The Death of Domain Parking?

An anonymous reader found an article about the former CEO of MySpace moving into the domain parking biz. He says "I thought, it can't be that easy. So I talked to some domainers, and they said, 'We own 300,000 domains, we make $20 million a year, we have just four employees and some servers in the Caymans.'" The idea behind the business doesn't really seem any better to me than just having a parked name with a banner ad. At least, not for the internet as a whole.

Comments

This comment parked

[turnipsatemybaby]

Buy this comment for $20 a year!

Re:This comment parked

[Prysorra]

And "turnipsatemybaby.com" for 15!

Re:This comment parked

[homey of my owney]

This doesn't seem as much the 'Death of Domain Parking' as much as the 'Death of Domain Parking as we know it'. It's unfortunate that we continually find ways to feed 'services' providing no value, and wind up with 1,890,000 hits on Domain Parking.

Re:This comment parked

[Divebus]

There has to be a way to neutralize these sites as the Internet is getting more useless every day. Legitimate people who try to register a site find their name is taken by someone just sitting on it and demanding $50,000 for the name. Here's a dangerous idea: cancel the domain registrations. Make a few simple rules, like any entity found to have more than 10 mobius loop sites like this will have all their registrations released and name servers de-listed (which would kill the ISP). We could get the Internet back in one afternoon. The dangerous part is that someone will need to decide what qualifies and what doesn't.

Re:This comment parked

[slazzy]

Increase the yearly fee to a minimum of $50 / year like to used to be with InterNIC. If ICAAN changed this to the minimum prices that accredited domain name sellers could charge, I'm pretty sure that 99% of registered domains would be dropped. Just like the patent system - patents are quite expensive to maintain so the vast majority of them are dropped each year and not kept. (not that I'm a fan of the patent system)

Re:This comment parked

[Baricom]

Sure 99% of domains would be dropped. However, a huge chunk of that number would be legitimate domains used by ordinary people. I own a domain which I use to host a blog, and small tools designed for public use. I make essentially zero revenue connected with it - a total gross of about $10 over four years. If the price of a domain was raised to $50, I would be priced out of the market, as would many other legitimate owners and even some small businesses. The web would become the territory of the wealthy - exactly what the media conglomerates want.

Re:This comment parked

[Divebus]

That's where the judgement call comes into play. I've got a site where I host some personal photos and another which just says "welcome to .net" for now. Those wouldn't be a target for deletion because they don't show a pattern of abuse. They don't trash search engines, squat on thousands of useful domain names or mislead people into black holes. However, take a look at some of the sites which are clearly a waste of bandwidth, it wouldn't take long to figure out who is hosting thousands of those sites at once and de-commission the whole batch. I don't think there's any guarantee that someone would get a domain name just because they want it. All assigned names belong to ICANN and they can simply deny renewal to the abusers if they chose to do so.

The bad news is this would simply start another cat and mouse game, electronic warfare between abusers and the people trying to stop them. It would also open the doors to using this method for censorship at the hands of influential, interested parties.

Re:This comment parked

[jez9999]

Woahh, woah, hang on. Where the hell do you live, Africa? This is a ridiculous argument. You almost certainly make enough money to fund a measly $50/yr for your TLD. If it's not worth even that much to you, you should be asking yourself whether you even need it and considering getting a subdomain from a hosting provider or something; you can probably get them for free somewhere. I totally reject your argument.

Re:This comment parked

[marcello_dl]

> Buy this comment for $20 a year!

Don't get it modded down for $2 a year! (to each slashdot moderator, unfortunately)

Re:This comment parked

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm from Africa (South Africa, to be precise). And you talk about ridiculous arguments. Listen to yourself. You're a total embarrassment to whichever country you are from.

Re:This comment parked

[Anonymous Coward]

So what if someone is from Africa?, it's ok if they are left out of the Internet?, I really don't get what do you mean.

One can only hope.

[SatanicPuppy]

Domain parking is just another form of internet garbage, like half-assed "portal" sites, and spam.

It's only sense to know that there will forever be garbage, and that we will forever be looking for ways to sort through that garbage for the good stuff.

Looking at it, you'd think that domain parking wouldn't be half as profitable as it is. We clearly need to work harder on our search engines.

Re:One can only hope.

[markhb]

We clearly need to work harder on our search engines.

Given that the real source of traffic for these sites has nothing to do with search engines (it comes from people typing stuff directly into the location bar of the browser), I doubt that that would be productive.

Re:One can only hope.

[EggyToast]

Or remove the advertising incentives. They only make money because companies like Google and Yahoo pay them. To me, that's no different than the "aggregator" sites that are just links and news about asbestos.

Re:One can only hope.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe we should just make sure that our browsers are equipped with the best ad-blocking technology by default. Why isn't Adblock a part of Firefox? I realize that it's probably best for me that the lambda user doesn't know about ad-blocking as there is little incentive to develop anti-ad-blocking technology but it doesn't seem right to let people profit by polluting the net with garbage sites.

Re:One can only hope.

[Anonymous Coward]

Working on harder on search engines (which is seemingly hard enough, just look at the investment made by google and the talent they're hiring to get this done -- which nobody else can afford to do) seems like a workaround. I think we need something else.

Internet is nice and all, but it has its share of problems. Domain parking is a problem somewhat like spam. Nobody wants it, and we need a system that makes it impractical. That's the real fix we need. Although I don't see what we'd replace the current system s(both domain names or email) with.

Out of those 300000 names, I'm sure there's quite a few that could be useful to many "legit/real" sites (even though a good part are likely misspellings of well known sites). But those assholes are grabbing every name that might be somewhat interesting and that's still available. Been playing with nameboy to find a few good names for a while, and quite frankly, out of a thousand I'd like to get, I'm lucky if 5 or so are available (and they're not the best ones either, more like second picks).

Buying a domain name is much like trying to sign up for a free email account nowadays. You try anything, and it's already taken. You even try totally random things and half the time they're already taken!

Re:One can only hope.

[RyoShin]

I don't think it's the search engines that cause the visits so much; rarely, if ever, do I click a link from search results and get a parked domain. If I do, it's usually because the search engine has it indexed before, and the site has since been taken down and the domain bought by someone else.

The way that domain parkers make their money is mainly through mistakes. For instance, if I buy reallykickasssite.com for a future project, a domain parker is going to come in and register reallykickasssite.net, reallykickasssite.org, and reallykickasssite.info in the hopes that my site will become popular and someone will accidentally type in the wrong TLD. Then there are ones that are mispellings, like foogle.com or yahooo.net or something.

Hell, sometimes they don't even wait for you to register it. I've gone to do domain checks at GoDaddy for a domain I might want to use, decide to mull it over, and come back the next week to buy it only to find that some company got it and parked an ad site there. I have no idea how they know that I checked on it, but they somehow get it on a list and snap it up.

What's worse, though, is that they hold on to these forever, so you can't just wait for their registration to expire. A domain is fairly cheap, so it's not a huge drain on them. And I know of no way to purchase it from them, either. If you have some sort of trademark or copyright, you could probably wrestle it from them through lawyers, but beyond that you're likely SOL.

I've learned my lesson, though. If I ever get an idea for a domain, and check to see if it's open, I'm going to buy that domain if it is. It's only $8-$10, and if I decide I don't want it I just turn off auto-renew.

GoDaddy has this thing where you pay $20, and when the domain becomes available they'll buy it for you and put it under your name. Has anyone tried this service and had it work? I have a sneaking suspicion that they are the ones doing the parking themselves (that's where I do most of my domain checks), and just trying to get another $10 out of you for the domain.

Re:One can only hope.

[JohnnyLocust]

Domain parking is just another form of internet garbage

And MySpace isn't?

Re:One can only hope.

[un1xl0ser]

Assuming that:
a) parked domains with advertisements/portals are detectable
b) list of these sites could be easily kept up to date
c) something that I haven't though of could be used to quickly determine if a domain was parked

Then it would be a trivial plugin to rewrite common typos, and avoid these sites entirely. We can push the advertising somewhere else!

Re:One can only hope.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's because Firefox's developers don't think there's anything inherently wrong with ads. Pop-ups are annoying and are blocked, but simple banners are not that big a deal and help legitimate sites pay for their bandwidth and development time.

Re:One can only hope.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been trying to find a decent .com domain name for some time now. I am firmly convinced that domain squatters (for that is what they are) are methodically working their way through the entire namespace, starting with every possible four and five letter combinations that are available. As you say, even totally random domains are taken, and if you visit the site they are often "parked" (Read: squatted).

In theory it will take them years to cover the five-letter domains, and much, much longer to cover the six letter domains: but that only holds if the number of squatters remains constant. Which it will not.

Re:One can only hope.

[hal9000(jr)]

Then it would be a trivial plugin to rewrite common typos, and avoid these sites entirely. We can push the advertising somewhere else!

yeah, subsidize the plug-in development and maitenence with advertising. Pop an interim page that says "You entered , we changed it to , but while we redirect you, why not check out these sites that sell "exmples".

I'm kidding, of course.

Re:One can only hope.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, sometimes they don't even wait for you to register it. I've gone to do domain checks at GoDaddy for a domain I might want to use, decide to mull it over, and come back the next week to buy it only to find that some company got it and parked an ad site there. I have no idea how they know that I checked on it, but they somehow get it on a list and snap it up.

nslookup example.com

You don't need to check a domain's availability at some website that will collect and capitalise on such searches. Just use the command line tools provided with your OS. No one need know, its just between you and your DNS server.

Re:One can only hope.

[glesga_kiss]

I've gone to do domain checks at GoDaddy for a domain I might want to use, decide to mull it over, and come back the next week to buy it only to find that some company got it and parked an ad site there. I have no idea how they know that I checked on it, but they somehow get it on a list and snap it up.

I've heard of that before as well; it was down to the registrar. GoDaddy has just been added to my "do not use" list.

Re:One can only hope.

[Standmic]

Try this article, http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/03 /how-to-snatch-an-expiring-domain/ from Mike Davidson (of Newsvine) on how he grabbed the Newsvine.com domain.

Re:One can only hope.

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried it - anytime the domain gets updated they email you. They also send you a status report about once a month. It was a waste of $20, I never got the domain. I don't think they check if the domain has been released very often, I think it's once a day at most.

Re:One can only hope.

[trogdor8667]

I've read numerous articles that state that GoDaddy does register domains and park them, as you said. They make tons of money off of this, because they can then sell you the backorder service. For this reason, I have stopped using GoDaddy to search for available domain names. I use tucows domain search, or r4l.com and search there, then later register it on GoDaddy when I'm sure I want said domain.

Re:One can only hope.

[hondo77]

Hell, sometimes they don't even wait for you to register it. I've gone to do domain checks at GoDaddy for a domain I might want to use, decide to mull it over, and come back the next week to buy it only to find that some company got it and parked an ad site there. I have no idea how they know that I checked on it, but they somehow get it on a list and snap it up.

Like you, I'm pretty sure GoDaddy is the one doing the parking. I do my domain searches with "whois" from the command line. As for whether their domain checker actually works, I'll be finding out around May...

Re:One can only hope.

[AutopsyReport]

Actually, that's wrong. Earlier last year I launched a new website and a corresponding AdWords campaign to spread the word. When searching the name of my product, I get hundreds of hits from parked domains that are running AdSense containing my ad on it. Now, the first five pages of results are legitimate websites, and the remaining 10-15 are parked domains. It is incredible how many empty domains get drawn into these search results.

Furthermore, most people search for websites rather than type them in the location bar because they usually don't know exactly what they're looking for. If parked domains only made their earnings from direct hits, I suspect it would not be nearly as profitable.

Re:One can only hope.

[daeg]

Google and the like are only hurting themselves and those that advertise through AdWords by allowing parked domains to serve ads.

If you're paying Google $1500/month in advertising, do you really want your ad to show up on some parked domain that came up because someone can't spell microsoft.com?

Re:One can only hope.

[dave562]

Furthermore, most people [who know how to use the internet] search for websites rather than type them in the location bar because they usually don't know exactly what they're looking for.

I corrected your comment for you. I have seen numerous people who don't really understand what a web browser is who try to type what you and I would call search queries into the address bar. Parked domains and phishing sites target those users who simply don't know any better. Beyond that, there are parked domains with names similar to every single popular website on the internet. I seem to remember Craigslist.com being a porn site. The other day I was looking for "Curse Gaming" to download some WoW addons and sure enough, cursedgaming.net, cursegaming.net, cursedgaming.com, etc. all came up with webpages. Luckily Google is smart enough and by searching for "Cursed Gaming" I got "Curse Gaming" which is what I needed. Oddly enough, all those subtle iterations on the domain don't show up as results on Google.

Re:One can only hope.

[Chris Burke]

And I know of no way to purchase it from them, either.

I had a domain name I used for my website, but I let it lapse. My domain registrar was the one who started parking it, and put up the usual generic portal/search engine. And, in the upper right hand corner of the site was an url that said "Buy this domain!" I clicked on the link, and the asking price for the domain had gone from $15 to $1000.

That's right, one grand. Uh-huh. I think not. Fortunately it's just a personal website, not something I run a business from, so I had zero reason to give in to their extortion. I think the thing that bothers me so much about it is that it was my own domain registrar that did it, not some cybersquatter who saw a lapsed domain and bought it up. It was they themselves who saw the opportunity to try to rape me.

I would be fairly sure that GoDaddy is the one doing the parking, as well. It makes sense for them -- the domain has some value to someone, and why let some other squatter get the name at the normal asking price and get to play the extortion game, when they could make that money (and be more efficient at it too, as they know exactly when a domain becomes available).

Re:One can only hope.

[Calydor]

Or simply try going to the site in Firefox - you'll be told immediately if the DNS server doesn't know the domain; if your ISP's DNS server doesn't know it, there's a pretty good chance it's available.

Re:One can only hope.

[nschubach]

I thought it was microsfot.com ...

Re:One can only hope.

[coldtone]

GoDaddy has this thing where you pay $20, and when the domain becomes available they'll buy it for you and put it under your name. Has anyone tried this service and had it work? I have a sneaking suspicion that they are the ones doing the parking themselves (that's where I do most of my domain checks), and just trying to get another $10 out of you for the domain.

