of "this"-like comments, but I find your analogy very elegant in explaining the impact of money.
The concept of money mapping 1:1 to value/produced utility (note that I haven't defined what a unit of this is) is a difficult concept to grasp.
It's very common for people to trivialise money as a printed piece of paper and miss the higher level value as a currency that "benchmarks" the value of one's impact to another.
Society pedestalizes healthcare workers for their immediate, physical and observable impact to the lives of individuals; and it is understandably justified. However, this often raises questions to why nurses only make marginally above average salaries. Unfortunately the semantics of the supply-vs-demand economy is often lost here - any individual nurse is generally not difficult to replace should they leave (of course, depending on the market). On the other end of the spectrum, people making significantly above the market financial trading are commonly seen as negative-value producers when most do generate a significant amount of positive value, simply because it's hard to reason with a non-physical form of value. (I don't work in a field related to financial trading)
It's unsurprising why there's communities formed to demonise the concept of currency, trade and markets; and why some of them advance further and push for the breakdown of modern society.
While I don't mean to be pushing the message that "Capitalism is perfect and the utopia of reality" - I can't imagine alternative systems not involving a free market, that would achieve similar or better levels of quality of life and advancement in society (at least in current modern? times), while balancing around the imperfections of humans.
> people making significantly above the market financial trading are commonly seen as negative-value producers when most do generate a significant amount of positive value
They generate a significant amount of money - not value, money. They concentrate wealth in the hands of those who can afford to pay them to do it, a process which begets itself. That's why traders are commonly seen as negative-value producers by society as a whole - they contribute to decreased social equality.
Your argument here is circular - financial traders can only be said to be generating value if you assume that money and value are in some way equivalent. The former doesn't prove the latter.
As for nurses - if they're so easily replaced, why are so many rich societies dependent on immigrant health workers? And I'm sure you're not telling me that, if you were dying, you'd rather be attended by a stockbroker? Or could it be that "value" is a nebulous concept that is highly situational and varies from person to person?
Capitalism is very successful in certain arenas but it doesn't universally improve quality of life, and if you want an example then look no further than healthcare, and consider the difference between the US and any country with a nationalised healthcare system.
With regards to your statement and another stating the solution is to use it or lose it.
If you create a system that lets you take a domain name from the owner for squatting it is not a big leap to expanding the definition to include whatever you want it to be. As in, soon someone will come along and say so and so does not deserve this site because they are using it in a way that generates revenue which in turn does not generate tax.
Which is what some do to claim land others own by imminent domain.
If we incentivize taking domain names for non criminal abuse we are opening the door where only those with money will be secure in their web site ownership
Well, according to your logic the crappy website owner could also sell her domain to the brand new startup. For a price where the revenue supports the crappy website owner, not some absurd buisness.
The current domain trading situation is as if some real estate agent would buy all land instead of mediating seller and buyer. If your exemplaric "crappy website" wants to make a good price, there are still domain agents which could help with the deal.
> The current domain trading situation is as if some real estate agent would buy all land instead of mediating seller and buyer.
Zillow (and probably other companies) are experimenting with this, buying up quite a bunch of homes to build up an inventory of homes to sell at a profit later.
That's right. And then it's just a small leap to say that "claiming a domain for a crappy biz and then selling it" is not that different than squatting.
> This is actually helpful as otherwise some person comes along and buys the domain and makes some crappy website on that domain and it is their pet project so they don't want to sell (or even worse they have no contact info available and the whois is protected).
That's BS. It's like saying that scalpers help bands, because only the most committed fans will pay the prices they charge. So their concerts will be more lively, and they will have more sells at the merch booths.
Btw, a mom and pop business will probably happily sell the domain at the price the scalper charges. So it's not that they're making anyone any favors.
> A bunch of people using quality, high value domains for low value or mom and pop businesses is suboptimal too.
Your proposition requires a significant amount of "pet project" and "mom and pop" businesses getting the domain first, and also that they refuse to sell out. This has to be so much of a problem that we're willing to regularly pay squatters for the "cure".
This seems unlikely to me, and I would say the reality is closer to the squatters looking for a ransom on a domain they're holding hostage, and without them there would simply be many more domains still available from the registrars. Specifically that the hypothetical cases where a domain wouldn't be able to be negotiated at all are outweighed by the overall value currently lost to squatters.
And I doubt that business is too lucrative these days. For one domain that sells for $10000, there are hundreds just sitting there and bleeding $10 every year.
So I guess your take is that speculators help price goods optimally. And I'm assuming this can be construed as good for society, because value is created, and in most cases, appropriately taxed. Fine - I'll work with that model.
It seems to me nevertheless that for domains that system is suboptimal in itself. Although I take it that parkers are better than non-specialized agents at pricing domains, and that they may create more value than charging a $7 flat fee, I doubt that their pricing systems are dynamic and sophisticated enough, and therefore a lot of value goes uncaptured. I see a lot of them simply charge domains at ~$6,000, without accepting lower bids, so for all we know there is a few dozen million domains that could've gone for anywhere between $7 and $5,999.99 that will never see the light of day...
Oof! Well done. I always look for the unintuitive economics angle on things and missed this completely!
You're absolutely right. The world is a better place when GM.com takes everyone to General Motors and not someone whose initials are GM who got it first. The economics of domain value definitely help make this happen.
The value of a domain name is entirely due to what it is used for, the services it hosts. The registration costs are negligible compared to the value to the users of the domain name.
Domain squatters reduce the value of domain names by using them for junk advertising web sites instead of providing useful services.
Oddly I have the opposite problem, I keep having good idea for names and registering them, then I end up doing nothing with them. I think I need to attend domain names anonymous
1. If I haven't used the domain in 2 years, it's never going to happen so I will let it lapse
That in itself may not be enough, as you may become attached to some of the names, because they're just too good. So there is also rule 2:
2. Max 12 domains at any time (1 for each month), to keep costs reasonable.
If I'm at 12 domains, and I have a really good idea for another one... I have to weigh it against the existing domains and either not register it -- or immediately turn off auto renew for whichever other domain lost against my brilliant new idea.
When somebody eventually wants one of your domain names, do you sell it for roughly the total of your holding cost, thus making the author of TFA happy, or do you sell it for as much as you can get?
The analogy isn't great, because you having car A ( with its advantages, like easy to remember, good SEO, good pun on the company name, etc.) doesn't preclude anyone from having the exact same car bought elsewhere. Domains are unique, cars rarely are.
All cars are produced in limited numbers, and luxury or classic cars can be extremely rare.
