Slashdot Mirror
The Man Who Owns the Internet
Tefen writes "CNN Money posted this story about Kevin Ham, who has made a fortune gobbling up lapsed domain names and has recently launched a lucrative business partnership with Cameroon, the country which controls the .cm TLD. Since 2000 he has quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue."
Sensational much?
This seems to be an obvious case of multimillion dollar fraud yet I can see how it would be difficult to investigate and prove. And what few people know is that he's also the man behind the domain world's latest scheme: profiting from traffic generated by the millions of people who mistakenly type ".cm" instead of ".com" at the end of a domain name And advertisers accept his claims of legitimate page views without any skepticism? I get the feeling that the American investment money and the government subidies going into online conglomerates are being seriously screwed.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Slashdot owns the internet...
how much revenue will he lose? Of course not all real websites of interest are correctly spelled English words. Nevertheless an extension to Firefox that would avoid these SEO squat sites would not be too hard.
I can't believe you didn't use PWNS in the title of this story! I want my money back ;P !
So, you're typing in a URL and you make an error.
And you end up at a page with nothing but ads. Lots of ads. Ads for EVERYTHING. Ads all over the place.
Does ANYONE here click on ANY of those ads?
If so, why?
I thought this guy owned the Internet.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
CNN is just reprinting a Business 2.0 article - how hard is it to attribute things properly? It's not quite as bad as crediting "Yahoo" for AP news stories, but still...
REDDIT
Take a look at http://weddingshoes.com/ it's a very good link farm. I would click on those links if I really wanted wedding shoes.
Not anymore different than Al Gore "inventing" the Internet. I wouldn't be surprised if Al filed a lawsuit to protect his invention. :P
NUTS to CBS
Block outgoing TCP packets on port 80 to these IP addresses:
64.20.33.115
64.20.33.131
64.20.49.210
64.40.116.41
66.45.231.154
69.46.226.166
204.13.160.26
204.13.160.129
208.254.26.132
208.254.26.140
209.200.153.152
216.34.131.135
217.68.70.69
That should get rid of many pages you get to when you type "typos".
Having been on the wrong side of 'cybersquatters' this is an issue close to my heart. I wouldn't mind if these people took a domain and did something useful with it, but instead they just plaster it with advertising and watch the cash roll in.
Am not even that bitter (it wasn't even me that lost the domain but the previous owner of my site), what makes me angry is the way these people just leech ad views without giving anything back. Scummy blighters, the lot of them!
Problem is what should be done about these people? It's not as if the government(s) of the world are competent enough to deal with problems like these (tubes anyone). ICANN is the organisation we should turn to: perhaps make a rule that the owner of a domain has to actually do something with it within a set period of time (say 6 months to a year). If all they've done in that time is plaster it in advertising (or have done nothing) it should return to the pool, perhaps with a bar disallowing the ghastly spammer from buying it again for a year.
This is pretty controversial and I suppose if someone pays for something they have a right to do what they like with it. That doesn't detract from the fact that these people are like parasites, filling the Internet with rubbish and getting in the way of those of us who just want to provide a service.
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
Wonder if he's got a Dalek in his basement?
Early on, he wrote software to snag expiring names on the cheap.
Since spam introduces meaningless noise in email, isn't what this guy is doing introducing meaningless noise in the DNS system? Maybe an RFC is needed to further and more specifically define such worthless noise and abuse in the DNS system.
Ham is a devout Christian, and he spends $31,000 to add Christianrock.com to his collection, which already includes God.com and Satan.com.
Why is that not surprising...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Sorry to double-post but I missed something in TFA that /.ers might need to be aware of:
(emphasis mine) Patent application?! He's patenting being a scummy bastard and redirecting .com domains to .cm? Wow, just wow.
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
I gave my credit card to my gf. Someone buy this domain quick!
"Ham Just As Bad As Spam"
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Is a "squatter filter". Basically, it should work like the phishing filter in Firefox, but detect squatters. If you go to a domain that a squatter took, for example, bluemicro.net*, it would give a (built in) page warning that the domain was taken by a squatter.
I would love this as I've noticed many of my users actually click links or use the search box on those "search sites" when they mistype a domain (I read the logs, it happens several times a day). Anything to help prevent these assholes from making money off of that would be awesome.
* Does anyone know of a mirror? Their host file was pretty good.