I have first hand experience with this. (I just got cl1p.com back).

GoDaddy.com backorder does not work, and never will. This article here explains why.

Basically the expired domain market is owned 100% by three players. Snapnames.com, enom.com, and pool.com. These guys are first in line when a domain expires.

I purchased godaddy.com backorder service to get my domain back from a squatter. I noticed that I was expiring in Dec 06. So I waited. When it got closer to the expiry's date I did a google search and found that godaddy.com would not work. I registered at snapnames.com, enom.com, and pool.com and its a good thing i did. It seams that domaincontender.com (The register the domain was currently under) has some sort of deal with snapdomains.com and puts it up for auction a few weeks before it can go to the other two players.

If I haven't registered, it would have probably gone to some other squatter.

Re:One can only hope.

[gozar]

Hell, sometimes they don't even wait for you to register it. I've gone to do domain checks at GoDaddy for a domain I might want to use, decide to mull it over, and come back the next week to buy it only to find that some company got it and parked an ad site there. I have no idea how they know that I checked on it, but they somehow get it on a list and snap it up.

I remember when this hit Digg awhile back. What I understand is happening is that the request for the availability of a domain goes to all the domain registrars. Some of the domain squatters also run their own registrar, which allows them to see what names others are searching for and register them instead. Since they can register a domain and return it for free in a minimum amount a time, it doesn't cost them anything to put up a parked domain and see what kind of money the site may return.

This would affect using whois or any of the other registrar sites also.

Re:One can only hope.

[Kuukai]

I'm not entirely familiar with this, but is there any per-site registration cost to them? If there is, someone should run a bot searching for random garbage string domains. At least it would take them work to sift through the crap, and I'm pretty sure that's incompatible with their business strategy.

Re:One can only hope.

[Shaper_pmp]

We clearly need to work harder on our new users.

Re:One can only hope.

[romland]

Well, if they are indeed doing business this way you can drag through all kinds of hell. See, when you sign up to be a .com/.net/.org registrar you sign a contract (with ICANN? don't recall) saying that you will not do any domain/cyber-squatting (the reasons why they don't want you to do this are obvious, I would think)

cheers

Re:One can only hope.

[volsung]

If you hold the domains for less than 5 days at a time, then you can do this for free (aside from a deposit). Ironically (given the subject of this thread) it is Bob Parsons, of GoDaddy, who explains the process: http://www.bobparsons.com/DomainKiting.html

Re:One can only hope.

[Phroggy]

nslookup does NOT confirm whether the domain is registered or not. Granted, if it's not registered, you shouldn't get an IP address, but the converse is NOT always true. You're much better off using whois.

Re:One can only hope.

[bennomatic]

Actually, I find it's often the opposite. People who DON'T know how to use the Internet search for web sites rather than typing them into the address bar. I don't know how many times I've had a conversation similar to this one:

Me: OK, go to www.dimspace.com
Them: OK, I'll search for that. I'm on Yahoo.
Me: No, just type it into the location bar.
Them: What? I'll search for it here. OK, which one is it? Should I click on the top link.
Me: (resigned) Yeah, I guess... (mumble something underneath my breath about how cousins should not be allowed to marry)

People get stuck in their ways. Heck, some people can't even accept that there are sites that don't begin with "www". Tell them to go to "mail.yahoo.com" and they'll go to "www.yahoo.com" and stare blankly at that over-crowded page searching for the "mail" link. As Ross Perot used to say, it's just sad.

Re:One can only hope.

[Kelbear]

I don't think the parent should really be modded insightful. Making Firefox the ad-less browser makes fire-fox compatibility pointless at best, and damaging at worst for many websites that offer content or services for free if their revenue stream is ad-dependent.

Advertisements aren't always a bad thing.

I do have adblock installed, but I use blocking judiciously. I only block advertisers that are instrusive or obstructive. If the ads don't hassle me, I don't mind seeing the ad on the off-chance that it may have something of interest to me, benefitting both me and the advertiser.

Re:One can only hope.

[anagama]

I know how to use the net. Heck, I was surfing with Lynx just last night. Anyway, I have largely stopped typing the name directly to url bar because every now and then, I make a typo. The search box is right up there by the url bar on all gui browsers anyway.

Re:One can only hope.

[jidar]

Yeah... but the same argument was made about spam when it was getting started.
I bet it's a lot harder to stop than that.

Re:One can only hope.

[CallFinalClass]

I believe GoDaddy also parks expired domains that appear to have a function business behind them.

Not surprisingly, they also have a paid service to get these domains back. I'm currently in the process of doing this with them, whatta crock this is.

Re:One can only hope.

[dave562]

People get stuck in their ways. Heck, some people can't even accept that there are sites that don't begin with "www". Tell them to go to "mail.yahoo.com" and they'll go to "www.yahoo.com"

Hahahahahaaaa. I run into that type of person quite frequently too. The young, ditzy, personal assistants often seem to fall into that category. "I went to the link you told me to go to and it isn't working. You know, www.mail....." , "No, LISTEN you stupid bitch! There is no fucking WWW." .... Sorry, had a flashback there.

Re:One can only hope.

[Anonymous Coward]

I consider GoDaddy to be a sleazy organization for a multitude of reasons... maybe the thing to do here is encourage people to search for tons of useless domains through their site. Let them fork over the cash to register all these names - just let them.

Re:One can only hope.

[itlurksbeneath]

Adblock isn't a part of Firefox because Firefox is an extensible browser that can have it's functionality increased by use of plugins that the user chooses.

If all the nifty features got bundled into the browser, then people would start bitching about bloat. Keep the core lite, guys.. Extensions rock.

Re:One can only hope.

[Anonymous Coward]

When you run a WHOIS it sends the query to many different registered providers, some of which will sell or provide this information to others. This is why you can run a WHOIS and then find that the name you considered is taken.

Instead, run an SOA DNS query on a domain. It will only go through top level domain servers and if it exists, should show up.

Re:One can only hope.

[Pollardito]

Google and the like are only hurting themselves and those that advertise through AdWords by allowing parked domains to serve ads.

If you're paying Google $1500/month in advertising, do you really want your ad to show up on some parked domain that came up because someone can't spell microsoft.com? Google AdWords are pay-per-click, so if the user accidentally ends up there but still clicks your ad because they think it is relevant to them than what's the difference?

Re:One can only hope.

[ajdowntown]

Ok, I am going to say this purely out of memory, so forgive me if I am wrong. The way I understand it that when you search for an open domain name from sites like godaddy, since they do not have every single domain registered out there on the net done through them, they have to send out requests to other registrars to look for them information about the address. Unfortunately, some of are known as Drop Registrars which take all that query information, and if the site does not exist, will register the name. As long as they see someone is interested in the domain, they will try and grab it. Now, here is what I usually do: I use a whois on the domain I want to buy. If it comes back with information, I know it is take, if not, well, I think I got a winner. I then take the week or so I need to think about it, then buy it through a registrar. I am not sure why it would be much different than doing the query through godaddy, etc, but not once have my whois names ever been taken a week later when I go to buy them. I suggest trying Better Whois

Re:One can only hope.

[bobbonomo]

"Hell, sometimes they don't even wait for you to register it. I've gone to do domain checks at GoDaddy for a domain I might want to use, decide to mull it over, and come back the next week to buy it only to find that some company got it and parked an ad site there"

Yes I have seen this too. The name I tried got registered somewhere in Africa then a week later was register in the USA (subsidiary) but to my luck was dropped about 1 month later as I was about to register another. And yes it was for sale for about $18 while it was registered.

Is the registrar doing it or connected? Dunno. Tried a few dummy domains later to test out the theory and they did not end up registered. Fluke?

Why did it get dropped 1 month later. Maybe the scammer used a phony credit card or did not pay the bill?

Re:One can only hope.

[JazzLad]

That, and the do NOT understand .edu

At least our students don't (support for a distance learning college better left nameless). You tell them it's www.[nameless].edu and they seem to 60% of the time insist on adding a .com after the .edu and then complain that the site sucks, there is always an error.

Oh, well.

Re:One can only hope.

[muszek]

They also hurt AdSense publishers. That $1500 could end up in my pocket. Even if advertizer ain't pissed after seeing worthless traffic comming from parked domains and doesn't cut his budget, I have to share the pie with those crooks.

Re:One can only hope.

[piranha(jpl)]

Why support that kind of business?

Re:One can only hope.

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that the real source of traffic for these sites has nothing to do with search engines (it comes from people typing stuff directly into the location bar of the browser)

I don't think many people actually do that any more. I know I don't; Google is my home page, and if I want a site whose URL I know, I type the URL into Google's search box.

If I make a typoo Google corrects me. "Do you mean 'typo.com'?" while listing typoo.com and listing all 4 sites that link to the parked 'typoo.com'.

My mom does the same thing because she doesn't even know what the URL box is for. Nor do any of the other "normal" (non-slashdot type) people I know.

Re:One can only hope.

[daeg]

Personally, if I'm advertising weight loss drugs, and my ad shows up on a parked page, I'm not going to value those clicks at all. Now, if someone is coming off of WebMD, I will value those clicks very highly.

Just because someone clicks on your ad doesn't mean they are of any value whatsoever to you.

Granted, the ad on the parked page is probably somewhat contextual, maybe they were trying to get to webmd and typed it wrong. But that doesn't make them very valuable, either, certainly not as valuable as if they actually came from webmd.

Re:One can only hope.

[CallFinalClass]

Out of necessity only; I certainly find it distasteful. I'll be moving all of the domains elsewhere asap, and buying new domains from that other place.

Re:One can only hope.

[un1xl0ser]

Yeah... but the same argument was made about spam when it was getting started.
I bet it's a lot harder to stop than that. SPAM works well through e-mail, and basically nothing else.

Domains are not free. Domains and hosting have many more "paper" trails than e-mail (which has none). There are a limited number of typos and other mistakes, which are the real source of profit. We don't have to make this impossible, or eliminate it completely. We just need to make unprofitable.

Domain parkers can't resport to a lot of the dirty techniques that SPAMers do.

Re:One can only hope.

[Sparr0]

any sensible browser configuration doesnt need a search bar. anything in the address bar thats not a domain name goes to a search engine. how hard is that? saves a lot of screen real estate (that google search box isnt small), and makes things easier all around.

Re:One can only hope.

[allacds]

any sensible browser configuration doesnt need a search bar. anything in the address bar thats not a domain name goes to a search engine. how hard is that? saves a lot of screen real estate (that google search box isnt small), and makes things easier all around. The problem for me is speed. When using the addess bar to search, you have to wait for the browser to check local and remote dns for every variation of your search term before it realizes that "jessica alba nak^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H msdn error number 512345" couldn't possibly be a domain name. THEN it takes you to your browser of choice. That takes a good 5 seconds on my box...much too long to wait for that important info ;)

Re:One can only hope.

[allacds]

THEN it takes you to your browser of choice. Shoulda used preview...I meant search engine...

Re:One can only hope.

[McFadden]

No, LISTEN you stupid bitch! There is no fucking WWW." .... Sorry, had a flashback there.

Because everyone who isn't familiar with the internet and makes a simple mistake is automatically a stupid bitch, right?

Re:One can only hope.

[CliffSpradlin]

I don't work for them or get commission.. but http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ is a pretty fantastic domain registrar (and also a very nice webhost). You should check them out.

Re:One can only hope.

[naChoZ]

Me: OK, go to www.dimspace.com
Them: OK, I'll search for that. I'm on Yahoo.

Absolutely. But the funniest part is the way they say it. "I'm on Yahoo," with that subtle tone indicating they fully expect your next question to be wondering aloud what year they graduated from MIT.

Re:One can only hope.

[Sparr0]

erm, every variation of your search term? anything with a space in it isnt a domain and should go directly to a search engine (for you, already does for me). as to things without spaces, thats a matter of preference. i dont ever want "foo" to go to "foo.com/.net/.org/...", i want it to attempt to resolve "foo" in DNS and if that fails then go to google.com/search?q=foo. period. no exceptions. do not pass go, do not collect 5 second delay.

Re:One can only hope.

[Vokbain]

No. Them being a pinhead who can't follow simple instructions automatically makes them a stupid bitch.

Re:One can only hope.

[funfail]

Firefox automatically searches when it sees illegal characters (like spaces in your example) which can't be in a hostname. The problem only occurs in one word searches.

Re:One can only hope.

[funfail]

You can disable content ads through AdWords control panel and only allow search engine result page ads.

You can even set different prices for content ads.

Re:One can only hope.

[bennomatic]

Right... they may as well be saying, "Years ahead of ya, dude!"

Re:One can only hope.

[cswiger2005]

Respond with the Obligatory Barney Quote:

"....I can see your MIT education really pays for itself." :-)

Re:One can only hope.

[zopf]

Indeed... my band's website is MindAtLarge.net, but our fans (and grandparents) find themselves very confused when they arrive at MindAtLarge.com, a ridiculous porn site. I can't imagine how the parkers decided to first register the domain MindAtLarge.com, but there's no way in hell I'm paying them $250 for the domain. I guess it encourages people to be more precise with their spellings... or perhaps they know something about our fans that we don't.

Re:One can only hope.

[BillGatesLoveChild]

I sympathize! I was trying to talk a friend over the phone through a series of instructions the other night. I kept telling him to type an URL, with the leading http:/// but everytime he kept saying "Ok! I can see the search results" and then he'd go looking for the web site in the list.

Not sure if he was dropping the http:/// or if IE directs even http:/// addresses to its intrusive search engine, but I got him to install FireFox instead. At least its search and address bar are separate.

Anyway, I was tearing my hair out. He couldn't distinguish between going to a web site and searching for it,

Handy hint: Firefox's search box is too small, but you can edit it with Chrome to make it bigger.

Re:One can only hope.

[YGingras]

You know you could just type whois in your favorite terminal right?

Re:One can only hope.

[IdolizingStewie]

Handier hint: Searchbar Autosizer

Re:One can only hope.