Even mass produced cars are rarely identical. From new, there are a huge number of ways cars can be optioned, and on the resale market there are myriad variables that can make a car more or less desirable to different buyers.
In practice, unless you're chasing collectibles (in which case this is analogous to domain squatting), you'll find more than one seller if you look around, and a ton of sellers if you're willing to settle for a slightly different make/model - so competitive pressure keeps prices on a reasonable level.
Importantly, unless you literally tell a given seller that you won't settle for a different make/model, they have to assume that you might, and thus in their minds, they're competing for you with a lot of other people. As a buyer, you'd have to work really hard to get an unreasonable quote.
Don’t you think collectibles are more analogous to domain names than cars which are in bountiful supply? Nobody is paying more than the purchase price for a Camry.
But from a practical standpoint you will be served equally well or better by a different model of car. Domains do make a difference for businesses though. It's important for them to be relevant, memorable, and easy to type.
There are a lot of domains that are easy to type and memorable, and being “relevant” will come with name recognition. It seems pretty glib to just say cars are “practically” all the same; why does anybody pay 3 times as much as the cost of an economy car if the difference is so small?
Just because cars are fungible to you, doesn’t mean they are to other people.
The same applies to domains. Some people don’t care if they need to add an extra word, or pick a different extension. To other people it matters a lot.
IMO the problem isn't the person who holds ~25 unused domains, the problem is the company that holds ~25,000 and parks a "make me an offer, minimum 2,000" page on all of them.
I understand the frustration from having your dreamed-up name taken by domain squatters, however, as we've seen many times, you can succeed with any domain name.
Google succeeded despite not having the search.com domain, Instagram didn't have the photos.com, and Uber did not own the taxi.com nor the ride.com.
If only it were as simple as the absolute best and most directly related word being taken. Almost every phonetically acceptable combination of characters as a .com is taken up to 6 letters long. Google would not be able to hand-register Google.com if it were founded today; they'd have to go aftermarket.
Another problem is that when domains expire, eg, I don't need it anymore, instead of going into the pool of available domain names, my registrar gets to keep the domain name for a few pennies a year. They put it in their domain auction pool instead of releasing back to the free pool. Because they are a registrar, it costs them almost nothing (18 cents per year) to hang onto the domain name:
"Transaction-based fees are assessed on each annual increment of an add, renew or a transfer transaction that has survived a related add or auto-renew grace period. This fee will be billed at US$0.18 per transaction for registrars operating under the 2009 or 2013 RAA."
One way to prevent this is to: a) require that an expired domain go back to the free pool; b) require registrars to pay regular annual registration fees for all domains they own.
Aren't expired/expiring domains that are auctioned off, that happens quickly, no? Like days to weeks? So they do go back into the available pool unless someone actually buys it.
Disclaimer: I work for a company in this field, only speaking for myself.
Well, most registrars that also run auction houses will auction off the expiring domain names. If nobody bids for them, they will get deleted.
As far as I understand it, this won't cost them anything in ICANN/Verisign fees if a domain doesn't sell as there's no renewal involved or anything.
There are other registrars (usually, smaller ones) that don't auction off expiring domain names, but rather keep them for themselves. $8/year is not much to offset and if you take in consideration the occasional sale of a domain name, it becomes even less to break even. At least, this is my take on it.
Some registrars (eg. EPIK) provide you with the number of WHOIS queries ran against your domain names, the IP's used etc. This is enough information to signal interest or not in a domain name. Also, once a domain expires, they can point it to their own DNS and start collecting a whole new set of valuable info.
Fortunately domains don't really matter that much anymore. Address bars in pretty much all browsers are now search bars, and if you type a product name it will typically be the first result (as long as there aren't multiple products with the same name).
Sure, programmers like sweet and short domains, but customers don't care if your domain is widget.com, widget.net, widgetapp.com or companyname.xy/widget
Spending 5000 on a domain name is probably not worth it for the vast majority of startups.
There are some exceptions. If you are an email provider and your customers will use the domain in their email address it probably is a good idea to get a good domain.
But I really don't think that domain matters as much as founders think they do.
You're right, but consider the hypothetical that instagram.com was squatted and they instead went with instagramapp.com or whatever. Today instagram.com would be very valuable for advertising and/or scamming purposes. Instagram would probably consider buying it for $500k, a drop in the bucket for them, just to get rid of the problem.
In Sweden we've "solved" this problem by a rule that says that if you incorporated the business XYZ then you're entitled to the domain XYZ.se. Incorporating requires $2500 in capital and you can't incorporate as "pizza" or any other common word, so squatting is not a problem there.
> if you incorporated the business XYZ then you're entitled to the domain XYZ.se
What happens if the domain is already registered? I think I've seen .se used as the ending of english words like say impul.se (first try, seems to be unused or squatted).
Sometimes it's about signalling strength, or dealing with a market that's not just consumers under 30. In those cases, I think the customers do 'care', or at least get some conveyed vibe from it.
Getting sales from big corps, for example, is often partly about your perceived current state of established-ness.
Yes, I believe this is the case. One thing are conventions. If domain name ZZZ is taken, you can use getZZZ, ZZZapp, and so on. It does not matter much, as almost nobody types www address. Plus there is huge amount of top level domains, so even if ZZZ.com is taken, there are 150 alternatives which sometimes are better than original .com.
Are we now at a stage that .com is no longer considers more 'trustworthy' than say .xyz ? I'm not so sure, which is why many people still hanker after the .com in the first instance.
That said, as a non-US person I'm not personally on-board with .com-for-everything, but I understand that Joe Public in the USA thinks differently.
> Are we now at a stage that .com is no longer considers more 'trustworthy' than say .xyz?
Generally, I'm not sure. But I (and I think the majority of the people I know) were beyond that stage a long time ago or never cared/understood to start with. As you mention, not being in the US might bias my opinions and the opinions I'm exposed to on the matter, so YMMV.
I'm not sure if it confers any SEO advantage, but I don't particularly care about that (the things I have hosted are only useful to people who already know about them, so SEO isn't a concern).
> trustworthy
That might be the wrong concept for the discussion though. Another key factor is whether somthine.com is more memorable or guessable than something.co.uk, something.site, something.link, ...
It's not - and I doubt it ever was - about SEO in the technical sense (the hypothesis being that .com has some kind of innate SE ranking benefit compared to other TLDs).
To me it's far more that if you have a company called, say, 'YCombinator' then a huge number of people will simply assume you are to be found at YCombinator.com, simply because their experience is that all the other well-known brands live at .com, so why wouldn't you?
Why would you choose to fight that if you didn't have to?
The problem here is that registrars sell domains for much less than they're worth, thus creating trade opportunities.