"The Federal Reserve is a fraudulent system."--Lew Rockwell
End The FED. -
hehe. no text
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Mixed amongst these junk domains are some great names that deserve to be developed, and will be if they are available. Unfortunately, the bottom-feeders of the online world have control of this vast assortment of names, which they are essentially holding largely for ransom purposes. I think that's a scummy way to make a living. But it's possible so long as annual registration fees are less than the small amounts of revenue that can be generated through generic google adsense programs and their ilk.
I would love to see the price of annual registration hit the point where, say, the guy who owns "waterfalls.com" would have to develop it in a meaningful way or surrender it. Sitting on a domain and putting up generic ads should be a losing proposition financially, and an increased annual fee would correct this situation and work to the public good.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
because the submitted of the story had to search through 2 days worth of GARBAGE on digg to find it!
duh!
This whole selling of other people's domains without permission is BS.
Big corporations can protect their property through the courts via trademark etc. So obviously one cannot just arbitrarily use someone elses domain... if that someone else has the money and legal talent to protect it.
But many people and small companies can't. Obviously some people can protect their domains from being sold/ripped off to speculators and complete strangers.
What makes these internet registrars think they can sell off someone else's intellectual property?
Sure - I can understand turning off TLD DNS resolution for a domain that is not paying for the service, but selling it to someone else? Bullshit. Complete Bullshit.
If the owner wants to use it again with that registrar, then pay them to "light" it back up again.
Registrars have no business selling other people's domains.
It's no different from owning any other commercial real estate. The profits are great at the moment, but it can all suddenly turn.
Just as it would be unacceptable for a town to have its main street full of empty shops, so it might be that long-term parked, unused domain names may become an unwanted scenario and fines or increased fees could be imposed.
Not really a very sustainable business model in the long term, methinks.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Now it does.
Somebody is paying for all those clicks, and they're probably not getting much actual business from them. Advertisers are getting fed up with paying for "clicks", just as they did with "banner views" a few years back. The trend is towards paying only for actual sales directly derived from an ad. That's what "Google Checkout" is really about.
It's not hard to filter out typosquatting sites. We do it with SiteTruth, which tries to find the real-world business behind the web site, and down-rates the ones where it can't be found. Almost all the typosquatting sites are anonymous. Some of them have reasonably high Google rankings, because they have inbound links, but as soon as you look behind the facade of the web site, it's clear there's nothing behind them.
With all this "domaining", link-based page rank is no longer meaningful for small and medium business sites. With hundreds of thousands of phony domains, all linking to each other, a growing fraction of business links are just noise. Search engines try to filter out this stuff, but it's like spam filtering; it mostly works, but isn't airtight. With a high volume of junk sites, enough bad links get through to affect ranking.
The other two web-based sources of credibility, user-provided ratings and blogs, are also collapsing. Blog spam is a huge problem. Not only do existing blogs get spammed, millions of automatically created dummy blogs full of spam have been created. Until recently, user provided ratings had some credibility, but now there's a Collactive, which has a sort of spam engine for ratings, Digg, Reddit, and such. (Their slogan: "It's good to be popular").
Amusingly, in this world of spam, Usenet, where spam began, has become almost spam-free.
Really, taking up domain names for typos, or just about anything other than actually creating a developed website is just plain breaking the internet. If the domain doesn't lead to a website of any worth to the user, it should return "not found" not send you to some boiler-plate trash loaded with keywords and ads.
I'd love to see some system that detects these sites and delivers you a simple 404-ish message for a typoed domain or one that has fallen out of use and been replaced by a squatter. Really cut out that ad revenue from accidental page views.
Anybody know of any sort of firefox plugin for such things?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Here's a simple, fair and elegant way to fix this: .com domains that one entity can own to, say, 100.
Limit the number of different
Why would any company own more domains?
So essentially, Firefox is using the URL field as a search entry box for Google, and sending you to the first site that Google returns. You can try it yourself by typing in multiple words in the URL box and comparing to the same words on your preferred search engine. I've since started using this as a shortcut for some Google searches (it skips the search result page).
Isn't OpenDNS a solution against this? I set it up on my router years ago and I think that's what prevents me from going to random sites (food.cm forwards me to foodnetwork.com) most of the time.