[billcopc]

If cousins aren't allowed to marry, there will just be a lot more illegitimate retarded kids. Those rednecks'll fuck anyway!

Re:One can only hope.

[BillGatesLoveChild]

Handier Hint cheerfully accepted! :-)

Re:One can only hope.

[Anonymous Coward]

YES!

Re:One can only hope.

[ResidntGeek]

I can't tell if you're serious or not. You do know there are only two slashes in http:/// don't you?

Re:One can only hope.

[ResidntGeek]

Oh, I see. Slashdot adds a slash. My bad, feel free to ignore or downmod the above post as desired.

Re:One can only hope.

[BillGatesLoveChild]

> You do know there are only two slashes in http:/// [http] don't you?

Do you? Take a look at your post... ;-)

Re:One can only hope.

[ResidntGeek]

Yeah, I realized it as soon as I posted. They really should take away the submit button and force me to preview.

Re:One can only hope.

[BillGatesLoveChild]

Yeah. Me too. I'm waiting for someone else to come along now and tell the both of us :-)

Re:One can only hope.

[Basehart]

Hey, are you that brainy bitch from Star Trek?

Re:One can only hope.

[anagama]

I'm not grasping the funny mods I got. An truly, I really was using Lynx last night (learning how to use the ports system for openBSD after my first install so I could have a browser with multiple tabs rather than multiple xterms running Lynx).

Re:One can only hope.

[therufus]

...okay, I think disturbing is a slight understatement when describing the previous post. I think you should really just have a lie down and put the tampons away.

I'm going to have my afternoon coffee now and just pretend I never read that interesting anecdote you shared with us.

Re:One can only hope.

[owndao]

These companies appear to me to be doing what many American investment firms used to/still do. They take something apparently worthless (a name) and help make it produce money. It does not and was not ever intended to be used to provide products or services. Trade deficit? I wonder why? Oh, yeh. We don't make anything any one wants/or can afford anymore (or will soon). Another topic. Many domain name sites buy large blocks of domain names, park them, and then evaluate their worth by the amount of hits they get. This then determines their resell price. They then keep the the high-hitters and dump the rest back into the overall pool at no cost to them. Also persons wanting to obtain the rights to but not necessarily use variants on their domain (.com, .net, .org, .info, etc...) get "parking" privileges on some of these sites. They get "free" parking if they agree to let the registrar put their own ad page on them. Buy 300,000+ domains, dump the ones that don't have a high value (hits, requests for purchase) before the registrar release deadline so they cost you nothing but up front money that you get back. Keep your ad income, free advertising, "hit rating" assessment, all for the small cost of a little overhead for equipment, licensing, power and personnel. Why go into the business or making things or selling services when you just open yourself up to law suits, competition and all that nasty stuff when you can make money contributing nothing to the world (not even social networking). Junk bonds, buying on margin? I'm sure this is so much easier.

Re:One can only hope.

[kingturkey]

What's worse is the people creating websites that don't understand this concept. I just tried to go to http://centrelink.gov.au/ and it returned nothing, I added the www. and it loaded. This is incredibly frustrating, and on a government website no less!

Re:One can only hope.

[jez9999]

Looking at it, you'd think that domain parking wouldn't be half as profitable as it is. We clearly need to work harder on our search engines.

It'd be far easier to sort the problem out the same way it's sorted out in the physical world. Why don't you get a ton of property squatters that do essentially nothing with the property in the city centre? Rental costs, taxes, etc. It's a *waste of money*. And domain names are even better, because you can't buy them, you have to keep renting them. So increase the minimum rent to $100/year and see how many asswipes with 300k domains maintain that portfolio.

Re:One can only hope.

[Anonymous Coward]

So you first entered a URL that doesn't exist and were frustrated by your inability to view content that wasn't there. You corrected your error, it worked as designed... and this somehow bothers you.

You're an idiot.

Re:One can only hope.

[Raenex]

Are you kidding? That was the most Insightful post in this thread. Gave me a laugh, too :)

Re:One can only hope.

[Linkin99]

"Why did it get dropped 1 month later. Maybe the scammer used a phony credit card or did not pay the bill?"

It's called domain tasting. There's a 5-day redemption period after one registers a domain name. Squatters use this window to test / "taste" the domain to see if it gets any traffic. If not enough traffic comes, they decide to let it go and get a refund on it.

Re:One can only hope.

[Deliveranc3]

Perhpaps those people just need a better browser? May I suggest Opera?

It's like teh mac of browsers :)

Domains

[null etc.]

For the insightful comment of the day: domain names are dumb. Sure, they have the utility of being easy to remember, but there are much better solutions to directory services than domain names. Ask the owner of PenIsland.com

Re:Domains

[iamjoltman]

Actually, it looks like the owner of Penisland.com knows exactly what his domain name looks like :)
PenIsland.net is what you were thinking of.

Re:Domains

[sporkme]

or expertsexchange. All the all important hyphen.

Re:Domains

[Tony Hoyle]

Not to mention slahsdot.org

Re:Domains

[Barnoid]

Actually, it looks like the owner of Penisland.com knows exactly what his domain name looks like :)
PenIsland.net is what you were thinking of.

The banner on PenIsland.net

Your Pen Is
    Our Business

suggests that they are very well aware of their ambiguous domain name ;-)

Parking?

[Nemetroid]

His idea kind of reminds me of the pages you get when you misspell an URL.

Does this mean i will get spiffy Web 2.0 pages when i do that now?

Re:Parking?

[Doctor Crumb]

That is exactly his idea, except he also wants to add a heavyweight "forums" page or somesuch to further waste your bandwidth every time you make a spelling mistake.

"Web 2.0 Sprinkle"?!

[TheWoozle]

FTFA:

If you can make that much doing nothing, what if we added some Web 2.0 sprinkle...

I've now found a great metaphor for all this "Web 2.0" nonsense: urine.

Web 2.0 is people pissing on the Internet!

Death of buying used names is more like it

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a domain name that I wanted that was about to expire, so I signed up for one of those companies that register names for you as soon as they become available. Instead of the process that used to happen, the domain was snatched by the original registrar company before anyone else could try to get it. (This wasn't a matter of getting it milliseconds before someone else, they snapped it up a month before it was supposed to be really available.) They are sitting on it, along with a bunch of other names, hoping for someone to pay big bucks.

Quite a bold article...

[illegalcortex]

You know, something putting things in bold is a visually pleasing way of drawing more attention to topic sentences so people can skim instead of reading the whole article. But when you do it too much it just look like crap.

Re:Quite a bold article...

[ThinkWeak]

You are honestly going to try and convince us that asked himself does not deserve its own bold face? You, sir, must not have a background in proper web-editing.

Re:Quite a bold article...

[truthsearch]

He's doing it for the SEO. Bold words help pages rank higher in google for those keywords.

Re:Quite a bold article...

[Anonymous Coward]

haha. yeah, i thought the bold text was the most annoying thing of the whole "article".

Re:Quite a bold article...

[Pollardito]

i'm convinced that if you took just the bolded parts from that story you could piece them together into a much better article

The change

[Billosaur]

The change is going to be that the Internet is going to finally resemble a Möbius loop, where once you click on one content link and keep clicking, you will eventually wind up back where you started. People will be trapped in infinite loops of marketing and commerce will collapse because no one will actually be able to buy anything, because they can't break out of the loop.

Re:The change

[Joe Snipe]

Fun Fact: All loops eventually end where they started, not just Möbius loops!

Re:The change

[Dragonslicer]

Möbius loops also only have one side and one edge. Maybe he meant that not only will people just end up where they started, but everyone will be stuck on the same circle of advertising pages?

Re:The change

[vishbar]

Technically, you don't even end up where you started on a Mobius loop! You end up on the other side of the loop. You have to go around twice to get back to where you started.

Re:The change

[navarroj]

but Möbius loops are more fun because you end up in sites that look like this!

Scalping and Squatting

[Anonymous Coward]

Pure and simple. These parasites add nothing of value whatsoever and get in the way of constructive people.

Re:Scalping and Squatting

[Anonymous Coward]

*gasp*

You mean that MySpace is pursuing ahead in "[adding] nothing of value whatsoever" and "[getting] in the way of constructive people"? MySpace?! Nah, couldn't be!

gah

[kv9]

all of that emphasis is hurting my eyes!

Garbage? yes

[bobbonomo]

But the bottom line is it drives in $20 a year. Let's see. How many cases of beer is that. If you had the chance to do it, what would you do? "We clearly need to work harder on our search engines." Agreed on that

Mod Parent Up

[Prysorra]

He's right :(

www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com

[russ1337]

I've 'parked' the following domains for some time. Call it cyber squatting or whatever, but when a company comes along with these names, i'll be laughing all the way to the bank!!

www.XFmq1yw1pC3.com
www.QtEQpK1jGnm.com
www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com
www.bbyja3OWEVW.com
www.iQ7aE0YSTl8.com
www.tV56pze3idd.com

and i've got all the .biz, .info, .org etc too. so don't think you can steal my idea!

Re:www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com

[Xugumad]

> www.tV56pze3idd.com

Hey, how did you find out my password? :)

Re:www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com

[El Torico]

Damn, you've ruined my plans to turn /etc/shadow files into profitable advertising!

Re:www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com

[Hoi Polloi]

I'm going to grab all of the mispellings of those then. Just wait until I get pay-per-click $ for "www.XDmq1yw1pC3.com".

Re:www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com

[peepleperson]

Prepare to feel the wrath of InterNIC's Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy.

Yours faithfully,

Mr. QtEQpK1jGnm

Re:www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com

[romland]

Yeah, according to whois, BqLJJNJq6vL.com was indeed registered today!

Re:www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com

[dreamlax]

Prepare to feel the wrath of InterNIC's Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy.

Yours faithfully,

Mr. QtEQpK1jGnm

How do you pronounce the 1 in your name?

Re:www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com

[GuyErnest]

>> www.tV56pze3idd.com > >Hey, how did you find out my password? :) Hey, how did you find out how I want to call my future kid?

Re:www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com

[peepleperson]

How do you pronounce the 1 in your name? One.

And it's a silent 'p'.

Re:www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com

[nuckfuts]

You *do* realize that domain names are not case sensitive, right?

Re:www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com

[Phroggy]

Often when browsing Slashdot, I'll have several tabs open, then go do some work in other browser windows, and eventually make it back to the already-opened Slashdot tabs. Occasionally I get momentarily confused as to which article I'm reading comments for (without looking at the titlebar). So that's why when I saw this comment, what I had in my head was a completely different article about fighting spam.

It occurs to me that registering domains like this that nobody could ever possibly want, then running spam honeypots on them, would be a good way to identify spammers that try to send mail to random domains. Register something that nobody could possibly type by mistake, never publish it anywhere, and see what kind of crap comes in.

If it's real, then it's temporary

[inviolet]

'We own 300,000 domains, we make $20 million a year, we have just four employees and some servers in the Caymans.'

If that truly is the economics of the situation, then it is necessarily temporary. The market always adjusts when the opportunity arises to carry off so much wealth for so little actual effort.

Perhaps the adjustment will come in the form of higher DNS fees, since the 'business' in question is so heavily relying on DNS services.

Perhaps the adjustment will come in the form of higher domain-name registration fees, once the authorities fully grasp the nature of the free-riding involved.

Perhaps the profit per wayward surfer will drop as the sponsoring sites gradually pay less and less per click.

Or if this is truly a market failure, then watch for new legislation. (Not that past legislation bothered to wait for a justifying market failure to arise; indeed, the legislature is always willing, and a market failure is just what it needs to explain actions it wanted to take anyway.)

Re:If it's real, then it's temporary

[hal9000(jr)]

I think paragraph four has the most pop to curb this business. However, what I want to know is if these parking services are driving business to PPC sites, then they are in fact generating revenue for the parker and the payee, so everyone wins, 'cept perhaps the hapless user.

But if the parked or typo squatted domain actually leads me to information that is relative to my "search", then I win too.

The market dynamics made this happen and it is unlikely to change until all the possible domains are parked. So who ever mentioned turning /etc/passwd (/etc/shadow, really) into a profit center, go patent it as "a system for turning private information into a gold mine". Get crackin'!

Not such a bad business..

[NerveGas]

    At my company, we have a couple of hundred domain names that we don't currently use. We're not cyber-squatting, we are going to use them at some point in the future - but development time is always in short supply.

    In any event, without even trying to sell them, we occasionally have people offer us money for a domain that we have. Sometimes it's a few hundred bucks, sometimes it's more. Just this week we agreed to sell one for $6500. If we were to make a full-time business out of it, I'm sure we could make a good bit of money.

Re:Not such a bad business..

[Hoi Polloi]

So why are you selling them if you really had plans for them in the first place? Sounds like you never really needed them.

Re:Not such a bad business..

[thebes]

because sometimes there are people that have too much money, and this is one way to legally steal from idiots that will spend whatever they can just to get some specific name.

Re:Not such a bad business..

[bill_mcgonigle]

Just this week we agreed to sell one for $6500.

Just curious - was that the initial offer or did you negotiate them up? Some details might be fun if you can maintain anonymity for those involved.

Re:Not such a bad business..

[NerveGas]

The initial offer was $5k. I forwarded it on to the "powers that be", and got word that the final arrangements were for $6500.

Since we do have plans for nearly all of the domains, it's not often that we actually sell one. When I get an offer, I discard it if it's less than $1k, because it's just not worth our time. Of those that I forward on, I think that we only sell about one in ten. It's not something we're really interested in, but if it were, I imagine that it could be quite profitable.

steve

Re:Not such a bad business..

[bill_mcgonigle]

The initial offer was $5k. I forwarded it on to the "powers that be", and got word that the final arrangements were for $6500.

Thanks for the further info. You must've had a good one - my future projects domains typically get offers for $70. :)

stupid headline, stupid article

[Thaelon]

Article title: "The death of domain parking?"
Article body: "unrelated information"

Article comes free with idiotic terms like "domainers" (not a word) when what they mean is "squatter".

It's just a euphemism. Anybody with a brain will see right though it. It's no better than calling URL spammers "search engine optimizers".