Handshake[1] has a solution for this problem. Each new domain, instead of being sold outright, is put up for a two-week-long Vickrey auction[2]. If registrars adopted this policy, buying domains just for parking would become much less affordable.
I wish ticket sellers functioned that way. This would let artists get the true value of their tickets (which is much higher than what they're usually sold at. Ticket scalpers would also have to disappear, as real customers would be paying the true ticket prices directly to artists, and there would be no opportunity for profit.
Disallowing the transfers of domains (with exceptions) is another way to solve the problem. Transfers should be allowed only when the new owner is going to continue using the domain for the same project, which is also transferred over. In all other cases, the domain would be returned back to the pool, where anyone could buy it for the normal price. A similar strategy is already used by some ticket companies.
I don’t think this will help as most domains are parked for a long time, years even. So many of the two week auctions would just be bid on by few people because there’s not interest yet.
I think this works better for ticket companies because there’s a temporal element and more demand.
I’ve been watching a specific unnamed domain that’s been parked for over two decades uninterrupted, and they increase their minimum price in line with inflation over time, even though clearly no one will ever buy it (because it was temporally relevant to a small city in the 90s and has no further value remaining). It gets resold to other domain parkers now and then, which is hilarious to me since it’s so obviously worthless, but when they churn the domains to a new owner, they lose sight of that twenty-years-unsold marker. Oh well.
It would maybe help if the parkers would compete during these two weeks. This prices from the registrar would be higher and only domains with less speculative value would go into parking.
It seems like there's a risk of domain squatters bidding up the price of the object just to make you pay more. Just making a bid tips your hand that it's worth something. They can't tell if it's your cat pictures blog or your unicorn hopeful startup, but the calculation suggests that they'd nudge up the price of the former in hopes of forcing you to tip your hand that it's the latter.
If there's no reserve, they'd still just buy up everything they could get for $.01. If there's a $10 reserve, at least one person would bid $11 just to make you pay $11.01 -- and setting off an arms race that raises the price of all domains, even cat pictures blogs.
Is there something I'm missing?
It makes a lot of sense for tickets, where there's no incentive for domain squatters to bid up the price of an item that's worth more to you than it is to them.
I sure don't like domain squatters, who are the epitome of "why we can't have nice things". But I don't know how to design a system that prevents them without also putting in a lot of friction at the bottom end where intuitively you'd expect there to be practically no cost.
You're missing the Vickrey auction part. It would be hard for the squatters to outbid you, as they wouldn't even know your bid in the first place. You could bid $100, but you'd only pay the second price (which could as well be $0). The squatters would either have to do either $100 per domain.
I can relate to this, I was recently looking to get a couple of domains for some ideas I wanted to pursue, but every name idea I came up with - at least the ones I really wanted - were taken and had a "this domain is for sale" or similar message on them. On multiple tlds.
I ended up just searching for available domains that kind of matched what I wanted to convey to use a product name.
It is frustrating, but I don't think there is really an answer.
- Limit the number of domains per person/business to say, 10, unless you can show that you are actively using them?
- Have a 'use it or lose it' type system?
Those are not great ideas, and practically are not really enforceable anyway.
I dunno, it's annoying but I guess it's up there with ticket scalpers etc
I've had a 3 letter .net domain for 23 years, and in all that time there has never been more than a small website on it with a handful of extremely low traffic pages that no one would care about [1].
From a web point of view, it appears to be an almost dead domain, something that I played with a bit at the end of the last century and have largely ignored since then.
But domains are also used for email, and my primary email has been on that domain for all that time. There are several hundred companies that have that email address on file as a contact address and/or as an account identifier, and all my friends and acquaintances use it to correspond with me.
How would I prove I was using it if someone tried to get it transferred to them on grounds of non-use? To prove significant use of it for email seems hard to do without having to share a lot of personal and private information.
[1] Oddly, there is one page on it that for most of that time was the #1 hit on Google if you searched for the thing that page is about, although recently it has slipped a few spots, and is still #1 on Bing and DDG and Yahoo. The page is just plain text with some tables and some bolded headings, has never been publicized, has no SEO, and according to Google only has one outside site linking to it (in a comment I made seven years ago in a forum), and there are numerous other pages out there that cover the same thing I did and usually better. I am completely baffled as to why mine ranks so high.
That has been problematic, if I recall correctly. I believe that was the reason Cybercity, an ISP, was asked to hand over large number of domains. Others claimed that Cybercity wasn't using those domains, because there where no websites. The domains had been registered solely to be used as domains for their customers email account, so their where in use.
I think the dropped the domains when their stopped providing customers with email accounts.
Depending on the court, I can see a large number of cases where someone is forced to hand over a domain, because they aren't using it for a website.
then the problem is the court not understanding the technology. If you are using the domain just for email then sure, that's a valid use case and you can claim the domain is being used
I don't think so. It hasn't happened in Denmark at least.
Besides, just having a "domain squatting is illegal" rule would mean domain resale websites won't be possible as they will be a clear sign of bad intend.
It may not remove all the squatting, but if you can't easily set up a resale shop, it'll be a lot less economically attractive.
Well, if a court rules that having an email set up on the domain is valid, how would you know whether that given case was legit or not? Who can really speak to the motivations of doing it?
I think .dk and .com probably diverge in this case because (a) a top .com is literally a million-dollar lottery ticket of incentive, and (b) .com is so much bigger that it would probably allow for utility services that set up trivial email services for a minimal fee, across your whole portfolio of domains. I'm not sure .dk can sustain the same kind of domainer industry tooling.
Plus, there's the problem of jurisdiction. For .dk it's pretty clear: cases are heard and decided in Denmark. And, since it's mostly Danish entities using .dk, that doesn't cause much unfairness. If .com is arbitrated in the US, seems like US corps are likely to take advantage of that and cause a lot of problems for smaller entities around the world.
I wish the .dk solution could be applied to .com. I hate how .com is right now. But I'm not sure it works at global scale.
I did not, firstly because I have no way to verify that the email I'm contacting is not some sort of scam to get my info, and secondly I don't have time to sit and
have a back and forth email conversation to maybe potentially buy the domain for more than the current value. (Yes, value depends on what someone is willing to pay etc)
Whilst it was frustrating they were not available, it wasn't the end of the world to me.
The people owning these domains most probably have them listed on a domain market place so you might not have to deal with the person directly and if it's listed as instant buy there is no bargaining or whatnot. You just buy it and the platform handles the transfer of ownership.
I always had similar thoughts. Domain squatters provide no value to society, just leech on others that actually build things. Luckily, these days there are a lot more TLDs, so one doesn't have to pay the ransom.
