Wouldn't that allow random people to increase your tax on domains you obviously don't want to sell ?
E.g. if you owned and actively used greyface-.com and I'd make an offer of 10 000$ just for the fun of it, either you literally give up your name (I eat the cost but that's a risk I could want to take) or you're stuck with a percent of that to pay every month/year even as nothing else changed for you.
> E.g. if you owned and actively used greyface-.com and I'd make an offer of 10 000$ just for the fun of it, either you literally give up your name (I eat the cost but that's a risk I could want to take) or you're stuck with a percent of that to pay every month/year even as nothing else changed for you.
If you're willing to pay $10000 for it, even if only out of spite, then it's worth that much yeah. The domain is suddenly in more demand than it was, taking it out of circulation is a bigger imposition on society than it was before, so isn't it right that the tax on that goes up?
I'm still not sure it works. If I end up paying for your domain after a malicious move I coukd as well try to milk it out and may recover my cost by burning through your brand image. If I actually got more from it than expected, I'd rince and repeat making people's life miserable. Same way if an attacker got tesla.com by pushing enough, they might extract more value from it than a flailing Tesla could, and the customer base would be worse for it.
As a society I think we don't want to encourage adversarial pricing on taxes, the same way property tax isn't just based on raw demand (or even linked to it at all depending on the country) and has elements of controls to prevent too much gaming of it.
> If I end up paying for your domain after a malicious move I coukd as well try to milk it out and may recover my cost by burning through your brand image. If I actually got more from it than expected, I'd rince and repeat making people's life miserable. Same way if an attacker got tesla.com by pushing enough, they might extract more value from it than a flailing Tesla could, and the customer base would be worse for it.
"Someone might get angry about this tax and do something malicious" is an argument you can make about any kind of tax.
We already have to deal with people squatting domains, and we have laws about trademarks, libel and so on. A tax on valuable domains ought to reduce domain squatting (since it makes it harder to just hold a domain that you're not using, you'd be paying every year) and reduce the market price of domains, which would increase competition and be good for customers. If someone manages to make a viable business out of buying up domains whose owners have been lowballing their value to keep their taxes low, fair play to them, they'll be helping keep everyone honest and keep domains in circulation in the market (but notice that a business like that is only going to be viable if they can sell the domains on to someone who can actually use them pretty quickly, because every year that they're holding them in inventory they're paying the taxes themselves).
> As a society I think we don't want to encourage adversarial pricing on taxes, the same way property tax isn't just based on raw demand (or even linked to it at all depending on the country) and has elements of controls to prevent too much gaming of it.
The current property tax regime is exactly the kind of failure I want to avoid; those "controls" are what leads to all the gaming that locks up our property market and means young people have no hope of ever owning anything. A more raw market-based system would be fairer and more effective.
I know of no truly serious offers for the domain, but why should that matter? I'm pretty sure residences aren't taxed based on un-accepted offers, for example.
At least where I live (California US), that's not true. There are certain things which trigger a change in taxable value, but they're mostly only indirectly connected to appraised value. Un-accepted offers 100% definitely don't factor in and (for reasons already argued by others on this discussion) would probably cause more problems than they would solve if they _were_ taken into account.
You're probably thinking of Prop 13, which, no argument. But I don't think the fix is as straightforward as you imply. (TLDR the biggest problems are due to corporate landowners, not families who own a single dwelling.)
Also, what jurisdiction are you aware of that takes un-accepted real estate offers into account for tax purposes?
My background is Ireland, where there's a general requirement to self-assess an accurate value; you're not specifically required to take offers into account but you're not required to ignore them either, it's more of a "you should assess all the information available and come up with an accurate valuation" type law, with the specifics being left to interpretation. https://www.revenue.ie/en/property/local-property-tax/valuin... has a bit about the process.
You'd have an assessor compare it against domains that had traded recently (someone else mentioned beer.com), perhaps ask interested buyers to give a quote.
No, I'm envisioning something like the property tax system - the state assessor tells you a number, you can accept that, informally discuss it with them, or make a formal appeal. Which, yes, might mean legal costs, but presumably only in cases where it was assessed to be worth a lot, in which case either you really are that wealthy and can afford the assessment, or you always have the option of ceding it to the state at the price they've assessed.