Re:stupid headline, stupid article

[Junior J. Junior III]

It's not really squatting, though, is it? In real estate, squatting means living on property that you don't own, without the owner's knowledge/consent, because the property is effectively abandoned and neglected.

This is more like real estate speculation. Buying a parcel of land, and then sitting on it to assert ownership rights, while not developing it and waiting along for someone who wants to buy it from you so that they can use it. Speculating is a lot less unsavory-sounding than squatting.

Re:stupid headline, stupid article

[Thaelon]

Not exactly.

It's more akin to buying up all the coastal properties on an island and then selling off the harbors to shipping companies at ridiculous prices, the beaches to resort companies at ridiculous prices etc.

They're seeing the pieces of land that they know companies are going to want and then getting there first. Or, taking the misspellings and profiting off of the combination of big companies' names or common words and typos users of the internet.

"Domain parking" or squatting, or whatever you want to call it are all repugnant practices little better than spamming.

I make it a point to never, ever click a single link on a typo-domain. I always use Firefox with adblock.

Re:stupid headline, stupid article

[Junior J. Junior III]

It's repugnant only from the standpoint that the content served by the domains while they're being speculated is repugnant. The dns registrar system allows this behavior, and it's profitable, so you just know someone will do it. You can't blame them for doing something that isn't illegal that can be pretty lucrative. The people doing it do take risks, and may well participate in other, more definitely unethical behaviors such as spamming or browser hijacking. Simply serving a crappy web page on a potentially popular domain name is merely distasteful. I don't see any solution to stop the market forces driving it that would be worse than the problem.

That's not to say that there aren't domain squatters who have taken trademarked words without the trademark holder's permission and then added .com, .org, .net, etc. and registered them ahead of the trademark holder. Squatting on those domains is probably a more legitimate problem. But having the foresight to buy a dns registration for sex.com or buy.com or some other "hot" word back before anyone else can think to is totally brilliant. Maybe not technically brilliant, but business-wise it's brilliant. I won't argue with the fact that putting up a shitty web site there is lame, but I'm still jealous I didn't think of the idea first.

Re:stupid headline, stupid article

[Anonymous Coward]

A creative and smart guy calling another guy repugnant as he deposits loads of money he made from being just a little creative and smart on the internet. Sour grapes.

Re:stupid headline, stupid article

[Thaelon]

I disagree.

These people consciously chose to put crap content (ads) on pages that people would accidentally stumble onto. Sure it's pretty obvious that it could make money, but that's no excuse for repugnant behavior. Robbing banks, mugging, stealing, scamming and spamming all make money too, so saying it makes money does not excuse behavior. Sure it's predictable that some asshole will eventually do anything that makes money but that doesn't mean you should stick up for them or excuse it for no other reason.

It's not brilliant, it's just that they got there first.

Translation

[BCoates]

Firstly, the randomly scattered bold text is a pretty big hint that this article is advertising copy designed to impress the very, very stupid.

Cutting through the "let's promote lame advertising models" rah-rah, it looks like the idea here is to assume people typing a random keyword into their address bar are searching for a forum and/or wiki on a topic. So these folks want to create some sort of ur-forum (that is, they want to reinvent a modern usenet) and figure buying up a bunch of idle domain names to advertise it is a good starting point.

This would pretty much be the "death of domain parking" at least in the form of a sell-off-the-assets exit strategy. I have no idea why they would buy any domain that wasn't an obvious word or term, though, so if you're holding on to that hot "ilemonstore2003.cx" property you're probably out of luck.

It keeps getting worse, too.

[blueZ3]

I'm sure I'm not the only one who remembers back when Google results were essentially free of this type of nonsense. Even a very broad search would generally return useful results. For instance, searching for "toy firetruck" would return links to toy stores and antique toy dealers on the first few pages. Quality search results were the driving factor in switching from some other search engine to Google.

These days, however, results from a broad search usually return five or six pages of aggregators, domain parkers, and other foolishness. It's gotten to the point where I feel like if I don't have four or five search terms, it's not worth the effort of paging through the first six screens of useless results to get sort out the wheat from the chaf.

For the moment, with most web advertising operating on a pay-per-view or pay-per-click basis, people creating aggregators and parking domains are making money. I'm hopeful that as advertisers become more interested in tying views or clicks to actual sales, the incentive for putting this kind of useless fluff on the net will decrease. Of course, we'll still have not-so-net-savvy surfers who might click links on a parked page and then buy something. But if the intermediate pages led to useful information, they wouldn't be so annoying, would they?

Eventually, my bet is that there won't be enough profit in advertising to make domain parking worthwhile. May that day come soon.

Re:It keeps getting worse, too.

[hal9000(jr)]

Did you actually read the article? Did ya? No, you didn't. The trick is not about manipulating search engines. It's about leveraging random addresses, typo squatting, etc, entered into the address bar and the resulting page results in PPC links. So taking your search example, a user would type in "http://www.toyfiretruck.com" and end up at a domain park that perhaps had some relevant content about toy firetrucks. Oh, and PPC linksThat is a very different model.

Re:It keeps getting worse, too.

[WizzardX]

These days, however, results from a broad search usually return five or six pages of aggregators, domain parkers, and other foolishness.

You can thank Ted Stevens for that.

Re:It keeps getting worse, too.

[Shotgun]

I'm sure I'm not the only one who remembers back when Google results were essentially free of this type of nonsense. Even a very broad search would generally return useful results. For instance, searching for "toy firetruck" would return links to toy stores and antique toy dealers on the first few pages. Quality search results were the driving factor in switching from some other search engine to Google.

I remember. I also remember searching for a subject and getting results from individuals websites with useful information. I used to use Google to get the real information about any expensive object I was considering buying. Now any search for a product returns so many hits for someone who is selling it, with nothing more than the same marketing blurb across all the sites, that I've nearly abandoned the practice. I think Google should provide a no-commercial option that does 2 thing:

1) Lower the page ranking of sites with identical text as several other sites.

2) Lower the page ranking of sites with advertisements.

What's In a Name?

[Doc Ruby]

Domain names are an artifically scarce commodity. Extra toplevel domains like ".biz", ".xxx" etc (".etc"?) don't really help, as most people can't remember the toplevel extension to the domain name they remember, assuming it's ".com" and going (googling) from there, unless tricked astray.

The real solution is to move from misleadingly narrow UR L s, locators of the precise info resource, to the UR N s, names like "Nabisco" means "biscuits" in the real world. Trademark means competing suppliers of the same product/service can't use the same name, but has not been well implemented to guide Internet consumers.

The closest we've got is googling for a name. Which isn't bad, especially since Google itself has competition (though its name has ironically become generic for "Internet search"). Wikipedia's disambiguation techniques seem effective, but probably haven't been tested by the kind of system games swindlers attack the wide-open Net with.

Re:What's In a Name?

[Anonymous Coward]

names like "Nabisco" means "biscuits" in the real world.

No, in the real world "Nabisco" means "Cookies". The real world turns out to be surprisingly larger than the UK.

Re:What's In a Name?

[Doc Ruby]

The "national" in "National Biscuit Company", later "NaBisCo", is an American company, even larger than the UK.

Re:What's In a Name?

[Reverend528]

You're right. We should all stop trying to remember domain names and just search for the sites we're looking for.

Re:What's In a Name?

[illegalcortex]

And Nabisco (National Biscuit Company) got its start making hardtack biscuits, which we would now call "crackers" (at least in the US).

Re:What's In a Name?

[Anonymous Coward]

Woosh!

Re:What's In a Name?

[FireFury03]

The real solution is to move from misleadingly narrow UR L s, locators of the precise info resource, to the UR N s

This isn't a solution. Whilest a URN uniquely identifies a resource, it doesn't tell you where to _find_ that resource, so it is pretty useless for a system like the world wide web.

For example, you can form a URN out of a book's ISBN number, but that doesn't tell you where to find information about that book (e.g. the publisher's website) - it only tells you which book to look for once you have found a website with information about books in general.

Re:What's In a Name?

[Doc Ruby]

Just because your "joke" gets something wrong in order to be funny, but isn't funny, though I got your reference to "biscuits", doesn't put it over my head. It puts it beneath my contempt.

Re:What's In a Name?

[Doc Ruby]

Just like a URL alone is useless without an infosystem like the Web to use it in, so is a URN useless on its own. The purpose of a URN infosystem is to return URLs. Either interactively to disambiguate, or several for redundancy, or other solutions to other problems the limited URL creates in its limited solution.

The ISBN is used with infosystems like bookseller or libarary databases to return the equivalents of URLs to find instances of the book, among other info about the class of copies of that book.

A URN like (nabisco) entered into a system like Google returns its URL(s). Pretty useful, but not a complete solution.

Re:What's In a Name?

[FireFury03]

Either interactively to disambiguate, or several for redundancy, or other solutions to other problems the limited URL creates in its limited solution.

I'm not sure what problem you are trying to solve by throwing away an existing infrastructure whereby an address points at a specific resource location and replacing it with an infrastructure that identifies resources but not their locations. It doesn't resolve the domain parking problem since you will just get URN parking instead.

The ISBN is used with infosystems like bookseller or libarary databases to return the equivalents of URLs to find instances of the book, among other info about the class of copies of that book.

A URL identifies the location of a resource globally. A URN *may* be resolvable into a single location locally, but certainly not globally. Globally a URN would resolve into many locations. Citing the example of an ISBN, that globally resolves to every possible location of the book (i.e. every book shop, library, etc.), which is generally not useful.

URNs cannot replace URLs - the two types of address are for very different purposes. By all means, you can search for an object within a restricted environment by it's URN, but this is really no different to what we have at the moment - I can go to the Amazon website and put an ISBN in the search box.

Re:What's In a Name?

[Doc Ruby]

I didn't propose replacing URLs with URNs entirely. I proposed using URNs for finding things by name rather than domain names or other URL components which find things by location, which is a catch-22 for people who just know what something is called, and what kind of thing it is.

URN parking is harder, because trademark laws can stop it in well-known trademark practice, which is based on disambiguation by the kind of thing with that name. Domain names are by nature ambiguous to what kind of "thing" they point to, because they point to a virtual domain of computer hosts. It's hard to stop someone from using ambiguous domain names when domain names are ambiguous. When trademark or other laws are used, they're often abused to create artificial monopolies on terms much broader than the legitimate mark owner is entitled either by law, or just to disambiguate in the market for their specific kind of thing.

Like I said, googling for a name is closer to using a URN than using a URL through DNS. ISBN is similar, but restricted to a single kind of thing: books. A real URN system would solve a lot of these problems, without relying on Google or different techniques/APIs for searching for names in different databases. Like when different networks and host naming systems were converged to DNS/TCP/IP.

Re:What's In a Name?

[rs79]

"Trademark means competing suppliers of the same product/service can't use the same name"

So, "delta" would bring up an airline schedule or a catalog of faucets?

Re:What's In a Name?

[Doc Ruby]

Something better than the wrong one when you're looking for the other, like delta.com, and a bunch of SEO results like now.

Google does evil

[wytcld]

A professional society I belong to has just gone to set up a website, and discovered that its acronym is being squatted on by a "domainer" - no content at all there except for Google ad links to misc. stuff not even related to the acronym.

We have hundreds of thousands of domain names that could effectively and efficiently be used by real organizations as the most direct and obvious addresses to connect with them, but are instead being subsidized by Google to effectively obfuscate the Net. This means that if you really want to find a firm's or organization's site, you increasingly have to use Google to find the domain name they've settled for, since the obvious ones are taken up by these Google-subsidized squatters.

Google does evil here, and for their own ends. It would be simple for them to set standards as to where their ad links can be placed, and put this whole lecherous horde out of business, freeing up the domain name system to work according to its original design. What are the odds Google'll ever even consider this? Slim to none, because Google does evil. They're stinking rich, but they just want more, by any means, even when those means degrade the quality of much of the Web.

Re:Google does evil

[Antique Geekmeister]

This is hardly a Google problem. It's ICANN, and specifically Verisign for selling huge numbers of domains so cheaply, and making it so very difficult for a legitimate user to protect themselves or recover from a domain squatter. They also deliberately leave it very awkward to track the domains back to the squatters, making blacklists or automatic filters quite difficult to construct or keep up to date.

Re:Google does evil

[Anonymous Coward]

its acronym is being squatted on

What like you are the only people in the entire world that should be allowed to use an acronym.......wow....must be a real professional organization!

    stuff not even related to the acronym.

Hmmm....interesting, if the site does not pass itself off as being related to you what harm have they caused you?.....let me tell you.....NONE

    lecherous horde....sorry dude not all domainers are lawyers

Re:Google does evil

[Anonymous Coward]

they have to always want more. They are public. If they don't act like greedy assholes their shareholders will just remove the offender and replace them with someone more evil.

Re:Google does evil

[rs79]

"It's ICANN, and specifically Verisign for selling huge numbers of domains so cheaply"

Read your history.

Originally domains were free. But this kinda "domaining" hadn't caught on yet.

The NSF subsidized domain names by paying the Internic (de facto, network solutions) to handle domain registrations. The NSF's mandata was to serve US post secondary educational institutions and at such time as domains were starting to be commercial (because of Steven Wolff's moving of control of the Internet out of USG hands) the NSF didn't know what to do and was directed to tell its contractor to begin charging for domains. They were $100 for two years in advance of $50 to rereg a name. By this time "domaining" was already a problem.

There was widespread consensus that $50/yr was WAY too much and consumers forced the issue and lowred the price.

ICANN doesn't make policy it "measures community consensus and codifies it". Verisign would love to have higher priced domains.

In other words we have met the enemy and he is us.

Re:Google does evil

[lbft]

Google sells the ads that cover a very large proportion of the parked domains out there. They (amongst others) make it financially viable to park domains even before you factor in selling them on.

AsbesDot

[Rob T Firefly]

News for Asbestos. Stuff that matters.

BS

[geekoid]

If I see a piece of land, and think "McDonalds will want to put a franchise here." and then buy it, I'm a forward thinking business man. If I do the same thing on the internet, suddenly I'm some sort of 'bad' guy.

