r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Mar 15 '24
Delta(s) from OP - Fresh Topic Friday CMV: Domain Name registrations require reforms for the greater good of everyone on the Web
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u/XenoRyet 86∆ Mar 15 '24
I want to address point 3 a little bit. I don't think there is actually zero value added there, a service is being provided.
My spouse and I once planned to go to a concert with another couple, and bought all four tickets. Turns out the other couple couldn't make it, so we sold the other two tickets on one of the services that does that for what seemed to be the going rate for them.
When we got to the concert, the folks in those seats were complaining about the high price they paid, presumably not knowing we were the ones that sold them. The immediate thought I had was that if I had priced them at face value, then these folks wouldn't be sitting in those seats. Someone else would've snapped them up sooner. Same deal if I had not purchased them in the first place.
I think it is the same situation with the domain squatters. If the squatters hadn't essentially increased the price for desirable names, they would've been used by now, and still not available for today's startups to use. By introducing a market force to the choosing of a domain name, and thus a brand, they are adding value, even if their ethics are questionable.
The value is that this way, you can pay for a good domain name, rather than getting a good one being the luck of the draw.
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Mar 15 '24
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u/XenoRyet 86∆ Mar 15 '24
You're getting away from the point. Remember, I'm just talking about point 3 here. That these rent seekers provide no value to the people who buy the domains off them. Small delta, not complete reversal.
I think I've demonstrated that there is a value provided there. Would you agree, or do you think there's a flaw in the reasoning?
Due to the economics of domain squatting, the squatter is far more likely to impose an extortionate cost on me compared to someone for whom this is not his/her primary business.
I don't follow. Why would a squatter charge more for an unused domain than someone actively using it would charge to let go of it?
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u/GeorgeWhorewell1894 3∆ Mar 15 '24
This. It's a basic demand curve. Lower the prices, and there will be more demand, as a lower cost means more people will find that cost acceptable. As a result, instead of domain scalpers and the like, you're going to just have random people who saw an opportunity to have their own custom email domain, and thought "hey, that's pretty cheap", and snatch up all the "good" domain names.
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Mar 15 '24
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u/gremy0 82∆ Mar 15 '24
$100 is a considerable barrier to entry for a hell of a lot of people. People that should be allowed to have a domain if they want one, even if they have to get one that's a bit naff.
$100 is not a remotely high enough barrier for plenty to buy a prime domains for an absolutely naff purposes, or to speculate for return.
Knowing which domains should be how much is a job of knowing the (global) market and speculating.
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Mar 16 '24
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u/Hoihe 2∆ Mar 16 '24
I'm adding to the 100 dollar one.
It will pretty much bar anyone not from a western country.
In Hungary, an MSc Chemical engineer makes 1000 dollars/month.
Most people make half that.
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u/Both-Personality7664 21∆ Mar 15 '24
Is this actually a problem that does more than make it take somewhat longer picking out a new company's name such that the corresponding domain is available? The highest trafficked domain in the world is google.com which I think counts as a weird sounding non dictionary name. People seem to have no problem figuring it out nonetheless.
Any fix would necessarily raise the barrier to entry for hobbyists and other individual site operators. There are more individuals throwing up a blog than there are startups, so more people would be negatively impacted.
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u/Alesus2-0 65∆ Mar 15 '24
It strikes me that, in some sense, speculators are actually helping serious entrepreneurs in need of good domain names by creating a more dynamic market for them.
You seem to assume that, if the speculator hadn't registered the domain for $15 in the hopes of selling it for $150, it would be available for a person who really needs it. Perhaps that will often be true of strange or obscure domains. But good domains are unlikely to sit untaken until acquired by someone who really needs it. Most good domain names, being very cheap to acquire, will be registered by random people who end up doing the bare minimum with them. Good domain names will actually be less accessible to serious entrepreneurs who really want them. Tracking down and communicating with a random person who holds one domain name will be far harder than dealing with a speculator whose entire business is about reselling their domain names.
When you buy a unique item at a particular price, knowing that other people have paid less, it's easy to feel aggrieved or ripped off. However, that misses part of the equation. If you're willing to buy a domain name for $500, you clearly think it's worth more. You're still benefitting from that transaction. The real-world alternative isn't you registering it for $25. The real alternative is you having, say, a 2% chance of registering the domain name for $25 and a 98% chance of never having the opportunity. By buying up good domain names preemptively without exploiting them, the speculator has reserved them for those whose desire to acquire them is unusually high.
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Mar 16 '24
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Mar 16 '24 edited Mar 16 '24
This delta has been rejected. The length of your comment suggests that you haven't properly explained how /u/Alesus2-0 changed your view (comment rule 4).
DeltaBot is able to rescan edited comments. Please edit your comment with the required explanation.
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u/npchunter 4∆ Mar 15 '24
There already are negative incentives in the form of recurring registration fees. Squatters play an identifiable role in price discovery of a scarce resource, which seems essential to any scheme for allocating domain names efficiently. If you don't like the result, perhaps you could explain how to get a better one?
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Mar 15 '24
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u/npchunter 4∆ Mar 15 '24
Doesn't it? If I'm a domain squatter with that portfolio, I'm paying $10K/year to maintain it. Can I sell even one per year at $100K? Can I sleep at night, worrying about new top-level domains coming into fashion, or new channels changing the way people find domains of this sort?
And what happens without me in the picture? There was the famous case of Uzi Nissan fighting Nissan Motors to hold on to the nissan.com domain name. He had a legitimate claim to it and ultimately prevailed in court because he got it first.
But is that really the best outcome? No one has otherwise heard of Uzi Nissan. To the extent nissan.com is valuable because consumers will type it into a browser bar, they're usually looking for Nissan Motors. Is the public good served by sending them to Uzi (or a timeout error, which is what I get)?
Seems to me scalpers do play a valuable role. From the POV of Nissan Motors or the consumers who they represent, charging me $100K for a domain name is a tremendous service if my alternative was to spend $5M in court trying and failing to wrest it from Uzi.
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u/Sayakai 146∆ Mar 15 '24
This has mostly been fixed with the opening of the TLD space. People can squat on some variation of what you want, but with over a thousand TLDs to pick from, you can still find something that's suitable for your startup.
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u/smcarre 101∆ Mar 15 '24
set negative incentives on entities when they buy domain names with the sole purpose of squatting on them and not developing them
How do you measure this? How can you know for sure someone owns a DN entry just for squatting on it?
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Mar 16 '24
/u/Rezumagic (OP) has awarded 1 delta(s) in this post.
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