[NA-Discuss] The societal harm of domaining, episode 413

[Nat Cohen]

Hi David,

If I may chime in-

A scalper buys a ticket from a pool of tickets that are limited in number
and that have a limited useful life - usually a couple of hours on a
particular date.  The ticket provides access to, and a source of funding to
support the production of, exclusive content provided by a presenter who
charges a fee to experience that content - be it a concert, a performance,
a race, a fight, etc.

In contrast, the pool of domain names are nearly infinite in number, the
useful life is indefinite, and the domain names are not sold by the owners
of exclusive content as the exclusive means to access that content.  Domain
names are an alias for an online IP address.  They are sold by a registry
provider whose job it is to match certain contact information and name
servers with a particular domain name.  The character of domain names is
much more similar to physical real estate which can be bought and sold many
times in the resale market.  The role of a domain name registry is akin to
that of a land registry not a concert promoter.

In the past couple of weeks, I acquired lentes.com (Spanish for glasses)
from the registrant who lives in Mexico and lentesdesol.com (sunglasses in
Spanish) from the registrant who lives in Colombia.  They both no longer
had a need for those domain names and valued the cash that I offered them
more highly than continuing to own those domain names.  I hope to sell
these domain names for more than I paid for them.  In what way is this free
functioning of the secondary market a problem or akin to ticket scalping?

Regards,

Nat



On Thu, Feb 11, 2021 at 8:10 AM David Mackey <mackey361 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Evan,
>
> Thanks for the information.
>
> Just curious, do you think the Ticketmaster/Scalper relationship
> (primary/secondary market) for tickets is analogous to domain name markets?
>
> Cheers,
> David
>
> On Thu, Feb 11, 2021 at 12:36 AM Evan Leibovitch <evan at telly.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> More grist for the mill -- why and how domaining hurts small business and
>> entrepreneurs, and how it extracts value rather than adds:
>> http://www.circleid.com/posts/20210210-now-we-know-why-its-hard-to-get-a-com/
>>
>> All you domain speculators who fancy yourselves marketing experts and are
>> camped out in NARALO because, I would guess,  no other constituency will
>> have you .... your turn. I see that some have already posted lame rebuttals
>> on CircleID, read them and have a chuckle. (It's still noteworthy that
>> nobody I know in ICANN-land defends the practice except those with direct
>> financial interest in it.)
>>
>> (And thank you to the kind NARALO member who found the article, figuring
>> that I might have more fun posting it here than they would. You're probably
>> right.)
>>
>> Disclosure: I have never accepted money from AT&T or any other telco or
>> ISP for that matter. My shitty mobile provider won't even give me a decent
>> discount, but the others are no better. I did win a T-shirt a few years ago
>> from SiriusXM, does that count?
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada
>> @evanleibovitch / @el56
>>
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