If people will click on the ads on a site because it's exactly what they're searching for, then the ad site has actually provided a service. In the case of palmsprings.com, I looked, and it is a collection of ad banners for lots of tourist stuff, but actually organized with category links leading to more ad filled pages. I wouldn't call that fraud. That is a service like a decentralized yellow pages.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you read the article, you find that this guy took a whole list of registered domains for any given day, compared them with a list from the previous day, and figured out which domains had expired. He then apparently used some sort of automated registration script to grab the domains that had expired.
.com, .net and .org domains of my family name. The .com is currently taken, but expires in about a month. If what I read is correct, some slimebag domainer will use their lists and bots to automatically register the domain name I want mere seconds after its expiration.
I want to register the
All registrars should prohibit scripted registrations by using human verification picture codes. In the mean time, I need to figure out how to make sure I can instantly register the domain I want.
I think the preposterous nature of the heading was a fair give-away that it was a title and not a fact. But...thanks for clearing that up? ;)
Quack, quack.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Once advertisers switch to pay-per-sale from pay-per-click these people will disappear. They provide next to no value and routinely snap up useful names and host garbage on them.
For example, look at libtomcrypt.org. The links there have NOTHING to do with LibTomCrypt. Someone looking for my projects will be disappointed to find links to random commercial shit [most of which is snake oil]. Of course in that case I didn't care about the domain [after Dan Kaminsky failed to renew it, it was taken by a usenet troll, then lapsed again and was immediately bought by the domainer].
Personally I wish all the worst in the world for this person. He spends his time and energy ruining what was supposed to be a good and just goal of widespread communication and equality. If he thinks he's a "good person" he's sadly mistaken.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Similar to http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032542/site/newsweek/
If you link to something from there, I'd expect Newsweek to get the byline, not MSNBC.
Ya know, with all the hype around Creative Commons, I'd expect slashdot editors (I know, I know) to pay more attention to getting the attribution right....
Kevin Bacon
Is Kevin Ham related in some way to Kevin Bacon? I wonder if there's a Kevin Pork or a Kevin Prosciutto out there somewhere...
"It's not as if the government(s) of the world are competent enough to deal with problems like these (tubes anyone)."
This smear is getting as tired as the old "Al Gore claimed to invent the Internet" one.
People working in an industry that routinely and without irony refers to "pipes", "sockets", "channels" and "flow" to describe data internetworking are in no position to laugh at people who (quite correctly) describe the Internet's structure as a "series of tubes".
Also, I seem to recall this little US Government agency called ARPA.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
This is a perfect example of why domain names should not be a commodity that can be hoarded and resold. Currently, .au domains can't be sold or auctioned, they can only be leased from accredited registrars. AFAIK, the auDA is the only domain authority that gets this right, I just hope they keep it that way.
By reading this signature, you hereby agree with the content of the above comment.
"generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue" although the actual numbers are more like a couple hundred grand AT MOST. This is a market fluff piece blathering on about how it could be a goldmine but nobody can prove it other than he has a nice flat. Next article was about how someone invented cold fusion but couldnt show it to the public for fear of the power companies killing them. Yawn.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Get help, seriously. It's not healthy to walk around with all that anger.
Please get psychiatric help.
Yeah, that's it. Yep. Innovation. So.... would anyone else like to join me in tagging this story "dieinafire"? v.v
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I remember when I had the website hardcorelinux.com - a fairly popular linux website back in the day - until I suffered a number of personal and financial setbacks and in the process my domain name expired and was yoinked from me. The site became a viagra-selling website and now it's a link referrer for software and oil and gas(?).
The problem I have with squatters are they hang on to domain names and do nothing with them. It becames another piece of internet flotsam, and it offers no value to anyone.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
As it's creator, Al Gore has first dibs...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
A far more Fair and Balanced headline would read:
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
That old thing again? How absolutely DROLL!
I mean, everyone knows he never said he invented the internet. If I'm wrong, find the quote, and it's original publication. Good luck.
BTW, Did you know that the legislation wandering around Washington in the late 80s to open arpanet up to the public was referred to around town as "the Gore Bill?"
Any more I can shoot down for you?
Oh, one more thing, if you want some current data about the winds of politics, check out this poll from MSNBC:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10562904/
If that asshole were the owner of the internet he would be redirecting all the wrong links to his own page. /. FUGS!!!!!
?
Seriously, the more I read, the stronger I feel that the current domain name system is broken beyond repair.
We need to find a way to get rid of the domain name system for web usage.