I think there should be a subscription fee for domains in certain TLDs (especially .com) — so that there is a real cost to holding domains. If you are using it for a business, you will have no problem paying the subscription, but if you want to squat on hundreds of domains, it will quickly make your costs unsustainable. The current system where it costs next to nothing to hold a domain encourages squatting.
I have a domain for my email and a website hosting the handful of things I've put out over the years and my resume. It's a single word on a popular TLD.
Should I be priced out of that domain?
If no: businesses will still squat.
If yes: why the fuck should I care about stopping squatters if I can't even afford an available domain name?
> I think there should be a subscription fee for domains in certain TLDs (especially .com)
I have a few .com's and I pay yearly subscriptions on them. And some domains in other TLDs have "premium" subscription prices which can be 10-100x higher than the normal domain subscription price.
> so that there is a real cost to holding domains. If you are using it for a business, you will have no problem paying the subscription
This sounds like it would make the cost painful, if not prohibitive, for individuals to own domains in those TLDs. Don't get me wrong, squatting is annoying. But I don't think raising the prices is the right fix, since it may end up with the side effect of making domain purchases in some TLDs only available to businesses.
Since domain names are globally unique, there is no solution. The number of name consumptions by name consumers is larger than the number of useful names. If multiple parties want to use a name, only one gets it. Your hobby site is treated equally with any other commercial or social venture of any utility or economic size. Even if that size is zero. Free resources get wasted, free non-renewable are interesting to watch.
You and I can both name our daughters “Carla McIntyre”, all uses of their name will be context-sensitive.
On many sites, and for email providers, we need to be scoobydoo45478 because there were other scoobydoos that showed up first. Same is going to happen with domain names. At least a squatter won’t be able to claim copyright on the prefix.
> If you are using it for a business, you will have no problem paying the subscription
When you're building a business, your business' finances are literally your own finances. So in order to start a business (and get a domain for it) you'd already need to be rich enough to be able to pay the substantial fee from your own pocket. That doesn't sound that great.
I participate in an international accelerator program and last week the regular weekly update from one of the African participants was that they need a donation of $35 for their domain and hosting renewal. These are talented guys building a real product.
Your "next to nothing" is not so close to nothing for others.
Not really. There’s a major capital investment in owning a residential property, plus ongoing maintenance, otherwise no one would need to rent. A domain can be had for less than one fancy coffee per year.
Contrarian view: I'd rather negotiate with a "leech" domain parker than some random guy using it for his hobby site that he hasn't updated in 9 years and is impossible to reach.
At least the leech responds to me immediately, will negotiate 100% of the time and will actually sell you the domain.
Meanwhile, you've got the owner (might be previous owner considering the site has been updated now) of "Steam.com" who had a message saying "domain not for sale" on the site for years. [1] Not using it. Not selling it. Just sitting. Now Valve has to use the ugly abomination known as "Steampowered.com".
When I want a squatted domain, I can get it. When I want a domain some random guy owns, he doesn't reply 80% of the time. The other 20% he won't sell.
Just because there's nothing on the homepage doesn't mean it isn't being used. I've had a domain name for the last 10 years with no homepage that I'd never sell because me and a few others use it for email only. There's more use for a domain name than simply the webpage.
I visited Steam.com and was met with “Steam.com is reserved for our Future Product” but with a copyright of 1994 to today. That’s a long product development cycle. Are they building the new Duke Nukem Forever?
I'm not certain this is necessarily a contrarian view.
If the person is using it for his hobby (keyword using) I don't see how that's any of our business. Either he wants your $10000 or not.
On the other hand, if he is not using it, I'm all for avenues to address this, for example ICANN or local TLD "courts". This would then cover squatting/scalping as well.
My mom taught me about scarcity with land. She always said someone like Benjamin Franklin said, "Buy land, they don't make it anymore".
The same concepts tend to exist in the digital world. They don't have to exist in the digital world, but surprise! Us humans make it so. NFTs, for example. They prove that a particular configuration of bytes, which can be replicated exactly (!) at zero cost, have value to people. Scarcity value.
Therefore, only so many "good" TLDs, and names within that given TLD.
You can rage against it, but you will end up achieving nothing.
Fortunately, since this is not natural but artificial scarcity, a lot can be done about it - see e.g. Denmark's approach to domain ownership[0].
On a broader point:
> The same concepts tend to exist in the digital world. They don't have to exist in the digital world, but surprise! Us humans make it so.
Yes. And that's what's ruining the digital world. People creating artificial scarcity to extract money from trading things that should be freely accessible, instead of finding a business model where one gets paid by contributing something of value to the society.
Domain parking is somewhat similar to buying 100 tickets for the <hot-artist-of-the-day> concert just to resell them at double the price on the black market.
"Cool" domains are expensive because they are scarce. They are scarce because having an expensive domain name signals to potential customers a more legitimate service/product.
If "cool" domains were abundant, there would be no demand to pay above market price for one.
No, the problem is domain parkers pay nearly zero so they can horde millions and profit if they just sell a few.
Normal people end up paying $20 or so per year, MUCH more than the domain parkers, and enough that people tend not to horde them without a planned use.
Make the domain parkers pay the same as normal folks and things would get MUCH better.
There is almost no [commonword].com domain pointing to the most legitimate service/product. In many cases they are even worse, being spam source. So what is a cool domain after all ...
Reminds me a bit of the person who glares at handicap parking spots or suspiciously eyes the seemingly able-bodied person who emerges from their car in the handicapped spot because they feel they could have had that spot when a lot is otherwise rather full. No, if the handicapped spot was available to everyone, someone else would already be parked there anyway and you would still be hunting for a parking spot.
That said, fuck domain parkers. Just speculators fucking up my ideas for no value add.
Sometimes the "able-bodied" person has a legit reason for the handicapped permit that isn't visible. (For instance, someone with advanced lung disease where stamina is a concern)
Likewise for domains. I think many just buy domains with the idea of building something "one day". If it isn't actively listed for sale, it's hard to discern intent.
This essay really sums up the greater problem and impact of the modern rent-seeking economy. It applies to domain parking, ticket scalping, mass property buying for holiday/airbnb renting, etc.
While searching for a domain the other day I came across the lovechild of domain squatters - venture.com - which allows you to rent a .com domain for a couple of grand a month. I never thought the bar could go lower.
In Australia, to register a .com.au domain name, you have to demonstrate some affiliation eg a registered company of that name, or a product that has been trademarked with or is trading under that name.