It's just people making money by thinking ahead.

No, I am not one of these people, but wish I had gotten in when I thought to do it in the 90s. I could use 20million a year with less then 3 million in expenses.
damn.

Re:BS

[Todd Knarr]

A lot of those parked domains, though, are the equivalent of thinking "McDonalds will want to put a franchise here.", buying the land and putting up a "McRonalds" building with a pair of yellow arches suspiciously reminiscent of the ones used by aforementioned burger chain in the hopes that people looking for McDonalds will fail to notice the slight difference in spelling and show up at your place instead.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Land doesn't have names that refer to businesses or organizations. Land is also expensive and subject to running costs, and taxes. Whereas you can park thousands of domains on a pissy server. Domain squatters are ensuring sensible names are not available to a large number of people. If they were actually doing something real with them, then fair enough, first come first serve. But to hold them to ransom is simply antisocial and definitely not improving the value of the internet. It's also pissing off when these people grab all generic versions of the same thing.

Re:BS

[llZENll]

It's totally different. Land is tangible and limited. Domain names are not. Land only has value because of other land around it, except for minerals and such, but all of that land is gone anyways. Domain names have intrinsic value. And finally and most important, land is TAXED, domain names are not.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

A better analogy would be someone who sees new housing having to be built in an area in a decade or so. They go and buy strips of land with no intention of building anything, just to obstruct others. If you can't meet their price new housing can't be built.

In this case the gov could take it by eminent domain. Maybe they need that on the web.

If you have no morals you could still do it. Just buy all of the good domains for some 3rd world nation that has a chance of developing soon and shake them down later.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you've done it -- you've given the government another idea -- then again, taxation is one of the few things that actually engages the government's creativity, so I'm not going to mod your post down 50 bazillion for bad karma.

Domainer? Has the Bush language retrovirus infected everyone's use of the mother tongue?

Re:BS

[cdrguru]

No, the problem is that Google enables these people to make a return on their "investment". If you buy some land in the hopes of selling it at a premium about all you can do is something constructive with it while you are waiting.

Instead, what Google has enabled is to turn this wasteland into a money-making opportunity for these folks. Take away the ability to put ads in this space and it will dry up overnight.

Re:BS

[bhsx]

If you buy some land in the hopes of selling it at a premium about all you can do is something constructive with it while you are waiting. You mean like put up some cheap billboards on the land right?

Re:BS

[dim5]

Here's the difference. I can look at a building on your piece of land and decide whether it really is a McDonald's before I go in and eat.

Some of these squatters have no intention of selling their domain and no means of even entertaining offers. You would buy the land hoping that McDonald's will make a deal. Squatters buy their domains and put up a shack with a piece of posterboard on the door that says "MacDonalds" instead. By the time I realize the food I'm eating isn't a Big Mac at all, they've already made their dollar.

Re:BS

[rs79]

"Google enables these people to make a return on their "investment"

This happened before Google, it happened with Alta Vista, too.

It's been happening since about 1997 or 98 or so when that article appeared in Wired where the guy registered McDonalds.com and tried to sell it to Burger king (or something like that). Within a week the latency for a domain registration at the Internic went from 3 days to 11 weeks.

Re:BS

[scot4875]

Yeah, but the difference is that if nobody comes along and builds a McDonald's, you don't somehow earn money off of the deal.

These people essentially set up a fake McDonald's storefront and then make money by allowing solicitors and panhandlers to mob you before you realize it's not where you want to be.

--Jeremy

I'm wishing cancer upon him.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cancer in the head.

Great, more crappy useless sites

[gsslay]

This whole schemes sounds just like a way of advert-ridden websites with zero content to pretend to be something they're not.

Are we going to end up with a web full of great looking websites that have actually been created automatically out of nothing the second you went looking for them? At least with parked domains and link farms you know immediately that's what they are.

domain squatting - it's the future!

[ir]

1997 called and wanted their dot bomb business plan back

Re:domain squatting - it's the future!

[ickleberry]

yup. a month ago i owned 3sx.net - look at it now honestly I don't know what these fuckwits are at. I had this domain pointed to my IP for about 6 months and a few people looked at the site every week. They will be lucky if one person clicks on the piss poor ads they put on there. It certainly wasnt worth the 6.95 a year for me

DNS could easily become a directory

[Colin Smith]

It just takes some organisation. Something ICANN is pathetically short of.

Imagine:

IBM.IT.services.com
localbloke.gardening.services.co.uk
penisland.sex.services.com

Technically it's trivial to do. DNS was designed specifically for this sort of purpose. The problem is with the people who manage the domains, they're basically incompetent and exactly the same would be true of any whizzy new directory service which was created.

Re:DNS could easily become a directory

[Anonymous Coward]

The first stupid mistake when designing the DNS system was the order of the labels.
It should have been com.services.it.ibm (or com.ibm) instead of ibm.it.services.com or ibm.com.

Re:DNS could easily become a directory

[Tony Hoyle]

The problem is they'd try to 'monetize' it. Verisign would get first pick, and would get all the juicy ones. Then a thosand registrars would compete in the 'services' domain for different words. Then you'd get registrar squatters...

Also you wouldn't be able to add a new category under 'services' without ICANN approval (because it might 'destabilise' the internet) so we'd be left with 5 or 6 (sex, gardening, computing and probably a special one for museum with one domain in it).

So more of the same then.

Re:DNS could easily become a directory

[JackHoffman]

No, you're trying to squeeze something that isn't a hierarchy into a hierarchy. The domain name system is based on the concept of administrative domains and delegation of subdomains. The keyword is "administrative". The domains are not meant to describe functions or real world concepts because these are rarely hierarchical.

so how are you going to split

[1800maxim]

So how are you going to split the $6500 among the four of you on Cayman islands?

"Domainer" barely = Spammer

[Anonymous Coward]

I find myself wondering why I'm surprised that domain squatters have somehow invented a legitimate-sounding name for themselves: "domainers".

I guess it's the perfect sort of business for people who are happy extract value from the world without adding value.

Sometimes those people are best known as "sociopaths".

These folks are barely 1 step up from spammers.

If these domains were people...

[MatrixCubed]

Today's headline: websurfers hate encountering parked domains. Tune in tonight at 11 for part one of the Maddox-inspired series "If these domains were people, I would embrace their genocide".

Re:If these domains were people...

[Alcibaides]

I'm a bit tired of hearing the "practicality" or "likability" argument. The truth is that there's money in it...and that's all the incentive that there is in the world to do anything. Period. Complaining about it does precisely zero.

Not 'right' or 'wrong,' just not interested.

[Kadin2048]

I think it's because Firefox's developers don't think there's anything inherently wrong with ads.

This is besides the point; it's not about the inherent "rightness" or "wrongness" of ads, it's about whether people want them as part of their browsing experience or not, and whether the technology can deliver that. I think it's safe to say that, given the choice, most people would choose no ads over ads, therefore it would make sense that a browser give them that.

If a whole lot of people wanted white-on-black text, browsers would probably implement that, too. It's not an issue of whether white-on-black is inherently superior to black-on-white, it's just consumer demand.

The Firefox developers are choosing to pass up what could be a big boost to its popularity, because they don't want to give people something that I suspect most people want, or would find useful. I suspect it's because the Firefox project and the Firefox developers themselves draw revenue from advertising, and don't want to cut it off (or come under fire from people who's revenues might be impacted). To put it bluntly, it's a conflict of interest -- I'm not judging them for that, because it may be a necessary consequence of staying afloat as an organization -- but they have goals other than producing "the best browser" possible, which prevent them from putting in such a feature.

It's the same reason that TiVOs don't have automatic commercial skipping, even though such a thing would be possible to implement (and other projecs like MythTV do), and most people would probably think it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. There are other considerations on the part of the manufacturer, which trump what would be best for the consumer.

Re:Not 'right' or 'wrong,' just not interested.

[Meatloaf Surprise]

To put it bluntly, it's a conflict of interest -- I'm not judging them for that, because it may be a necessary consequence of staying afloat as an organization -- but they have goals other than producing "the best browser" possible, which prevent them from putting in such a feature.

So basically, you're saying Firefox has a conflict of interest because they didn't include a plugin you like by default? I could understand calling it a conflict of interest if Firefox somehow prevented the adblock plugin from being installed successfully or removing it from their plugin site, but come on, just because they don't include every popular plugin with their browser is hardly a conflict of interest.

Re:Not 'right' or 'wrong,' just not interested.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or perhaps like eMule/Azureus not coming preconfigured for leeching, even though there are certainly a lot of 'consumers' who would prefer to not be uploading while still enjoying the downloading part.

Re:Not 'right' or 'wrong,' just not interested.

[eric_brissette]

There are lots of good sites that depend on ads to pay the bills. A browser capable of blocking all ads would only make their existence more difficult, if not impossible.

The world is full of lazy schlubs who think they're entitled to everything. They don't contribute, instead they only exist to consume. I can't blame any open source project for not pandering to the needs/wants of people like that.

Re:Not 'right' or 'wrong,' just not interested.

[carpeweb]

I like the fact that Adblock is a choice and not a built-in feature. Maybe the suggestion was to make it a built-in option that could be turned on or off? Anyway, choice is usually good. A lot of people (myself included) don't like television ads, but they also don't like pay-per-view. Someone's gotta pay for content.

I wouldn't mind the lack of commercial-skip on my DVR remote, if Comcast hadn't used the rock-bottom bidder to make the thing. Yes, a commercial-skip button would be nice but the FF feature, if it worked half-way reasonably , would be an ok compromise. I'll just keep triangulating and convince myself that I'm still saving time ...

There was a lot of hype during the run 'n' gun days about how free content would pay for itself, and not just through advertising. But it seems to me that advertising is the dominant model for paying for content. The donations model might work for some areas (a few FOSS projects), but the other models seem somewhat utopian. Does anyone have any data on other models to pay for content -- i.e., how well are subscription services faring, etc.?

I'm planning to develop a "no banners" banner for my site, when I overcome my procrastination ...

Re:Not 'right' or 'wrong,' just not interested.

[Kadin2048]

I don't care about whether they include this plugin or that one, I'm talking about ad blocking as a feature. Firefox (and all other browsers) include lots of features that aren't strictly necessary in order to look at HTTP pages: bookmarks, for instance. Why do browsers have bookmarks? Because people like being able to save bookmarks, and find it useful. Same with tabs, search boxes, and other things that have been implemented. They're all there, because people find them handy.

Ad blocking would probably be just as well-received, if not better, than features like tabs and search boxes, which made it in. (And in fact, other browsers have built adblocking in to them.) That Firefox doesn't by default, is rather obviously a conscious decision on the part of the developers. They have decided to include some features in the browser, and left others out, and ad blocking has never been put into the core browser, even though it's (last time I checked) the single most popular Firefox add-on. It's pretty obvious that it's a feature that lots of people use, and if it were built in and didn't require a download, even more people probably would grow to appreciate it. If the development of new features were done purely on the basis of what would be most useful to the greatest number of users, it would be a no-brainer for inclusion. That it's not, shows that there are other considerations at work.

I knew that was going to draw fire from Firefox fans, but I don't really see that as a controversial statement. It reflects the realities of a big, and consequently expensive, (and sue-able) software development project. It is entirely understandable, even natural, that they will have priorities -- including their own corporate survival -- which may lead to decisions that are different from what users would have desired, or found useful.

Re:Not 'right' or 'wrong,' just not interested.

[Kadin2048]

Maybe the suggestion was to make it a built-in option that could be turned on or off?

I just wanted to clarify ... I wasn't ever even thinking about an ad-blocker that couldn't be turned off by the user; such a thing would be an annoyance at best and an abomination at worst.

In fact, it's an open question whether such a feature if it were built-in, ought to be on or off by default (my suggestion would be off, since the browser shouldn't remove content from the incoming pages without that choice being made by the user). What I was imagining, was something more like the ad blocking built into recent versions of Konqueror; basically a pane of the preferences dialog which looks suspiciously like AdBlock-the-plugin's control panel (because it is basically, I understand, AdBlock rolled in).

My point was less about AdBlocking per se, than about the apparent conscious choice of the Firefox developers, to not include such a feature in the browser itself (whether on or off by default). Since it's so often installed by users (meaning, obviously, that it does something a lot of people find useful), it would seem to be a pretty clear next step for inclusion in the browser itself; that it's not, suggests to me that the developers have goals different from (although not necessarily irreconcilable with) their users.

There are lots of examples of other places where this occurs; the TiVO was just the closest example I could come up with.

Re:Not 'right' or 'wrong,' just not interested.

[nixkuroi]

You also have to realize that if Firefox included an ad blocker for all ads, many content providers that survive on ad revenue would stop developing for that browser. It would take a lot less time for most developers to write pages that only have to worry about IE. It's still got the greater market share and it costs extra money to comply with both browsers. If you knew that you were spending money to accommodate traffic that was going to eschew your revenue generator, would you continue to spend that money?

Probably not.

Firefox realizes that. They make it possible to plugin and block ads, but making that a default setting would marginalize them in the eyes of ecommerce developers and as soon as that happened, they would be marginalized in the development process.

Re:Not 'right' or 'wrong,' just not interested.

[Meatloaf Surprise]

Perhaps I'm mistaken, but adblock, as it is now, is just a plugin for blocking certain elements (images, iframes, flash, etc.) from being displayed. It comes with nothing preloaded and requires the user to add any urls that they want to be blocked (for instance, to my knowledge blocking googlesyndication.com/* will get rid of all [or almost all?] google ads). I don't see how including this will help boost Firefox's population as the ones that know how to *use* adblock are also the ones that know how to install plugins. Average Joe that has no idea how to use plugins will probably also not understand how to use adblock, unless of course, you want Firefox to also come preloaded with a blacklist of known ad sites...

Re:Not 'right' or 'wrong,' just not interested.

[Kadin2048]

AdBlock Plus (at least, I think it's AdBlock Plus, maybe it's AdBlock2) does a fairly good job of this; when you enable the blocking, you choose from a list of well-known blacklists with short descriptions (what language/geography they're tailored to, who maintains it, etc.). You can load your own, naturally, but if you just want "zero effort" ad-blocking, it does a fairly good job. Here's the current list.