Anyone have any ideas on that?
when a domain expires, he squats on it and pays to register it in his name or his company's name. Then he puts up a dummy web site with advertising on it that looks like original content that pays him for click throughs so when someone surfs to an expired domain name, they think it is the original web page and start clicking links.
Then when someone has a company of the same name, or sees that their domain expired and they didn't renew it in time, he will offer to sell it to them for a few thousand dollars. If he needs money he just auctions off some domain names on eBay, and when those expire he buys them back cheaper and tries to sell it again.
This looks like it is more profitable than trading stocks. Just start buying off expired domain names for like $35 for a full year with a domain parking service that allows you to place advertising on it. Then sell the domain for thousands to some company that wants it that badly.
I think this guy and guys like him are the reason why we can't get six letter domain names anymore and have to opt for twelve or twenty letter domain names.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
He's winning monopoly with the internet? What's boardwalk, www.com?
that caught a fat one!
for you to respond to such a comment, you have been trolled.
congratulations, go smoke a fag.
your access to the Anonymous account has been suspended: report to your nearest Freeman Beurough for compulsory Voluntary training to read digg.com.
Alrighty, so an interesting piece of slashdot trivia.
How does this post get a +4 funny, when another post, #19247463, says almost the exact same thing and gets a -1?
I ask this because these two posts were literally one above the other.
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
I just got www.kevinhamsucks.com :D
On the Karmic scale this guy is marginally above Nigerian Investment scammers, and about par with spammers, which I guess makes him like people reselling essays to students. The good news is he's definitely above cigarette companies and pedophiles. Way to go Kevin! And for all his 'I'm a devout Christian' PR, what a waste of a life. This guy adds nothing to life on this planet. If he disappeared tomorrow, life for everyone else would be the same or better.
The people who used to sell used cars or deal drugs have all moved onto the Internet.
"ads everywhere" - but at least AdWords are unobtrusive and targetted. (cf: billboards and product-placements are worse)
ICANN has no motivation to refuse the money anyway.
PS: it sucks to lose a domain name. I almost lost mine. It was through my own mistake, but that wasn't exactly... um... reassuring at the time.
I didn't find any Al Gore jokes in this thread. I'm shocked.
Damn dude, relax. Your hero will live to fight another day even with this assault on his personal messiah complex.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
If advertisers (The suckers who pay Google good money for their word adds) switch on their brain then they will soon realise that their advertising budget needs to be reviewed urgently. At this rate most impressions of Google powered add words only get lost in nowhere land or only serve to create create irritation. I don't even see them anymore. Click - Squatter site - oops - back button - done. I could not possibly tell you if there were adds on that page or what they were.
Once advertisers realise they are being ripped off then this anomaly will automatically stop. After all, the money gained by these domainers comes straight out of the pockets of advertisers. Advertisers should demand from Google to keep their adds impressions well away from domainer sites where they don't do any good anyway. Something that would be very easy for Google to do.
So, I see this as a temporary problem, keep an eye out for the first wholesale domain name lists coming on the market soon.
I really hoped that this would be about L. Bob Rife.
-- QED
These days the registrar "buys" any domains theit clients let expire. You can thank ICANN for this.
It's even worse than that. Most of the ICANN accredited "registrars" are domain squatters who paid the fee to become a registrar so they could get a bulk rate, bulk Whois access, and the ability to do "domain tasting". Really. Take a look at the list.
Some fun registrar names:
Which is why I keep saying, registrars should be prohibited from being squatters, domain brokers, or anything BUT purely registrars. They should not be allowed to own any domains not directly connected to the registrar business, nor have any shady business connections. Any registrar caught brokering domains under a side business, or in any way being less than squeaky-clean, should have their ICANN status revoked.
Yeah, I know that's not gonna fly.. they're too used to making too much money with it.
A person does learn to be VERY cautious about checking whether a domain is registered or not, because some registrars are suspect for snapping up any domain name that gets checked more than a few times.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Now when did Mel Gibson start posting here? How's it goin', Sugar Tits, eh?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This guy is just a figure-head. The real owner of the Internet is of course Henry van Statten.
yes, no, itsatrap, Internet
That is a real business case...Actually he is urging forward the hole Internet and ad industry.