How does that work with new ideas? Expecting a startup to have a trademark is a little heavy handed, and obv you won't have anything trading with that name.
You actually don't have to have the eligible company name/business name/trademark already registered (though you do have to have an "Australian Business Number", which can be obtained online without delay or charge, even as a sole trader/freelancer).
But when you register the domain you agree to the policy I've pasted below.
So you can start using the domain straight away, but if, before you have registered a matching business/company name or trademark, somebody else can demonstrate eligibility to use that domain, they can challenge your registration and you'd have to hand it over.
===
Policy Acceptance
By submitting this application for a domain name, you confirm that you are eligible to hold the domain name set out in this application, and that all information provided in this application is true, complete and correct, and is not misleading in any way. If any of the information is later found not to be true, or is incomplete, incorrect, or misleading in any way, or if you have submitted this application in bad faith, the domain name license can be canceled and you can permanently lose the use of the domain name. I certify that I understand the agreement and that domain names have a close & substantial connection to the person/business that it is intended to represent.
You can register a company for $700, then $400 per year. A business name is less.
On the other hand, if you don’t want to spend that money up front, you can wait, knowing that nobody else can register the domain (unless they spend a similar amount first).
auDA really doesn't do much enforcement of this, at all. The policy might aswell not exist.
Not surprising, considering there are at least 4 auDA accredited registrars who specialise in domain parking[1], which is (allegedly) against the rules.
Same for .ie for Ireland, though it's a bit looser. If it's of interest to the Irish population or your personal interest as a member of that population.
Domain names seem analogous to property. A good .com gives a business the digital prestige comparable to having a store on 5th Avenue, New Bond Street or the Champs-Élysées.
Then there other parts of town (.io, .co, .app and so on) which become gentrified and increase in value as people move into them and start doing fresh things.
I once pondered taking out a business loan to acquire a particular .com domain, thinking of it as a mortgage. The thinking was that once it's been acquired you can run your business from that prime property instantly and pay that asset off each month. Then one day if you ever had to sell it you could probably get the same or more for it, provided you hadn't overpaid initially.
There are a few domains that might work that way, but it seems to be more like this:
buy domain ⇾ build traffic to domain ⇾ domain value increases
The value of the domain is often an artifact of the value of what was hosted on the domain, or an artifact of the value of the brand represented in the domain, but rarely just "awesome name value".
On this topic, does anyone know what process GoDaddy follows when they snatch up a domain that has lapsed?
There's a domain I've wanted for decades for sentimental reasons. I randomly checked on it a few weeks ago and noticed it had lapsed but GoDaddy had picked it up and was asking $3,500 for it.
Obviously I'm not going to pay that, so I'm keeping an eye on it (through searches on other registrars) to see if they drop the price (I'd pay a few hundred bucks for it).
I haven't contacted them or tried to make an offer yet, cause I don't want to let them know that someone is actually interested in the domain and ruin any chances I'd have just by waiting.
It's almost certainly not GoDaddy that registered the domain. They partner with the domain resale brokers (Afternic, if I remember correctly) so they'll be advertising the domain on behalf of whoever bought it.
I would love to see a government policy that differentiates between businesses that add value and those that don't, but I appreciate it's pretty much impossible to define and is unlikely to ever happen.
An economy is set up based on trade for mutual benefit, and if all participants have that mindset and use things as they are supposed to be used, it will be mostly self-regulating. But there will always be those who exploit the system and find the loopholes to benefit only themselves, ruining it for everyone else (and necessitating regulation).
Probably one of the reasons that startups tend to have nonsense made up words for names? Having said that really good names are probably taken by legitimate businesses.
> Probably one of the reasons that startups tend to have nonsense made up words for names?
Yes
> Having said that really good names are probably taken by legitimate businesses.
And No. Very no. There are lots of really good names out there that are being sat on, doing nothing. Anyone who's started a business can tell you of the infuriating days or weeks spent coming up with good names and then finding they're all being squatted, before settling for some nonsense made up name because "ffs I don't care any more, just hammer something into the keyboard that's available and we'll have that and get on with it"
> can tell you of the infuriating days or weeks spent coming up with good names
On the other hand it is quite fun to try to think about an original name that nobody else has thought of before. So yeah your days or weeks are in competition with people's years of doing this as a hobby.
Sure, but are they actually setting up a website for that domain, or is "thinking about an original name" the extent of their involvement?
Not that I'm knocking that, if that's what floats your boat. It's just exasperating when you're actually trying to do something else and this gets in the way.
http://www.hipsterbusiness.name/ is (I think mostly) a joke, but it implements the correct-horse-battery-staple solution to domain naming. The N one-word domains are long since taken, but there are N^2 two-word domains. They may not all make sense, but it presents a lot of opportunities, and they're "memorable" in that correct-horse-battery-staple way.
I was a little struck that my first attempt came up with Otter And Frame -- OtterFrame.com is taken, but OtterAndFrame.com isn't. I'd be curious to know what fraction of that N^2 space is taken already. (It doubles to 2N^2 if you add the word "And" between them, though I guess the version without will always be more desirable.)
OtterAndFrame.com is at least as good a name as Akiflow.com or Biyaki.com (two names dredged from YCombinator's summer class).
Definitely why there are so many .io or .co domains out there. Speaking personally.
I would use my home country which I feel makes sense but it gets localized out of international search results whilst .co and .io have gotten a free pass for some reason.
The solution, I think, is to raise the price. 20x the cost of a Dotcom, most people only need one or two and should be able to afford it, you’ve just increased the cost of squatting hugely.
That being said, I’d be scared about domain names raising the price 200x - all providers could literally hold domain renters hostage here, so it’s a double edged sword I guess..
Even in the developing world, double the current renewal price would be nothing for a company who owns one or two domains. Do you think the literal poorest people in the world are creating startups or even websites? The demand you're conjecturing just doesn't exist.
GP said "developing or poorer", not "literal poorest". You're creating a strawman to shoot it down.
I can only speak for myself, but if prices doubled overnight, owning a domain would not be feasible for me because I don't conduct business or earn income on the domain I own, and the only reason I went for this fairly obscure TLD is because it was the cheapest decent one I could afford. Some of us aren't "businesses", and unless you think we don't deserve a corner of the internet, you'll find there's tons of us.
Well talk about strawmanning, who said you couldn’t have a corner of the internet? There are plenty of TLDs that aren’t subject to the issues .com has.
Sorry but yes, if you’re not making enough money from your .com to pay (say) $50/year, I think it’s perfectly fine that you can’t use it for your random hobby project. The lost value that comes from .com being messed up is so much greater.
