Web domain ownership should be contingent upon actively using the domain relevantly within a reasonable time frame from registering it
By
Jonathan Schofield
on July 18, 2007
There are way too many domain squatters out there, including me. I’ve registered a few domains with the intent of doing something I never got around to doing. I don’t know what the ‘reasonable time frame’ should be — maybe six months?
There’d then be less need for the creative naming of the likes of ma.gnolia and del.icio.us, a whole lot more addresses available, and less need for new parent domains.
Deciding what is ‘relevant’ would be a lot harder to police, but the current situation sucks.
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Discussion (15)
This claim is flawed, because because domain registrants do not own domains; they effectively lease them.
Point taken, but isn't that a bit pedantic? For example, there are thousands of property ‘owners’ in the UK who actually only own a leasehold.
I'll reword the claim if you'd like.
Those who are voting against, I'm curious as to why?
Because the quality of content on the internet shouldn't be policed
So Billy, for you, the sticking point in the claim is the word, “relevantly”?
Yes, probably? The problem for me is the idea of enforcing some sort of quality of content at all
Although I have absolutely no problem with the new (and existing: .gov) .tlds that have restrictions on who can use them and how. Though .mobi seems like a huge scam
Thinking this through a bit more, I guess even removing the word 'relevantly' still presents big problems with the claim. For example, registering a domain purely for email use is a perfectly legitimate strategy.
Maybe I'll try a simpler, broader claim.
I agree that domain squatters aren't necessarily a good thing, but I'm not convinced that there's any way to stop it without also affecting legitimate registees (is that even a word?).
I think it's registrants
Who here sees the Henry George parallel?
That's an interesting observation, David. Fancy making a claim that applies Henry George's ethos to web domains?
Presumably your point is that if the cost of owning the rights to a web domain increased in proportion to the number of web domains that one owned, that could act as a useful deterrent to domain squatting?
Well more like, if you own a domain that is in high demand that is not like a branded domain, but is simply in high demand, you could pay a proportional tax to have use of the name, whether you are using it or not.
This would have the effect of penalizing people who are simply holding it off the market until the price shoots up. Because the upshot in price is through no labor of their own but rather the value the community as a whole is creating.
The same way Henry George recommended taxing the rental value of the unimproved portion of land as a single source of government tax revenue.
But I don't see any simple way to implement this with domain names.
1) Its internet domains, not web domains
2) How on earth are you going to measure use?
I use mine, primarily, as an SSH/SCP dump so I can transfer things between machines. There is a web presence, but it is old (and, since I don't know of any inbound public links, I'd be surprised if it were indexed -- in fact, it isn't other than the apache base page. Which I should probably disable).
It also hosts a mail daemon, but that's secondary.
I stand corrected on web/internet.