[At-Large] - Price caps - was: The Case for Regulatory Capture at ICANN | Review Signal Blog

[Karl Auerbach]

Here's one, anecdotal, data point:  My first internet company went 
online in the mid 1980's.  And our present main company has been on the 
internet since around 1993.  We have a three-letter name in .com.   Over 
that span of time we have never once found that we had to "jump through 
hoops" to acquire a domain name that was being held by another for 
speculative purposes.

I can't remember that we ever bought a name from a speculator.

We have, however, found that our competitors have acquired names similar 
to our and have picked up names that we have dropped so that they can 
try to grab customers or, to a decreasing degree, get advertising 
revenue from residual or stray traffic.  I think we once used the UDRP; 
and we have had recourse to international trademark law.  But in the 
main, we just live with it.

We have, of course, had the usual experience of coming up with a name 
idea and found that someone was already using it.  But that's not 
speculation, that's just a normal course of affairs.

In other words, over a period of nearly 35 years of business we have not 
found domain name speculators an impediment to our business.

In fact we've even benefited by selling some of our names to speculators 
- these were names we obtained to pursue some 3-in-the-morning idea that 
we abandoned in the light of day. Sometimes these sales were for amounts 
big enough to buy a Tesla or two.  I'm pretty sure that in the long run 
in most of those instances the speculator lost money.

Do we really want to impose what is in essence a $Billion+ tax on the 
internet every year in the form of fiat registry fees above costs in 
order to fight some chimera of speculation?

         --karl--

On 6/28/19 8:48 AM, John More via At-Large wrote:
> +1
>
> Domain name speculation is very destructive since it requires 
> potential users who have real businesses or needs to jump through 
> hoops and often be blocked from a reasonable domain name.
>