I thought your first two sentences were independent of each other and that you were talking about all TLDs. Sorry, probably a language barrier thing.
.com is very clearly commercial so what I had to say isn't applicable to it (which is why I mentioned I use a relatively obscure TLD like .site or .xyz).
Of course they do? Not everyone builds a business for the whole world or expects a SV growth with pumped in money. 13 has value at plenty of places where people are able to build stuff.
The poorest people in the world are struggling to survive. They barely start start businesses at all, let alone those that need global reach via a .com. The people in developing countries who do need such things and do have such businesses can easily afford $50/y.
I don't agree with it what so ever because I've been at the same situation. Businesses, especially online, are not only made by some Silicon Valley of the local types. I'm sorry but everything you write comes from a place of privilege unless you think dot com should be reserved only for the richer parts of the world.
That would just increase the possible gains as well - while also making all the squatters with their existing portfolio all the much richer. Also makes domains harder to reach for common folks. Wins for squatters, loss for society, yay.
Would it? Squatters charge you the maximum they can, increasing the cost reduces the profitability, if you 10x the price of domains, you will see less squatters as a result.
I’ll also point out they trade in volume - they may run 9 romaine at a loss to successfully sell one, putting all in profit - if you increase the cost to them by a small amount, it decreases their profit substantially. Most Dotcom owners can probably afford $200/year for a domain.
Raising the price would solve the issue overnight. It doesn't need to be a uniform price increase, either - ICANN can guess which domain names are likely to be pricey based on length, dictionary words, or other heuristics. It can't be that hard. There's no reason why every domain name needs to cost the same amount per month. Domain squatters only do this because it's economically viable for them to register 10K domain names and just extort anyone who wants to do anything productive with them.
Also, ICANN should directly auction expiring domain names themselves. It's infuriating that when a domain name expires, whoever has the fastest script pays $10 and then immediately resells it for $100K to whoever actually needed it.
(DDG didn't return anything with this quote, I think I should coin it!!)
With that said, a friend called me one day suggesting that we buy the a domain similar to "cocacola.it" (Italy), as it was available. His idea is that we put ads on that site, and a link to forward to the original "cocacola.com". This way we would collect $$$ from the ads, and perhaps we could sell the domain to CocaCola if/when they discover us.
I prompted him to read what is "domain hijacking" and also suggested that if CocaCola (or any other company) sends their lawyers our way, we're f-ed (financially).
I like the suggestion some people have already made.. don't google, don't 'test'. If you search the domain name you want, BUY the word then & there.
But I am not seeing from the author an argument that his start-up idea is better then next person's who wants it too. Let's say you got it for $10 but then you sit on it and do little progress. But someone else has a better execution or idea than yours. How is it then fair or better overall? I think It's a perfect way to vote for your business idea: put up more money if you believe if it's worth it. If you were blocked to execute your idea because someone is squatting, then I'll agree but as others pointed out, you're not blocked. You might lose a little money if you really want that domain. Then again you should be able to make up if it's really good.
What might be a solution is enforcing tld policies to the effect that a domain owner has to put up a non-generic website or make other reasonable use of a domain within a set amount of time.
This brings a better case to buy your own "master" domain(s) that you actively use and park your ideas on the subdomains. I would park it in a subdomain of one of my main 2 sites - either my personal blog or freelance company. So I have idea1.mydomain.com, idea2.mydomain.comm idea3.mylongerpersonaldomain.com. Might take a damage on my SEO but an idea so early on are most likely found through personal content creation with links to that site anyways.
>Thanks to Uber you now can seamlessly hail a ride to wherever you are. Thanks to AirBnB you now have a great alternative to hotels. Thanks to Amazon you can have every item on the planet cheaply shipped to your doorstep. The world is better for these companies' existence.
These services would have existed regardless, opersting under other names hd those domain names not been available for purchase in the start up phase. That’s by supply and demand.
> So what's the problem, isn't this a legitimate business? On its face, yes - but it is value-destructive as hell. Generally speaking, the vast bulk of economic activity is value-creating.
Ehh.. how is it different from buying land ? Theres a limited ressource and it has a value.. of course some people are going to buy it.
You should be happy the whole concept of "renting" a domain name doesn't exist yet.
Yup. In fact, about a decade ago, I “brought” a domain from a squatter, only to have them refuse to turn over full authority.
Apparently, I was just “leasing” it. There was no contract; just a simple payment.
I started raising a stink. They made some attempts at barratry, I said “bring it on,” so they rather sourly tossed me the keys, and told me to get out.
The idea is that you “lease” a domain to someone, who imbues it with value, and becomes dependent on it, then you raise the price on lease end.
If they had actually spent a few dollars, getting a lawyer to draft a contract, I would have been screwed.
Buying land and then renting it out without improving it is the literal origin of the term rent-seeking, and is generally less well-regarded than running a business that actually produces something.
I agree it's terrible and as the things now are, only reasonable solutions I see is either increasing the amount of the "good" domains or just making the renewal price somehow cumulative the more domains you own. But I don't think there is any central authority or entity that could enforce that effectively hence things are what they are.
The answer was all the shiny new TLD's we got. Well, big companies got because they cost 100K each (iirc). But in principle we all got.
And to some extent that worked - if "yourfavouritename.com" is taken (it is) then you can have "yourfavouritename.tech" or whatever.
But there's this superstition about ".com" names in the business, that they're just more authoritative and people won't trust a ".tech" domain. And it does leave you open to someone else buying the ".com" later and giving you a problem.
But at least you can get a domain and launch the business, which is something.
Sure, but it makes it harder and you could still pursue them for tax avoidance which is a risk a larger company can't really take. There is certainly bureaucracy involved but in theory it could be possible, it is just who could even enforce such law.
I think people are looking at this from the wrong perspective. People who specialize in domain parking don't need to pay for their domains. In that way a single person can have many thousands of domains registered for zero to low cost.
Like anything else of this nature, this occurs by people never paying on post-billed charges that also include grace periods.
Worse actually than domain names are social media handles.
Type in any random concatenation of two words into namecheck.com and you are likely to find that the domain is available but all the social media handles are taken - and clearly parked.
This I don't really understand since you can't sell social media handles. What's the incentive to park thousands of them?
> This I don't really understand since you can't sell social media handles
What gives you that idea? I'm certain that social media handles get bought and sold all the time. Maybe it's against TOS but when has that stopped anyone?
Fortune 500 companies don't have to, they go to the social media company and say "Hey someone is squatting on our handle, here's a bag with a dollar sign on it to force their account to change so we can have it"
I think a good solution would be that the base price of .com domain registration go up from 10$ to 100$ or even 1000$ per year for premium domains.
