Domain Thieves and Domain Leeches

Normally these classes of entities or people (allegedly) are called domain name squatters and domain farmers.

Squatting and farming are honorable, worthy pursuits however, so we need other words. (Agaric considered "domain poachers" but there's something of an honorable tradition of poaching on the King's land.)

With apologies to thieves and leeches (and the terms for these particularly obvious capitalist parasites are henceforth domain thieves and domain leeches-- stealing other people's domains

Aside from a working system of dispute resolution, there's a pretty easy way to get rid of slime who register tons of domain names to either sell them back to people who want to actually use them (I guess domain kidnapping is more apt than domain stealing) or setting up automated content with advertising to live off people's attempts to find useful information.

This easy way would alleviate poverty at the same time.

Domain names are a limited resource. If you use one, you owe everyone else in the world something for its use. Under ideal conditions this could be done with some sort of auction, but with such inequality

So if domain leecher XYZ corp buys 1,000 domains at $100 apiece a year, they've just funded regular people to buy 1,000 domains. I'll feel a lot better about name-about-usefull-stuff.com being taken by soulless ads knowing that it's helping me buy my domains (and pumping money )

According to domain tools there are 96,742,806 active domain names today (several times that number have been registered and expired).

At $100 a domain name, and divided by six billion people, that provides everybody with $1.61 a year.

So jacking up the price for something only a few people have, such as domain names, is a whole lot less effective as a fair efficiency-inducer than doing so for things almost everyone uses, such as oil (to compensate each other for global warming and other pollution) or water (to conserve our most precious renewable resource).

For my own plan to not be devastating for me, it would have to be restricted to people who actually get domain names, or otherwise exclude the impoverished majority in the world. I don't like that.

I think that 100 million must be at only one registrar or something? I'm one of 300 million people in the U.S. and I've got like 60! Methinks maybe I'm not normal. Anyway it excludes all the country domains, so if the scope of people was limited to the U.S. at least I'd have $30/year coming in to subsidize my domain habit. UPDATE: Apparently it's 100 million domains at most: http://www.domainworldwide.com/

The math is saying very loudly that my simple way to price out domain spammers won't work until practically everyone gets at least one domain name. And of course making domain names more expensive means fewer people will have them. So on reflection it seems fairer for domain names to be cheaper

Oh well, we can always have a jury of our peers decide if a domain name is actually being used for something, and revoke it from domain leeches and thieves when someone has something real they want to do with it. A five minute decision, made online, with a couple layers of an appeal process, and some modest charge for those who lose the appeal. The problem is still very solvable, and it is a problem.

On a different perspective of this matter, it must be noted that these sad losers, whom almost everyone involved with Internet work hates, do far less damage to society than the average media or other large corporation.

ANOTHER UPDATE (and I haven't even posted yet): ok, I think the real market-economic way to do this is for people to have to pay the economic value of their domain name. Basically, www.this-is-the-domain-name-of-arthur-thomas-henderson-iii.info would be administrative cost only, while $.com (if symbols were allowed) might cost a million dollars a year. The principal is that domain names draw on a common resource, that any given domain name is finite, and that therefore any money derived from a domain name itself (rather than the content you put there) ought to go back to the public. About the only way to know this is to allow regular auction of the domain name, but this doesn't work because the value of a domain name itself can be built up by the content put there. Plus, especially in present circumstances of inequality and corporate ascendancy, this means that any non-commercial use of a domain name is at a huge financial disadvantage to commercial use.

Resolution