There would undoubtedly be some wrangling over who's list got to be the default, or at the top of the list of options, but you could order it with some neutral metric (number of unique downloads per day? Google Ranking?) if it became a point of contention.

You don't want to include a blacklist with the software itself, because they become obsolete too quickly, and for obvious reasons you don't want to stick the user with one that's hard to update or change. Using a subscription-based system that lets the user choose between lists is fairly simple, yet powerful, and allows users to move to a different list if they desire a different level or focus on blocking. (E.g., some lists are more minimalist, others take a more expansive interpretation of "ads," and most are tailored to a particular language.)

Re:Not 'right' or 'wrong,' just not interested.

[TClevenger]

Like spam and phishing, web advertising is an arms race, with the anti-ad software always having to up the ante against the ads. If Firefox got directly into this arms race, they'd lose their shirt, both in continual updates and user support when legitimate stuff gets blocked. Better to leave that to the plugin writers.

Pen is Mightier

[dunc78]

Does he know that the pen is mightier than the sword?

Re:Pen is Mightier

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll take the Penis Mightier, for 500.

Re:Pen is Mightier

[Ultra64]

What matters is does it work? Will it really mighty my penis?

Mysterious sniper registrations

[StreetStealth]

I've gone to do domain checks at GoDaddy for a domain I might want to use, decide to mull it over, and come back the next week to buy it only to find that some company got it and parked an ad site there. I have no idea how they know that I checked on it, but they somehow get it on a list and snap it up.

I've had that happen to me too. Foil headgear aside, I've made a habit of using WHOIS to see if something's registered rather than using an availability search unless I'm ready to register when I think of the name.

moolah

[zogger]

Mozilla makes money from google being their default search engine. Google makes money from ads. I doubt they want to actually include adblocker with it turned on. They have the extension, that is as far as they probably want to go.

There is no market economics in this

[Solandri]

'We own 300,000 domains, we make $20 million a year, we have just four employees and some servers in the Caymans.'

If that truly is the economics of the situation, then it is necessarily temporary. The market always adjusts when the opportunity arises to carry off so much wealth for so little actual effort.

A friend of mine does this. There is no market economics involved because domain names are monopolies. If you own a domain name, nobody else does. If someone wishes to advertise on it, they have to pay your terms for it. If someone wishes to buy it, they have to pay whatever price you set for it. It's actually a lot like real estate, except most of the land got bought up by a few hundred individuals when the price was $10 a lot.

Perhaps the adjustment will come in the form of higher DNS fees, since the 'business' in question is so heavily relying on DNS services.

Do that and you 1) kill off most of the web, 2) make multi-millionaires out of whoever runs DNS. Everything relies on DNS.

Perhaps the adjustment will come in the form of higher domain-name registration fees, once the authorities fully grasp the nature of the free-riding involved.

Domain registrars are in a similar business. They offer to make trivial changes in a database for you for an annual fee. Increasing the registration fees just transfers money from the parkers/squatters to the registrars. Increasing the fees registrars pay just transfers money to Network Solutions.

Perhaps the profit per wayward surfer will drop as the sponsoring sites gradually pay less and less per click.

The amounts sponsoring sites pay per click will depend on how many sales they get per click. It has nothing to do with whether or not the domain is being parked/squatted.

Or if this is truly a market failure, then watch for new legislation. (Not that past legislation bothered to wait for a justifying market failure to arise; indeed, the legislature is always willing, and a market failure is just what it needs to explain actions it wanted to take anyway.)

Like I said, there is no market economics in this. It's a side effect of the artificial (but necessary) monopoly created with the concept that a person or corporation can "own" a domain name. The only way to avoid it would be for a central authority or government agency to go through domain-name-space and regularly "clean up" any domains that were obviously just being parked for clickthroughs.

The one idea I've thought of which could prevent this is to make it progressively more expensive to own more domain names. e.g. The first 10 domain names are $10/yr each. Domain names 11-50 are $100/yr each. Domains 50-100 are $1,000/yr each. And so on. There really is no need for any one person to own more than a dozen or two dozen domain names, at least without good financial incentive. True you could set up a sprawling network of shell corporations and paid underlings, but the paperwork necessary to maintain them would quickly become overwhelming without incurring additional costs.

Re:There is no market economics in this

[localman]

A friend of mine does this.

Get a new friend.

Re:There is no market economics in this

[Anonymous Coward]

There really is no need for any one person to own more than a dozen or two dozen domain names, at least without good financial incentive.

Are you kidding. Have you used 1 resume all of your life. 1 tie for every social occassion. Companies like disney, microsoft and others own thousands of domains.....are they squatters in your eyes.....oh wait....first you should open them!

Re:There is no market economics in this

[EnglishTim]

Companies that have a real need for lots of domains will have the resources to pay the higher rates for them, but it will become uneconomic for squatters to buy every domain they can think of just so they can screw over someone who could actually do something useful with it.

Re:There is no market economics in this

[woolio]

here really is no need for any one person to own more than a dozen or two dozen domain names, at least without good financial incentive. True you could set up a sprawling network of shell corporations and paid underlings, but the paperwork necessary to maintain them would quickly become overwhelming without incurring additional costs.

Interesting point but I don't think a mountain of paperwork would prevent it...

It would just give rise to a new kind of "work at home" pyramid scheme... Instead of selling a "product" you would be collecting rare "domains" with the hope of the parent company buying them from you at a substantial profit for an outside buyer. And/or one would also be involved in soliciting these domains to prospective buyers.

Just think of the amount of promotional and informational material that would be needed for that one!

OpenDNS

[MDMurphy]

That's close to what OpenDNS does. If the name does not resolve, it will give a best guess and show you an advertising page. They will also redirect you around known phishing sites.
  http://www.opendns.com/what/smarter.php
  http://www.opendns.com/what/safer.php

No difference in typosquatting results, but instead of getting a "not found" error you'll get an ad page if it's a typo they can't resolve.

Re:OpenDNS

[PingSpike]

I wonder if it would possible to piggyback onto openDNS's system with some sort of browser plug in, detect their redirect and kill it.

Re:OpenDNS

[secolactico]

I wonder if it would possible to piggyback onto openDNS's system with some sort of browser plug in, detect their redirect and kill it.

What for? The end result would be the same as not using openDNS servers at all.

one filter to rule them all

[Bazzargh]

I for one welcome our new domain squatting masters.

No, really, I do. The consolidation of the domain squatting market makes it possible to do interesting stuff like NEVER go to their sites - eg a firefox plugin to check who's behind 'direct navigation' site names and, if its a squatter, take me to google instead. (I love how they say direct navigation like its something that users just started doing, that they might patent)

domain parking should be banned

[havenskate]

When I read the subject of this I got excited. I thought maybe, just maybe there were going to be some rules set about how long you can park a domain for -- making it more of a hastle for scammers and squaters to just sit on domains with nothing more than an ad on the site... I'm normally not one to opt for control, but if I can go out and buy just about every mispelling of microsoft or google or whatever possible and sit on them or even have them forward to my site, well that just seems crazy. and if you're rich from selling a business, internet land is cheap... dirt cheap... do we really want a warren buffet of the world to own everything?

I admit that I haven't researched what regulations do exist, but I'm not aware of anything in place to prevent this besides the cost (which is not much as the article mentions)...

Re:domain parking should be banned

[spongman]

who gets to say whether or not a web site is parked or not?
besides, there's nothing that says you have to have an http server running at the address pointed to by your domain. hell, you don't even have to have a DNS zone...

Use parked domains for password validation

[giafly]

www.tV56pze3idd.com Hey, how did you find out my password? :)

Strange but true: With Windows server account validation you need a CAL per account, so parent's alleged approach of matching a registered domain could save money. This system could replace certificates too.

Microsoft Windows 2000 Server 20 User CALs Only $189 to $650
Register domain name as low as $3.95/year

Waste of $20

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone else stated, GoDaddy's service to get a domain after it has been released is a waste of money. I'm not sure how often people have trouble with it but we ended up purchasing the domain from the bastard that parked it. So much for GoDaddy's quick domain snatching service.

Here's another great business idea

[grouchyDude]

As a companion bricks-and-mortal store, you could sell jars of people's
sewage and excrement, labelled as "organic products". About the same value
and utility to society.

a word of cautoin form wokring for a domain parker

[shareme]

Most never make any money.... The one I worked for in indy never made any revenue in the past 10 years..

Getting a Dropped Name-

[microcars]

is a bit harder than you may realize

GoDaddy has this thing where you pay $20, and when the domain becomes available they'll buy it for you and put it under your name. Has anyone tried this service and had it work? I have all my domains registered there and there was one that was expiring and ready to "drop" and I wanted it, so I registered to try to get it with GoDaddy.
But I had also read the story (posted in a reply below somewhere) about how the whole business of getting "dropped" domains worked.

Basically if the Registrar "drops" the domain from it's system, whoever happens to be there at the precise moment it "drops" can snag it.
It's like being part of a hungry mob in a street and someone is throwing a piece of candy off a 10-story building.
Your chances of getting it increase if you have Longer Arms, are Taller and have also brought as many other people acting on your behalf along as well to try to "catch" it.

I ended up registering with several "Drop Catchers" and when the domain I wanted did drop...GoDaddy was NOT one of the "winners"
however- one of the "Drop Catchers" I had registered with DID get it.
however- more that one entity had registered for that domain with that "Drop Catcher" so it promptly went off to an auction.

I dropped out when it went over $800, the name went to one of these guys in the Cayman Islands and will now and forever be one of those crappy place-holder on-page domains that you might happen upon if you clicked an old link to the website that used to be there.

The essence of the article.

[a_karbon_devel_005]

The essence of the article is:

If you can make that much doing nothing, what if we added some Web 2.0 sprinkle...

Some idiot decides that someone doing something simple that makes a lot of money could be better with some buzzwords. Total pointy hat management.

What he fails to see, of course, is that the profitability of domain parking was never in the "quality" of the appearence of the parked domain, but it was gotten by virtue of being the first people to snap up the most domains.

As mentioned in the article, most "domain parking companies" aren't grown, they're bought from companies that own domains already and then slowly added to by using automated tools to snatch up new good domains.

How is this article /. quality?

Re:The essence of the article.

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this article /. quality?

You must be new around here....

Domain Parkers!

[linvir]

Hey, at least we're not spammers, right?!

Re:Domain Parkers!

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't affect anyone that doesn't go directly to their sites. Most of them don't even try and install spyware or anything nasty. I really don't see what the big deal is.

The ones buying Google Adwords to leverage the differential between Google and Yahoo ad pricing, that's somewhat more annoying.

Re:One can only hope. (anecdotal)

[ErroneousBee]

Ive just been looking for a bike. Decided Kona Cladera looked OK, of off to the maufacturer website for specs:

Searching for "Kona Caldera" just pulls what appears to be an infinite number of shops

http://www.kona.com/ - Hawian island.
http://www.konabikes.com/ - parked, knows Kona are a cycle manufacturer and hosts loads on links, but none to Kona's site.
http://www.konacycles.com/ - parked with adsense links of no specific type.

Turns out its http://www.konaworld.com/ but the site is just a shop with no more details than other shops.

And that, folks, is how parking works. It relies on all the chaff generated by online sellers causing searchers to try more direct methods of getting at the information.

Internet Mafia

[jeremyclark13]

In best Godfather type voice
You got yourself a nice domain there, it would be a shame if anything happened to it.

real-estate speculators are NOT businessmen

[Comboman]

If I see a piece of land, and think "McDonalds will want to put a franchise here." and then buy it, I'm a forward thinking business man.

No, you're a real-estate speculator not a business man. Businessmen create and run businesses, generate employment for others, service their customers and stimulate the economy. Real-estate speculators, currency traders, domain squatters, ticket scalpers and people who sell PS3s on eBay are just ignorant jerks who are gaming the system to enrich themselves while providing no useful service.

Re:real-estate speculators are NOT businessmen

[null etc.]

Yes, you are right. This country would be better off with no speculators whatsoever.

Re:real-estate speculators are NOT businessmen

[Dretep]

Real-estate speculators, currency traders, domain squatters, ticket scalpers and people who sell PS3s on eBay are just ignorant jerks who are gaming the system to enrich themselves while providing no useful service. Sounds like someone is a little pissed that they weren't smart or savvy enough to 'enrich themselves'. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Re:real-estate speculators are NOT businessmen

[Anonymous Coward]

Real-estate speculators, currency traders, domain squatters, ticket scalpers and people who sell PS3s on eBay are just ignorant jerks who are gaming the system to enrich themselves while providing no useful service. If there was no demand, there would be no supply. Obviously if people are willing to pay enough for real estate, currency, domains, tickets, or PS3s to make speculating in these commodities profitable, then the speculators ARE providing a useful service -- matching up scarce commodities with the people that want them the most. Eliminate the scarcity, and you eliminate the incentive for speculation.

Re:real-estate speculators are NOT businessmen

[Anonymous Coward]

Down with profits!

Preach it my Communist Brother!

Re:real-estate speculators are NOT businessmen

[piranha(jpl)]

These people you list are involved in trade—they are in the business of making money, not providing some public charity out of the goodwill of their hearts.

If the "original sellers" of these properties (landowners, registrars, ticket vendors, etc.) have the sense to know the demand of their product, they would adjust the price accordingly themselves. The only one losing out in such a case would be the original seller. On the other hand, if the "speculator" is mistaken and ends up purchasing some property above value, it ends up being their loss. This is the market at work.

Re:real-estate speculators are NOT businessmen

[JesseMcDonald]

No, you're a real-estate speculator not a business man. Businessmen create and run businesses, generate employment for others, service their customers and stimulate the economy. Real-estate speculators, currency traders, domain squatters, ticket scalpers and people who sell PS3s on eBay are just ignorant jerks who are gaming the system to enrich themselves while providing no useful service.