Sure, money.com would still be sold on secondary markets for more, but the vast majority of domains sitting in squatters "portfolios" would get released.
I currently own or have previously owned domains that are considered “premium” by namecheap standards. I straight up can’t pay $1000/yr for a personal site/non revenue generating site.
Domain names are powerful, cheap marketing that only gets more powerful over time as links are acquired. It can be a huge advantage in driving organic traffic to your online business.
Paying someone who speculated on the domain's value early on isn't outrageous. It's like getting mad at someone for buying a piece of real estate on the edge of town, having the town grow around their property, and seeing the value appreciate. The buyer took a risk. Circumstances could have worked out differently.
Speculation is a really natural market force. Suck it up, babies. If your product is that good, your investment into a good domain will pay back quickly!
Recently I was looking to buy a domain for hosting personal blog + mail. I looked for firstname.tld, lastname.tld and firstnameLastname.tld. Most have been squatted upon, although a few are being used legitimately.
Sucks that they're squatted but even if they weren't it could be very expensive to buy from a registrar. For me lastname.[anything] was either taken or far too costly. Would have been nice to get though because firstname@lastname.tld is a nicer address than me@firstnamelastname.tld (heck I even prefer my firstnamelastname@gmail.com address... except for all the garbage that mistakenly gets sent to me)
I don't understand why people want to use existing words for their startup or whatever. Being unique surely strengthens your brand through a lack of confusion, improved name recognition and ease of search.
You don't understand? We have used legible and understandable words for companies through the ages. Making up a new word and hoping people to remember it is much harder than associating it with something they already know - such as "New York Times" or "Facebook". I'm much more confused if I don't understand a name of the company than the one that I understand.
They do not only squat dictionary words: also short words, or rather, short randomly generated letter combinations. So your unique startup name has be become longer the later in the life of the internet you start. No-one wants a huge domain.com no matter how unique and nice it is.
My completely unscientific perception is that companies that focus too much on getting the perfect domain name from the get go are doomed to fail, and especially so if they buy a domain for more than $1k..
I had an app in PlayStore and registered a domain for it. The app didn't take off, never made any money, so I abandoned it and let the domain expire. Now it's listed for $6000!
Those prices are like sticker prices on used cars in lots. They're the opening negotiation.
Generally, when you buy a domain from one of these companies you're dealing with an Afternic salesperson or some other affiliation. These salespeople substantially discount during negotiations.
I recently purchased a very premium domain from Afternic for 25% less than the "sticker price". It sucks having to pay them thousands of dollars but in my view I underpaid for the domain considering the marketability of it.
Off topic, but thanks Wolfram for creating Golden Layout. I've developed two major platforms using it, and it's been hugely beneficial to the systems I've built.
> Thanks to Uber you now can seamlessly hail a ride to wherever you are. Thanks to AirBnB you now have a great alternative to hotels. Thanks to Amazon you can have every item on the planet cheaply shipped to your doorstep. The world is better for these companies' existence.
The world is better for these companies' existence? That... that remains to be seen. All of these companies are exploiting workers -- it's not just me saying, the UK has recently ruled so. Uber deliberately circumvented the law (google for greyball) which should be a crime but you know, big companies are not pursued for these things criminally. And so forth.
How many land squatters do you see? Not many, because it's not profitable, even though land is limited and non-fungible.
Why is it not profitable? because you have to pay the actual market value to own it and hold it. You don't pay a ridiculously low fee to buy it and then re-sell it at their market value. That doesn't make sense, yet that's what happens with domain names.
Are you a non-profit or don't have money? Great, because there are myriads of top-level domains that don't mean "commercial" which will probably have lower prices.
Not that I don't agree with the article - who hasn't struggled with this problem? But this problem is as old as the internet itself and part of the culture at this point.
In fact, I'm sure you could liken the rush to squat domain names to many present-day internet gold rush crazes. People didn't know for sure that they would be valuable and scarce, don't forget.
So yeah - obviously it being hard to get domains you want is annoying, but that seems quite a simplistic and outdated rant for this place.
Totally lost me at the "Amazon ... is a net good".
And maybe because I choose "unusual" domain names, I've found buying them to be relatively straight-forward. There are now so many top-level domains to choose from that you can usually concoct something that works well with one of them. Admittedly, these haven't been names for "startups" - they're for small businesses and local groups, but it can't be that different.
> If it wasn't for domain parkers, you'd still get your domain - just for 10$, rather than 10.000$.
Yeah, no. If it wasn't for domain parkers, the fancy domain that a domain parker thinks is worth $10k would have been sold 10 years ago for $10 for some high school student building a website for their dog.
Not to mention how facebook.com would be the 1999 face book of Big Cedar High School somewhere in rural America.
WTF - an ex J.P. Morgan employee (look at Wolfram's LinkedIn) who sold several companies is complaining about people who trade with another kind of assets?
Can someone tell him that he is complaining about the system which made him rich?!
While I dislike domain squatting as much as the next tech person that has been watching it for a quarter of a century, the author goes out of their way to evade the elephant in the room regarding their setup.
They say:
> So what's the problem, isn't this a legitimate business? On its face, yes - but it is value-destructive as hell. [reference to supposedly legitimate businesses] The world is better for these companies' existence. ... Domain-Parking is nothing like that. If it wasn't for domain parkers, you'd still get your domain - just for 10$, rather than 10.000$.
You wouldn't get your domain for $10, because someone else would get your domain for $10 instead. It is that simple, they'd beat you to it. How is that any more fair of a determining factor than raising the cost/price? It's not, it's a purely subjective opinion that one determing factor is better than the other, or more fair than the other. It's an argument that having capital to allocate to purchase a domain for eg $10,000 is unfair to everyone else without that much capital. It's false.
By that basis, it's unfair for a business to have $500,000 to buy a nice plot of land in a town square to open a new retail shop. Golly gee, what about all the other people that don't have that money. This is a perpetually reducing argument that goes all the way down to the last person with $0 (the person who gets to own the universe because they have nothing, and everything is unfair toward them accordingly; which then breaks the system morally, which lets you know it's a fraud, it's self-contradictory). It means having enough money to purchase a McDonald's franchise - which is like a magic ticket to a forever nice return on your money (at least historically) - is unfair to everyone else that can't (which is 99% of the world's population). It applies to all routine economic activity, all business function (without exception), and is similarly absurd when applied.
This business over here can't afford new $10k equipment. It's unfair, the competition can afford it. That equipment therefore should be $1 and it's first come first serve. The company making that equipment must be forced to supply it at a loss forever. All equipment derives from natural resources somewhere (which derives from land ownership/control), it's unfair some people can access those natural resources and others can't.