The registrar is selling you the right to have your domain in the global DNS, and as such can revoke it at any time. This is why the domain market is so strange (and I've been involved with it in different ways for 12 years now). People have spent huge amounts of money on more intangible things but not many, and ultimately domain disputes can all be solved simply by pointing out my first sentence. It's like Dutch Tulip Mania. Hmm, I registered dutchtulipmania.com years ago, now it's parked with GoDaddy, which goes to show.
How come a bunch of operating system vendors haven't got together yet and set up their own DNS-like system?
...generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue
/. every single day even without sensational headlines. Please ?
A bunch of domain names and $70 millions and you think that guy "owns the Internet"? Do you how much revenue some Internet-only companies generate?
I promise to read
No, .cm does not stand for cambodia, it stands for cameroon. And no, he is not registering domains in that TLD. He made a deal with the local registar to put a wildcard on *.cm, so _all_ queries for names not existing in .cm would redirect to his agoga service.
I envy this guy too, but he played by the rules. unfortunately the rules do not state that everything you do should be make the web better. Good on him!
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
And how is it different from the page you wanted to go to covered in ads?
I lost my domain xsrv.org after +12yr of registration. First some hell when I needed to let it expire because Internic (Network Solutions) could not transfer it after I called them roughly FIVE times from Belgium. I transferred it over to Joker; I am very satisfied about the service until lately I did not receive any renewal mail about xsrv.org; I did about the xsrv.net and .com domains so I took them ALL THREE and I renewed them immediately.
.be (government ID) correspondence is still blocked completely. I didn't look in the matter immediately since xsrv.org was also hosted on the same network/same DNS server; so it all looked "fine" to me. It's currently hosting a search-engine poisoning engine.
.org to .net and have plentoria of documents with my regular normal "home" xsrv.org domain in it; which is bothering me even more... He interrupted my personal communications for almost a half year now!
xsrv.org failed and yet again I have not received a mail from that robot. A few weeks later I started to discover a spam-decrease and the missing end-of-the-month mailing list digests which I normally receive on my xsrv.org domain. Stuff stopped functioning as it should be functioning and I did not receive my regular correspondence; even my
Some while later the xsrv.org domain has been taken by Mr. Wilson; of the Wilson group. I've notified the WIPO about it and they tell I got a strong case about this; even in such matter that he could bail out before the panel decides. Still, it's a costly procedure to start this and I'd like to get my domain back in a normal way; without paying the $1000 RANSOM to Mr. Wilson ; or without getting it back by force using the WIPO with $1500. It's a double edged sword; both costing money; although the WIPO would sound lots more fair to me since his name *WILL* get published on their website.. I swear !
Don't break open my mouth about these people doing business like this; this guy took my house and he will be evicted from it; still I am wondering how this will be happening in a best and easy possible way without hurting MY OWN wallet about this. I am still not done changing everything from
I already notified his and our registry about this; no changes happened yet..
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I'd probably pay $300m not to be called Kevin Ham.
I thought it was Al Gore who owns the internet.
This isn't the guy! He lives in an underground complex and collects alien artifacts and has a live Dalek in his basement!
http://timcol6.freehostia.com/
I've seen a lot of constructive solutions on here for dealing with these bottom-feeders. So here's my $.02 Maybe it would make sense to make domain names non-transferable. When you're done with it, it goes back in the pool, period. No transfer to another entity allowed. Wouldn't do much for typosquatters or ad farms, but It would make it pointless to buy a bunch of domains and sit on them, knowing you have no way of transferring them to a buyer.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There's another guy who does this. I think his name is Thunayan Al-Ghanim (calls himself Elequa). His company: Future Media Architects buys up tons of domains especially 3 letter and smaller domains in mass numbers. He then just holds them. For no reason, doesn't even re-sell them. He has made a few of them into functioning websites like dj.net but for the most part he just buys them up to hold them. Why? It really pisses me off that people like this are grabbing all the candy and then not even eating. Just buying domains only so other people can't have them. Should be illegal.
A .com domain I had for 7 years lapsed due to an error by my ISP.
I couldn't afford the £100 to get it out of its suspended state so I had to let it be deleted before I could re-purchase it for £10.
On the day of the deletion I found a search engine host site had bought it.
I reported it to icann and they told me an interesting trick.
Use a WHOIS tool to see who had my site.
These companies put up the lapsed site automatically and see if there is any web traffic on it. If after 5-7 days it's unvisited the company can get a refund. Yes they actually get their money back for registering the domain and so can try 'baiting the hook' with another lapsed domain.