People pay registration fees every year for domains. How is what you propose different than registrars setting different fees for different domains? Or: What entity should be entitled to the tax, and why?
> How is what you propose different than registrars setting different fees for different domains?
Under what I propose, people using or squatting a popular domain that lots of people want would pay more, and people using an obscure domain no-one cares about would pay less. That would be more equitable.
> Or: What entity should be entitled to the tax, and why?
It's a Pigovian tax, so it has a positive effect even if you burn the proceeds. In an imaginary ideal world I'd put them in a kind of sovereign wealth fund for all humanity, that every natural person was equally entitled to, because no-one owns the word "milk" and everyone on Earth (other than the one person who does get to use the domain) is equally deprived by not being able to use the domain for their own website. In practice, using it to run internet infrastructure or putting it into general UN/government coffers would be fine.
Just to be clear, do you believe milk.com is being squatted on right now? Should its registrant morally pay more than the default annual registration cost?
If so: How does consistently using a domain (any domain) for literally 30 years (as of a week ago) for a personal website and an email address constitute "squatting?"
Please note that there is a significant time cost (both senses) switching one's email address. Speaking personally, I have found some organizations are effectively incapable of updating an email address in their systems, at least not on the first N attempts over the course of M years.
> Just to be clear, do you believe milk.com is being squatted on right now?
I probably wouldn't call it squatting, but it's something economically similar.
> Should its registrant morally pay more than the default annual registration cost?
Yes.
> If so: How does consistently using a domain (any domain) for literally 30 years (as of a week ago) for a personal website and an email address constitute "squatting?"
If someone's using a highly-in-demand domain for a small website visited only by friends and one email address, then I see that as wasteful and icky. It's like having a /8 IP block because you registered in the early days of the internet, and using it for your home network of 5 computers. Or having a giant mansion in the middle of town where you live in a couple of rooms and leave the rest to rot. Or owning a bunch of historic paintings/cars/etc. that sit permanently in storage and are never used or seen. More "hoarding" than "squatting" I guess, but equally gross.
In what way is he actually speculating or rent seeking? He has a real website on it — not just a placeholder — and he's got DNS MX records, so it's presumably actively used for email.
I have a couple of friends who own various single word or three letter domain names. They universally say that companies attempting to buy their domains tend offer seriously not life changing amounts of money and often resort to threats when rejected.
Consider what if Land o Lakes owned milk.com and you demanded they sell it to you for $5k? Bwhahaahahaha!
I don't know how high the offers can go these days. But then again, we're not exactly in the dot-com bubble anymore. In 2001 I bet it could have attracted life changing amounts.
Yeah sometimes people spend inane amounts of money for things. If someone was willing to pay $7.5 million for milk.com it'd be theirs. But no ones offered even 0.1% of that. So the market says milk.com really isn't worth very much. And the owner of milk.com and my other two friends that own single word domains are using them for their personal websites not squatting on them.
In what way does that apply to milk.com? Is the owner seeking to get wealthy from it? And if so, is he also somehow failing to create sufficient wealth in the process?
What should he be doing differently right now to not fall on the wrong side of the line?
He (like most domain squatters) is blocking milk.com from being used for a practical purpose (from what I can tell), hoping to get $10M+ for no other reason than being the first to register it. He is definitely not creating any wealth in the process.
My read on his "value" page is that he doesn't actually want to sell. Assuming he just wants to keep using the domain for his personal site and have the same email address he's had since 1994, would that make it okay for him? Would that still somehow be immoral rent-seeking? What makes those uses of the domain "impractical?" Who is he morally obligated to give or sell the domain to, and if it is to be sold what is a fair value that wouldn't make it "rent-seeking?"
I really appreciate you and your site. I am in my 30s now and have enjoyed the weirdness of milk.com since I was a teenager. It is really nice to see a pre-web-2.0 / internet classic site still up and running. It's also great to see it on a domain name like 'milk.com' not being owned by a massive company.