This business over here can't afford to buy a new building. Their competitor can afford a nice new building that draws more customers. It's unfair. Some building owner should be forced to turn over a nice building for pennies on the dollar. Who are these people that get to decide that natural resources like land or building materials are worth something? It should all be $0.01, first come first serve.
Norway and Canada should have to give me their oil resources, I want to screw around with a million barrels of oil per day. I have an idea I want to put into action. Who are they to control natural resources? It should be first come first serve, $0.0001 per barrel of oil. Because I say that's fair. Why should someone with a lot of money be able to buy a million barrels of oil and I can't?
Everyone that owns a house or yard with more space than deemed fair (who decides? the authoritarians of course), must be forced to turn that space over to someone else that wants to use it (for any purpose). You have no choice in who gets to move into your (whoops, it's not your space really) unused space, it's first come first serve. Welcome to hell.
It's unfair that someone else had more time than I did to watch for domain names to buy for $10 in the new system. The counters never stop, that's because the author's alternative will always fail and will never produce the supposed fairness.
Any application of this author's premise would implode into absolute disaster economically. Only authoritarian technocrats would propose it could work and be managed, and they'd come up with all sorts of absurd regulations and systems that had to be followed & implemented perfectly in order for it to even function badly. And in the end, the supposed unfairness would persist regardless. It'll always be proclaimed unfair that another person beat you to a domain based on time (first mover). Maybe if someone gets to a domain first, we can just force them to share it, they get to use the domain every other day, or maybe once per year if we want to increase the fairness factor.
We might just regulate how a TLD works so that there is no domain parking industry and problem is then solved. The party who runs the TLD is surely not going to sell them at a loss since they aren't getting those 5k or 100k amounts even today. They just get 10$ or 100$ per yer or whatever.
If someone doesn't use a domain anymore and someone else has a claim on it, then it just gets moved to a new owner.
Example:
In Finland this is how the .fi domain works, you can get yourcompany.fi if you own yourcompany Oy (Ltd) and someone is just hoarding it. There's a process for this. It works.
The problem is that it's a property like everything else. Should we also prosecute who whold on to buildings, cars, huge strips of land without using it? Sure, but now you see the futility of how this would be possible. Anybody can generate a valid looking fake website for "proof of usage" in no time.
This is solved in real life by taxes which make it uneconomical to sit on high value land while doing nothing with it. If it's not high value then who cares, feel free to squat. The problem is ICANN just charges $10/month per .com no matter the value, so it makes it economically viable for domain squatters to buy everything and just extort anyone who comes looking to do something productive. Just raise the yearly price on .coms, or raise the price proportional to how popular ICANN thinks the name will be, or ideally both. If it was $1000+/year for a high-value domain name, and $100/year for a reasonable length .com, squatters would vacate real fast.
The problem with proportional pricing is, who decides the value? If your website becomes successful, and the word "facebook" becomes more valuable, what's to stop ICANN simply increasing the charge? Then it just becomes extortion from ICANN.
The new-generation TLD owners already do this with "Premium" names. Google does it with .app. A price is arbitrarily decided for your first year. Who knows what price it might be in a few years' time.
buying a property to just hold in in hope somebody buys it in couple years for 20x current value just would not work, there are taxes and other costs and it just does not make sense.
> how does keeping domains away from people with little money provide any value?
True, it doesn't. Then again, how is it different from property prices? A business that wants to open a shop in a premium location has to pay a higher price. I may be not seeing something, but to me this looks similar.
> As long as the owner pays the fee who gives a f?
I think other market users would become annoyed. Businesses would still have trouble coming up with names, but now they would have no way to solve that with money. And users would have to deal with more "creative" names.
More efficient how? Rather than registering the domain name via a registrar there's now another middleman and that's efficient? What are you, a manager?
Concert ticket scalpers also provide the same value, keeping culture available for people with more money. I just don't get this mentality - it's a negative for the world.
True, ticket scalpers also work in a niche where the actual price and the market price are different. Ticket companies solve scalping by lotteries; or they bring the ticket price closer to market value with price increases or auctions. Offering domains always for $10 seems similar to lotteries. Lotteries make money irrelevant; to me it makes sense for a concert but not for things that can enhance your business. I'd prefer domain parkers over $10 domain lotteries.
I am amazed by the examples of proper businesses that bring value.
Uber - seeking rent on poor people (drivers) and using them as a tool to fight taxi corporations. Taxi corporations nowadays also have apps where you can order a cab and pay with it. Uber forced this change maybe but we don't need it anymore.
AirBnB - helping people who already ruin cities by owning flats/houses for passive income to ruin it even more by making it more profitable. Building a hotel is costly and ruining someone neighborhood by building a hotel is hard. Ruining neighborhood by buying off flats and making them short term rentals is easy.
Amazon - well let's not go into how much of businesses they ruined. How much value they create vs how much bad stuff they do is probably not easy to "calculate" but sucking out value from low wage workers and passing it to people who buy stuff online is not what I would call creating positive value.
Domainparkers are annoying but they are not sucking value out from poor people and are not externalizing costs to society like those above mentioned companies. Author could get some perspective, not getting some domain name is whining and people are more creative that mostly they don't need to buy off those to run business.
I get what you're talking about but value is in the eyes of the consumer. All these ethic concerns holding, I can tell you that my life is completely different with Uber, AirBnB and Amazon than without, and probably most people in the developed world would say something similar.
"A complaint may be submitted by any person who has a sufficient interest in the outcome of the case. The chairman of the Complaints Board decides whether the complainant has a sufficient interest.
The Complaints Board decides whether the registration of a domain name is to be maintained, deleted, suspended or transferred to the complainant or to a natural or legal person appointed by the complainant. In addition, the Complaints Board can confirm, cancel, change or refer back a decision made by DK Hostmaster/DIFO about compliance with the terms and conditions of business (”Terms and conditions for the right of use to a.dk domain name”)." (from the official page: https://www.domaeneklager.dk/en)
We've used the board in our business once. When we first started our SaaS the domain name we wanted was already taken by another person who seemed to use it for something genuine. So we contacted him/her and decided to wait. In the meantime, a competitor managed to contact the other owner directly and bought the domain name. He then changed the site into one big ad+redirect for his own competing service. We complained to the board, and presented our arguments(+screenshots). He did the same, and we won. The domain was transferred free-ofcharge to us, and we've owned it since.
DK's a small country, and something similar might not work for larger countries, but it does limit the domainparking issue. I'm a big fan of it!