Of course when it gets deleted, another company takes up the game...
My site went through 5 different domain 'stealers' every 5 days before finally I could re-purchase my domain again!
Seemingly this is happening hundreds of times a day. And all because it doesn't really cost them anything!
Not many people seem to know this...
Stuart http://stuarthalliday.com/
Quit tap-dancing around the issue with the PC names for he-who-must-not-be-named-on-internet-discussion-b
I propose a corollary to Godwin's Law. As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of Godwin's law being mentioned approaches 1.
Anyone have a good way to recursively embed Godwin's Law within itself? That would save a lot of time fooling around with instances of meta-meta-Godwin laws being invoked, like this post.
-V-
Who can decide a priori? Nobody.
-Sartre
I don't know if you did this on purpose, but this is a spambait "search" page.
Man, you really need that seminar!
All this time I thought SPAM owned the Internet, and in the end is actually Ham? who would have thought that?
Am i right?
but aren't we all :)
But, if it does, the person who sold it to you has effectively "lost" that appreciation.
Its called opportunity cost (aka: money left on the table). Yea, you lose that. So what? Presumably, you sold your IBM because you had a better investment (even if it's just cash) so what's the problem? Aside from you confusing the futures market (and valuation) with the equities market (and valuation), you might have a point. But you totally miss the point of WHY a person sells an investment. Both parties can create wealth independently of each other...
People have vastly different beliefs about the efficiency of our markets, but I believe that any sort of "wealth creation" would have already been price into the asset that you are purchasing.
And you would be right. The stock market is the most efficient "pricer" of value in the world. Changes in underlying value (ie: news, earnings, etc) are almost immediately priced into the stock. When you buy a stock, you aren't buying what is already known. You are buying the future of that company.
Methinks you need to read a little bit more about investments. By your post, I can only conclude that you don't have any idea what you are talking about.
I'll agree that unused trademarks are an artificial barrier to the registration of new marks. In that way your analogy works.
In terms of a speculative commodity, real estate is a much better analogy.
Do you have any idea how many unused trademarks companies like IBM register in a given year? Yet there are still plenty of untrademarked words to go around?
Because you think that your use is more noble and just, doesn't mean that some supreme being should give you the domain name that you desire.
The Internet is fundamentally broken because it is 99.9% dead link, parked pages. Whoever was in charge of the DNS naming system should be jailed for mismanagement.
Intead of intelligent searching like a google or yahoo, the DNS domain names are the search links. That is very bad design.
Probably some bonehead MBA screwed that up. Their should be a 'managed' domain extension with me in charge. I would immediately cancel all dead links and cancel all 'goto' rerouting. Whoever wanted domain name that is currently an undeveloped dead sales link, it would be transfered for no more than $5. Otherwise the current method is search DECEPTION big time.
Also a gazillion of domain names now exist on Spam lists so they are essentially useless, but the buyer does not know this. And that is false advertizing. There definately need to be some major lawsuits to clean up the mismanagement.
There are no free markets, only managed markets, so why not properly manage the internet domain names?
Score & Karma: SASA: Slashdot Approval Seekers Anonymous
Doh! It wasn't there when I hit reply! Honest! Besides, mine IS funnier. So nerr.
Make that... was funnier :(
Real-estate is generally bought, developed, and sold at a profit. Net good happens there.
I don't go along with your assumption that, just because someone is willing to pay for it, "net good" occurred. We'd be much better off with a lot more nature and a lot less real estate development. Domain squatting doesn't destroy anything, the way development does.
The problem is that names can be registered and more so the fact that they are considered property, instead of allowing for various authorities providing DIFFERENT identities corresponding to the names. We should get a multitude of roots that accept registrations for names instead of just one. This would eliminate the domain name as a property and would allow everyone to use any name they want as long as they provide an authority that gives them it.
Imagine if every human was *forced* to use a different first name? It would need to be unique and can't be a derivative. Imagine if you could control who can use your name and where. Same thing. The current system with domain names is unnatural to human society.
I call for alternative root dns servers and URLs that include the DNS-root in them, or a setting in the browsers where you can specify what roots you use. Then if there are multiple choices for a name, you can provide priorities or choose from one authority. -- This way it's upto you whose authority you believe and we don't have a problem with everyone getting the name they want.