All the roles you describe (including "business man") have one thing in common: arbitrage ("buy low, sell high"). Without arbitrage there would be no economy; arbitrage is the process by which prices are determined and shortages and surpluses eliminated; it transfers resources from the production of less-demanded goods to the production of more-demanded ones. Speculators of all sorts participate in this essential economic function.

An example: A real-estate speculator buys a piece of property because it feels there is (or soon will be) a more urgent use for it (anticipates profit). The buyer accepts the arrangement because the price paid exceeds the buyer's reserve price; the speculator pays that price because it believes the property will be more productive in another use. While the property is in the speculator's possession it remains protected from alterations that would diminish its usefulness for the more urgent production. The original owner might have built a house on it, for example, when there are already plenty of available houses and a shortage of commercial space (or visa-versa); that construction would have been a malinvestment of the property, and a difficult one to remedy for quite some time -- probably decades in this instance. In time, provided the speculator was correct, the property will be resold to a new owner at a higher price, which the buyer would only pay if the value of the property in its new use was correspondingly higher than its value in the original use. (Those who remain speculators tend to choose correctly most of the time.) Again both parties agree to the exchange because they both profit from it; neither is taking advantage of the other or of anyone else. All else remaining equal, overall wealth (for everyone) is higher as a result of the speculator's actions, as the property is now allocated to a more productive use.

Exactly the same process and outcome applies to each of the other kinds of speculative investors; the only differences are in the commodities exchanged. The owner of a business, for example, deals in time and labour as well as raw materials, work space, overhead, etc., but the principles remain the same.

Re:real-estate speculators are NOT businessmen

[mmalove]

Really? So if I buy something that I believe will go up in value, for the sole purpose of reselling it later when the market wisens up to its true value, that's bad? Funny, because the government actually encourages this as a source of income, it's called capital gains. It broadly applies to land, stocks, or other items of value that you resell for more than you paid for them, and it's taxed lower than wage income. Fathom that?

Sure, there are specific crackdowns in the tax code, for example you can't abuse the home seller's 250k deduction more than once every 5 years, but basically this is not only a fair way to play, the government rewards this behavior more than going to work and being productive.

Let's look at what we have here:

Real estate speculators:
Well, before land belongs to a business, it belongs to someone. If that someone wants to sell before a business wants to buy, that's where real-estate speculators come in. Without, the original seller of land would lose out, because if they could have sold that land to anyone but the speculator for more money, they would have. I see this as a service, and a balance of market forces.

Currency traders:
Balance the valueation of money between to national economies.

Domain squatters:
Pretty much the equivalent of the pioneers that went out west, without all the wolves and natives. Pretty much every name one could come up with has a value in the internet - if you haven't claimed yours by now I'd say its fair game to anyone that understands the value of it.

Ticket scalpers:
Fall into 2 types. Some events specifically prohibit ticket scalping, in which case you're in breach of contract, and the legal system can be used to bring your profit margin to a grinding halt. Working as intended. If such a contract doesn't exist, that's just the free market at work.

PS3s on eBay:
Should go to those willing to stand in line to get them. After that, what you do with it is up to you: if you decide to make a profit by reselling, well, that was your call - clearly the console companies try to sell these things for less than they could make on initial offering. Again, if I can turn something over for more than I paid for it, that's capital gains.

Is it scummy? I just see supply and demand at work, and have not's complaining that the have's are leveraging it. And no, I'm not rich, just looking at this from an I don't want the government regulating trade at this level perspective.

Re:real-estate speculators are NOT businessmen

[OldManAndTheC]

Real estate speculation employs capital, albeit in small amounts. Every speculator buys from a seller, and the seller receives capital that can be invested elsewhere. The speculator is assuming risk and providing liquidity (which can be a big issue for real estate owners). Speculators in other areas are essentially providing the same function, despite our distaste for them.

Domain squatters are not in the same league. They do not add much liquidity to the market, because their investment is so low that it is virtually negligible. There are vast number of typos associated with "valid" domain names, so whereas scarcity makes specific plots of real estate valuable, it does not restrict domain squatting in the same fashion. It's as if each valid domain, upon being established and putting up its "sign" on a search engine results page, is immediately surrounded by billboards that claim to be the true domain.

In the real world, laws exist to restrict the allowable types and locations of signage. This is intended to reduce the visual clutter that would, if left unchecked, make life miserable.

Re:real-estate speculators are NOT businessmen

[Cadallin]

Speculators of all sorts are just leeches on the ass of society. Sometimes they get burned, but not nearly enough. Trading on Artificial Scarcity also falls into this camp Exhibit A: card for "Magic: The Gathering."

Re:real-estate speculators are NOT businessmen

[Comboman]

Obviously if people are willing to pay enough for real estate, currency, domains, tickets, or PS3s to make speculating in these commodities profitable, then the speculators ARE providing a useful service -- matching up scarce commodities with the people that want them the most. Eliminate the scarcity, and you eliminate the incentive for speculation.

But by buying up limited resources, speculators are artificially creating scarcity specifically so they can profit off it. That is NOT a useful service. Selling inflatable rafts to flood victims is providing a useful service (even if you profit from it). Blowing up a dam so you can create a demand for the inflatable rafts you sell is NOT providing a useful service.

Re:real-estate speculators are NOT businessmen

[Comboman]

As a capitalist, I believe in free markets. Speculators who create artificial scarcity by buying up limited resources and monopolizing them are the opposite of a free market. Profits are good if you do something to deserve them.

It's the warranty's fault

[Jotii]

The main reason that domain parking is so beneficial is that you don't have to buy the domain -- it's ok to turn it back after a few days. This means that you could buy a million of domains, see which get enough traffic to be profitable, and then use your warranty so you won't have to pay for the rest.

Re:One can only hope. (anecdotal)

[nostriluu]

This could get worse as the exploiters get smarter. They are automatically generating realistic web sites based on word associations, which will fool search engines and the public, much like spam content is picking up context.

I had friends who had a non profit web site and they missed a renewal, the domain was immediately grabbed by porn spammers and they even used the site's original graphics. The generated site was probably entirely automated.

With the money spammers are making, you have to wonder what they are doing behind the scenes to shore up their position. They are completely amoral as long as the money keeps rolling in.

The web could become as useless as email. Soon we'll need a turing test for each letter typed.

Home Works Needed.

[erica_ann]

Folks, forget selling on Ebay, forget stuffing Envelopes, forget making money through AdSense, your future is in parked domain names. Come one come all! Get your parked Domain higher in the search engine than any other website without paing for SEO!

there are better domain grabbers than GoDaddy

[bitingduck]

the one time I tried this was with a domain that looked like it was owned by a regular person who had let it lapse-- it was near expiration when I decided I wanted the name so I looked up ways to snag it without having to try to buy it from the owner. I ended up using SnapNames.Com, who only charge you if you win. They did manage to snag it for me, which was kind of a surprise. The downside is they they work with a variety of registrars, so you can end up with your domain registered someplace strange for a while until the waiting period on transfers expires. The registrar that they hooked me up with (4Domains/bluehill) had a slightly oddball set of control panels but were very civilized and easy to transfer from when I went to consolidate under one registrar-- I'll keep them in mind for future registrations.

Nonsense

[amyhughes]

You don't understand what's being discussed. As a "domainer" you didn't buy the lot to later sell it to McDonalds, you bought the lot so McDonalds can't. You put billboards up, instead. That's even less useful than McDonalds.

Re:Nonsense

[JesseMcDonald]

You don't understand what's being discussed. As a "domainer" you didn't buy the lot to later sell it to McDonalds, you bought the lot so McDonalds can't. You put billboards up, instead. That's even less useful than McDonalds.

It may be less "useful" (however you define that; it's purely subjective), but if this was occurring I.R.L. it could only mean that billboards were apparently in higher demand than new McDonald's franchises. Perhaps high-ranking advertising sites are actually in higher demand than regular websites? (This only seems like a problem if you assume that advertising equates with mind control, which I do not. Otherwise advertising is only in worthwhile demand when it serves to inform potential buyers about a product that they can reasonably expect to benefit from, facilitating productive exchange.)

Re:Nonsense

[StikyPad]

Obviously advertising *is* useful, to both the advertiser and the consumer, otherwise it would not exist. You're arguing that McDonalds is more useful, but that's hard to argue with any measure of useful other than what you'd like to see. The only difference between a McDonalds (or other business) and advertising is that one is the point of sale, and the other helps generate sales. It's two sides of the same coin.

Don't get me wrong -- I hate empty domains and billboards equally (and fortunately there are none of the latter where I live) -- but to say that they're less useful than a business itself is oversimplifying. The people who own, work at, and invest in the company for whom the advertising is provided might beg to differ.

Another idea

[metamatic]

Make domain names non-transferable. That'd kill domain squatting dead.

Of course, the registrars make money from the squatting, so they'd never do it.

Re:One can only hope. (anecdotal)

[anagama]

Is it possible to generate a list of parked domains and blacklist at the dns level?

Google even offers this.

[celardore]

I found this while browsing yesterday. Need a lot of hits though, more than I could generate.

Re:Google even offers this.

[Scarletdown]

So Google is encouraging these scum? How evil.

Re:One can only hope. (anecdotal)

[nostriluu]

This is already done for spam mail with rbl, spamcop, maps, but it's a constant battle and just makes things more complex - imagine if a sincere mom and pop domain ended up on a blacklist - and really doesn't help.

Re:a word of cautoin form wokring for a domain par

[Anonymous Coward]

The one I worked for in indy never made any revenue in the past 10 years..

how did they pay you???

self-hosing analogy

[DynamoJoe]

If you see a piece of land and think about selling it back to McDonalds, that's one thing. Domain names are a bit different. If you bought McDonalds.com back in 1993 and tried to tell it to the corporation, without having any legitimate claim to it (as if you owned a "McDonald's Tire and Dental" or your name was actually McDonald or something), then you're a cybersquatter. It's not a piece of land, it's their name, and having bought it first is not sufficient right to owning someone else's older trade or business name.

It's not owning one piece of land, it's owning the piece of land - someone's name. And yeah, it does make you a bad guy, extorting $$ from people for something you're not using and/or have no claim to other than "I bought it first".

Re:a word of cautoin form wokring for a domain par

[MLease]

The one I worked for in indy never made any revenue in the past 10 years..

how did they pay you???

My guess would be that they got some kind of funding by dazzling investors with buzzwords and pie-in-the-sky promises. Remember that 10 years ago was during the big dot com boom, when almost anyone with some half-baked scheme involving the internet could get money thrown at them by some desperate venture capitalist trying to score the next Google or some such.

-Mike

Re:One can only hope. (anecdotal)

[Anonymous Coward]

By the way, I bought a 2006 Caldera and it's a pretty sweet bike for the price. Decent component group and all around trail bike. I like it since it is my first real mountain bike, and a hardtail, hence really forces you to ride well instead of relying on rear suspension.

You (and me) are paying for this via ICANN

[karl.auerbach]

ICANN is subsidizing this garbage industry to the tune of about $300,000,000 to $500,000,000 per year - yes every year - out of our pockets.

This is because the "domainers" get free domain name registration tryouts while the rest of us are forced to pay a ICANN-fiat "registry fee" of about $7 per name per year.

The ratio of our full-time registrations to these freeebies is about 1:200. In other words, each of our paid domains is paying the costs for 200 of these "domainers".

ICANN allows this, but it never really was presented to the board of directors for approval (I know, I was on the board at the time). ICANN should stop it and make the registry-fee match the actual costs that Verisign and PIR and others incurr to handle the back-room registry function - a fee that, rather than ICANN's $7 probably ought to be about $0.02 per year - a savings for you and me of more than $300,000,000 per year, every year.

Re:You (and me) are paying for this via ICANN

[Anonymous Coward]

While there's some basis to what you're saying, it could also be very misleading. Consider this scenario: someone registers a million .com domains, returns 990,000 of the 3 days later, and pays for only 10,000 of them. They're paying about $70,000 to their registar ($7 a domain), and of the $7, something like a buck goes to ICANN, 50 cents goes to the registrar, and the rest goes to Verisign (or something like that - I'm going by memory). ICANN gained a net revenue of around $10,000, and that will be an annual $10,000 if the registrant renews those domains annually (they'll probably let some expire, but keep most). ICANN's cost for allowing the person to register 990,000 domains and return them is negligible...it's moving maybe a gigabyte of data around here and there, inserting and removing from a database...there's some cost, but it's a lot less than $10,000. So ICANN has a net gain. They're not losing $300 million a year as a result of this sort of thing - they're increasing their revenue. If they didn't do this, those 10,000 domains the person tried before keeping would not have been registered...maybe 100 or 1,000 would have been, through other analysis techniques, but not all of them, so ICANN would have made less money.

Now, you're right that ICANN never really explicitly planned or approved this practice. It was in fact designed as a way to allow registrars who make mistakes to return domains due to system bugs or other problems. It's been used in ways that were not foreseen. Personally I don't like it or think it's a good practice, but that's how it is. Even so, I see it as improving ICANN's finances, not diminishing them. I think describing it as ICANN subsidizing the domain registrants is misleading.

Re:You (and me) are paying for this via ICANN

[karl.auerbach]

I agree with much of what you write, but there is one important point - ICANN has created an arbitrary fee of $7 per name per year that we all pay to Verisign for every name we keep in .com every year.

Now, as we see from the 200:1 ratios, and from the fact that we know that Verisign is making a good profit from registry operations, the $7 registry fee exceeds the actual operational cost of those 201 transactions. This means that the actual cost of a registry transaction is as low as $0.02.

Why should you and I be forced to pay $7 for something that costs $0.02. The answer is the ICANN-supported Verisign monopoly over .com.

This 5-day add-grace thing that the "domainers" use is merely the bright light that illuminates this enormous difference between cost and price and the fact that ICANN is an active element in the transfer of roughly $300,000,000 per year out of our pockets into those of Verisign. (And that doesn't include the ICANN cut.)

Now, if there were in fact real inter-registry competition and existing registries had to charge no more for renewals than they do for first-time registrations, then this system might cure itself. But with ICANN's guild-like approach to domain businesses, this isn't possible.

Consider my proposal to do a registry in which registrations are represented by a certificate that can be transfered outside the registry, and never expires, and in which revenue is obtained by service fees (e.g. NS record updates) rather than rent - see The .ewe Business Model - or - It's Just .Ewe and Me, .Kid(s)

Mozilla did it right

[renoX]

There was no separate search box, you just typed in the location bar and entered 'Tab' and it did the search.

IMHO having a separate search box and location box as in Firefox/Opera is stupid: there should be just one box for URL or search strings (to search you do tab+enter), with a 'search menu' which allow you to select the engine (a bit like current FF search box but without the text box part).

Re:Mozilla did it right

[kingturkey]

I do this in my Opera right now, I just type 'g search text here' to search Google, or w for Wikipedia, or any letter(s) for any other searches I feel like creating.

Re:Mozilla did it right

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt that will happen as long as we (those of us who have to deal with users every day) need to refer users to KB articles like this one: http://www29.compaq.com/falco/detail.asp?FAQnum=FA Q2859

Re:Mozilla did it right

[spir0]

Firefox can do this too.

right click on any search box and choose "add a keyword for this search"

for example, if you add a keyword for google's search box, and call it 'g' then you can just type 'g ' and it will feed those search words into google.

Re:Mozilla did it right

[renoX]

I don't like Opera's solution: you have to type the g before the text, and I'm used to Mozilla when I could just use Tab+Enter to do the search.

Now in the absolute, I don't know which is best..

Tax domain names

[djb]

The solution to this problem is simple. Start taxing domain names at 50 bucks a year and the use the money to go after the spammers and other such scum.

I own a number of domain names and I'd be happy to pay a tax on them if it meant that these companies could no longer afford to hold on to a few domain names that I'd like.

To problems, one stone.

Re:Tax domain names

[Anonymous Coward]

You just dont understand. If domain renewals were $100 a year, these guys would renew 'everything'. You just don't get the model. The only way to unseat them is to cause a sea-change in the law which hurts everybody but them because they would be there shaping the laws with their fat-wallets or B) buy a delorean, get a flux capacitor and go back to 1999 for a re-do.

Re:Tax domain names

[JacksBrokenCode]

I didn't read the article, but I don't think it matters for this reply.

Start taxing domain names at 50 bucks a year and the use the money to go after the spammers and other such scum.

Based on the blurb - a team of 4 people manages 300k domains generating $20mil revenue from the Caymans. Even with a $50/domain-year tax they'd probably still be profitable (though not as wildly so). Even if you increase the domain tax higher you end up just alienating more "average Joe" users from joining the web.

The real answer is much more complex. Realistically it shouldn't matter if somebody owns slahsdot.org or gogle.com just to put ads up. Those aren't the sites people intend to visit so if they find it by mistake they should use their Back button. If they choose to click an ad link and generate revenue for the parker, more power to 'em. Since the alternative is a "server not found" error I don't see the harm. I'll admit it's extremely frustrating to want to register a "more legit" domain and have a squatter in the way, but to me that appears to be a different philosophical problem.

I'd wouldn't mind seeing a requirement that domain names can't be resold for more than $50 (or whatever) to prevent people from registering reallycooldomain.com in the hopes of selling to Really Cool Company for a king's ransom without preventing people from making ad money on silly typos. If your intent is to generate revenue through ads, I can't hate your business model but if your intent is to hold a domain ransom as a speculative investment I get annoyed. I'm not sure why I don't hate people who buy real estate in emerging development areas...

I suppose the free flow of the internet will eventually correct the problem. As soon as companies stop paying ransoms to squatters and as soon as dyslexic browsers stop clicking their accidentally-found links I would think these squatter/parking companies will start to disappear. As long as it's profitable, they'll fight to keep their businesses alive.

Exactly.

[Ayanami Rei]

Like a plugin that checks the netblock of the result of a DNS lookup on a URL... if it's in a range of known parking sites or phising sites, it'd throw up an appropriate error/blocked page.

That'd be a neat extension to have.

Quick Summary

[cgreuter]

Quick summary:

Typically, people buy lots of domains that look interesting, point them at crappy ad-covered pages and collect the loot. Unfortunately, this isn't working as well anymore, to the point where they have had to resort to putting in actual content (horrors!).

So $GUY has come up with the, um, brilliant idea of replacing the crappy ad-covered page with a crappy ad-covered wiki-thing (with an all-your-base-are-belong-to-us license) in the hope that valuable content will miraculously appear and bring in more users to his zillions of misleading domain names.

VC money is changing the parking business

[miller60]

Rosenblatt's company, Demand Media, is the best illustration of how the domain business is changing. Domain parking used to be dominated by a fairly small community of "domainers," who bought up one-word or two-word domains, filled them with ads, and made money off type-in traffic and misspellings. That all changed in early 2005 when a public company, Marchex, paid $165 million to buy a huge portfolio of names from a Hong Kong domain speculator. Suddenly everyone wanted to be a domainer and make millions. Sales of new domains surged, and resale prices rose.

But soon Google and Yahoo, who provide most of the ads on parked sites, found that click-throughs from parked pages often didn't lead to sales, and many advertisers didn't want to buy AdWords and then have them show up on these sites with no content. Some of the largest parking services began switching to a pay-per-action business model, instead of pay-per-click.

Meanwhile, venture capital firms started pumping money into the sector, buying up registrars (like Demand Media's deals for eNom and BulkRegister) and large domain portfolios. Vector Capital bought Register.com, and Perot has a piece of Internet REIT. The VCs and Wall Street investors prefer to monetize their domains with developed web sites instead of parked pages. Many of them are using free user generated content to populate these sites with articles and forums linked to their target keywords. Google likes these sites better, and they appear to get more relevant traffic and click-throughs.

But there will always be plenty of smaller operators with thousands of single-page ad-filled parked domains. The low price of domains means there's virtually no barrier for entry into this business, and that's not likely to change anytime soon.

I hate domain parking...

[Grinin]

Domain parking is a way for large companies to be able to purchase up any name they can think of, and variants of actual domain names in order to spread ads spyware and crap to the consumers. Also, they have much bigger purchasing power than the common consumer who may just want to purchase a domain name for their family web site or something similar. Then they realize they will have to purchase a domain from one of these big companies for hundreds if not thousands of dollars, when they could have originally purchased it for $15 or less. ITs frustrating and ultimately its just a bunch of bells and whistles which don't get the end user who was using "direct navigation" anywhere closer to finding what they were looking for... Just more and more AdSense click thru's.

Not a bad way to make a living

[Russian Art]

And why not I ask?
-------
Buy Russian Art

How about a potential SOLUTION?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why doesn't Google make it their policy to NOT allow junk sites, and a Craigslist style "report this link" button next to each result? Subject to a google-employee review of course. This way if a site gets enough flags per-clicks, someone will review it and blacklist it for awhile (not permanently in case someone else buys it later). Thoughts?

-nosebreaker.com

Re:One can only hope. (anecdotal)

[naoursla]

konabikes.com looks like the UK site for the real company.

Re:One can only hope. (anecdotal)

[naoursla]

Oh wait, that was konabikes.co.uk.

nevermind...

Re:One can only hope. (anecdotal)

[Anonymous Coward]

Check this out: www.opendns.org

Junk bonds of the web

[Nefarious Wheel]

Yes, these parked domains are the junk bonds of the web. Surprised we don't see more of them as image-based spaaaaAAAARGGGHH (sound of poster breaking his own typing thumbs with a hammer)

Both sides of the coin...

[msimm]

Parking is certainly frustration (as is flat-out speculation, their are some good domain names that I'd love to pickup to at *real* content to that are registered and completely unused).

But the reality is that parking *is* a business model that can generate real revenue. Obviously it's not suited for everyone (I'd never do it, but I'll probably never make large sums of money on all manner of convoluted principle). The difference here is that if you remove all the buzz-words from the article what you have *is* something moderately interesting. The idea is to make the sites useful. Whether it will work or not remains to be seen (wehow does look a lot like your average parking domain).

But its a new approach to an old business model and sometimes change is good. Besides (largely) the internet is self-correcting. If the sites don't add value the model fails, or the revolution simply fails to come. Read: status quo.

But the best case scenario is worth watching. There are literally hundreds of thousands of such sites. Maybe, if he's smart enough, something useful will emerge from what is essentially monetized trash.

Time will tell.

Re: OT sig

[iangoldby]

Parent's sig:

ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.

ad digicam Claiming a proposition is true, and that you have the tapes to prove it.

Real-estate speculators are investors

[vinn01]

investment - the act of investing; laying out money or capital with the expectation of profit.

Sounds like every situation that you mentioned.
It's not "gaming the system?", profit *is* the system. Did you fail ECON 101?

Re:One can only hope. (anecdotal)

[MrScience]

Well, if you were looking for a Kona Cladera, you might try searching for "Kona Cladera" ;)

A Cunning Idea: A FireFox Plugin ...

[BillGatesLoveChild]

... that checks parked domains against a block list. If it's in the block list, no web site.

It means no ad revenue for domain parking scum.

It discourages people from buying parked domains, because of the 12 month purgatory in taking them out of the blocklist!

Are you serious? One word for you...

[tacokill]

Arbitrage.

You may not like it but capitalism doesn't really care.

Taking advantage of users

[ragingmime]

That's when the lightning bolt hit me: You'd have a company that generates its own traffic, generates its own content, and monetizes itself. It would be the perfect lazy-man's media company!"

In consideration of having your work posted on the Site for any period of time, You grant eHow a perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, transmit, distribute, publicly perform and display, and create derivative works of the Content, in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, to make, have made, import, and sell the Content, and to sublicense all of the foregoing rights (including the right to grant further such sublicenses)."

So he sees social networking not as a way to give users voices or a place to share ideas, but as a way to monetize them and to get users to generate free content. People aren't going to use a site that treats its users like free content machines and not people, especially not when there are sites like Blogger and Livejournal that give users control over their content and don't post ads. Even the ad-filled Facebook always makes sure to keep users informed, respond to feedback, and keep the ads to a reasonable level. If you don't respect your users, they'll quickly find someplace else to go.

Also, why in the world do we need another social networking site? There have been tons of competitors to MySpace and Facebook, and none of them have really caught on. Remember that this guy didn't develop MySpace; he just found a way to make lots of money by selling it.

The arrogance of this guy's plan to get users to do the work for him while he makes bundles of money is astounding, and I don't think that people will stand for it.

Re: GoDaddy just the tip of the iceberg

[Guanine]

If you want a fascinating read about grabbing an expiring domain, you might be interested in an excellent article by Mike Davidson about that very topic. There are a few legitimate businesses who specialize taking advantage of the loopholes in ICANN's expiration process. Really cool stuff.

Everyone should search on 30 domain names per day

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone should search on (at least) 30 new domain names per day

Fill the bilges with swill - keep searching - keep searching - keep the scoopers busy...

Nothing to see folks

[fm6]

Please. It's hard enough to enforce the rules we already have. Detecting "loops" amongst the millions of domains that exist would be fiendishly expensive — and the cost of fighting the resulting lawsuits would be even more expensive.

Which reminds me how we got into this stupid mess in the first place. When the web first took off, TLDs cost $50 a year. This outraged a lot of technohippies with too much time on their hands, so they crusaded for more competition in the registry field. And they got it. So now you can register a domain for a few bucks, and you can get discounts for registering a large number of domains at once. So domain squatters pull out the dictionary and the typo generation software, and grab all the likely domains. So now you can renew your domain for a few bucks a year — but for any really useful domain name, you'll have to spend thousands just to get it.

The smart thing would have been to keep the $50 annual fee or even raised it. (Yeah, Network Solutions didn't deserve that much. So what? If that bugs you, make them pay a cut to charity or something.) If you really need a top level domain, you can afford that much. If your pockets aren't that deep, get a second-level domain from your hosting provider. The one I used in those days gave me one for free.

So now that we've "fixed" the original problem, you want to fix the fix? Let's leave bad enough alone.

Re:Nothing to see folks

[Divebus]

I can totally see the lawsuits over domain names. If we can get these mobius loop domains classified as spam, then something could be done. The idea behind them is to deceive visitors and deny the use of large swaths of domain names to the planet. I say put them on their own TLD which could be easily filtered. Make it .ADV and let them beat themselves to death. They can even keep the domain name, it just won't be .COM. If the common user finds those sites useful, by all means use them. If the common user chooses to ignore those sites, tick the checkbox on Google or Yahoo to ignore .ADV results, or set your browser to block .ADV links. Done. It's not dissimilar to the move toward .XXX domains.

Re:One can only hope. (anecdotal)

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhhh... the #1 link on Google is to konaworld.com..

Seriously though, Google search terms are the domain names of the future. No one remembers specific URLs except for sites they visit frequently or those lucky enough to get a good domain from the start.

I have a simple solution for google....

[glesga_kiss]

The solution to this is easy. Give users a "never see results from this domain again" link against each result. Then when we come across an aggregator we can add it to our personal blacklist. People could then share these blacklists amongst themselves. Self-censorship is not censorship, so it's far better than just outright blocking them, and it's less of a legal liability too for Google.

Re:One can only hope. (anecdotal)

[ErroneousBee]

With hindsight, I realised that, but looking at the search results it was obviously a shop website and not the manufactures specsheet, so I assumed it was a reseller, ignored it, and started using url-fu to locate a manufacturers site.

You can repeat this for other items where the manufacturers website is a bit obscure, e.g. "iaudio 5" links to cowon systems (who make the iaudio range, but a casual shopper may not realise that).

Re:One can only hope. (anecdotal)

[bitingduck]

I had friends who had a non profit web site and they missed a renewal, the domain was immediately grabbed by porn spammers and they even used the site's original graphics. The generated site was probably entirely automated.

I deal with that sort of thing by keeping all my domains on my snapnames "get me this domain" list-- they don't charge you unless you get the domain, and since I already own them and set them to renew, it shouldn't cost anything. But if something stupid happens (credit card in the autorenew thing expires while I'm in a coma for 6 months) then at least theres at least some attempt to keep the domain.