It also paradoxically means that .com domains are not quite what they used to be: as more cool new companies have a .ai or .co, the public has stopped thinking that "only .com matters". Like I said, the holders of the .coms are just poisoning the well for the TLD.

To address your point directly, I do personally disagree with you that "squatting for speculation" or "parking" as you prefer is harmless. Since ICANN (or Verisign, I guess) controls the TLD, I do think they should disincentivize this holding behavior with some kind of property tax. It's as if vast tracts of Manhattan were just empty fields - not really in anyone's best interest, in the long run, not even the property investors, who are at risk of property developers going to more-hospitable jurisdictions.

Further, nowhere did I say that it was "harmless", or pass any value judgment at all on it. I just said that it's not squatting (cyber, domain, or any other prefix). Those people pay the same domain fees as anyone else.

"I do think they should disincentivize this holding behavior with some kind of property tax"

They are paying the same domain fees as everyone else. However let's imagine that they change it to charging some sort of "how lucrative is the domain name" property tax, like Google hilariously tried to do with some of their failed TLDs: We're currently talking about parked domains that cost an absolutely negligible amount...I imagine a lucrative fee would be a bit more disliked by these imaginary startups ready to fill all the good domains.

Sidenote - there was a rush to .io, .ly and other TLDs -- against all reasonable caution -- because people thought they were cool and new, not because they were their last resort

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

You can tell it's not property because the one thing that's guaranteed to result in losing a domain is failing to pay the fees.

The idea that first registration entitles someone to (a) waste a finite resource forever and (b) sell it at arbitrary prices later was fought out in the early 00s, and the real WIPO trademark system won. A number of people who had squatted the names of famous companies in hope of extorting a payout were disappointed.

Don't pay your property taxes and you lose your property. Courts have argued that domains are property countless times, and they are treated absolutely as such. They are in the sense of contract law, with rights and grants, but obviously are a virtual good, of sorts.

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=016ee90b-496e...

"The idea that first registration entitles someone to (a) waste a finite resource forever and (b) sell it at arbitrary prices later was fought out in the early 00s, and the real WIPO trademark system won."

I specifically excluded trademark infringement, so why are you arguing that case? But yes, someone can "waste a finite resource forever" (by paying the same fee that a "useful" use of it would). Those are the rules of the game.

That may be true according to the current authorities running the show, but clearly those rules are far beyond their useful lifetime now. For practical purposes, domains often function as a primary form of identification, for websites, email and other functions. Both the domain registrant and anyone trying to reach them have a reasonable expectation that the identity in question will not silently and suddenly be changed, a huge amount of everyday activity now depends on that expectation, and the consequences of violating it can be severe. We are well past the point where such critical infrastructure should not be in the hands of private businesses or individuals without sufficient regulation to safeguard the common good.

I don't think anyone disagrees that those are the rules we have. I think everyone who actually creates websites thinks those rules are not working as intended and should be changed.

I refuse to believe that having speculators pay for thousands and thousands of empty domains is "working as intended".

I'm more thinking of the waste and expense. Clogging up infrastructure with utterly useless "holding pages". People spending vast amounts in registration fees in the hope of getting that big win. And that big win being at the expense of a company that genuinely needs the name but is forced to spend massively more than it needs to in order to get it.

If this was what was intended, then whoever designed it was evil.

I certainly agree that opinions can differ whether various things (e.g. intellectual property) should be called property or not. But personally I don't like the dilution of the concept. "Ownership" of a URL is more like a contractual right.

As for your home/land, if you don't pay property taxes the govt may begin a legal proceeding to seize it which must satisfy the usual checks and balances when the govt wants to violate your rights. Then they probably auction it off and the balance minus your back taxes goes to you. The point is you have real rights. Meanwhile your domain may be worth a million bucks at auction but you aren't getting squat because you forgot to pay the $12 fee, or violated some other detail in the contract.

There's a sibling comment that points out that courts recognize it as property, and certainly trademarks are a similar "property" that requires active enforcement.

But while the law is a good authority because they've gone through many disputes and have had to work out good arguments, I don't think it's the final authority; laws can change after all.

That a domain requires upkeep doesn't make it not property. Even in the absence of taxes, your house or any of your stuff requires some degree of upkeep.

But a domain is certainly not chattel, and intangible property always does seem like... not property. (Though, even with tangible property, it feels fuzzy, and that's part of why fences are used to reify borders.)

To my mind, a bigger issue with calling it property is that there's not necessarily a single registry system.

My thought experiment is to ask what we'd do without registrars. We'd all simply advertise our domains to the DNS servers, with all the obvious conflicts that registration is meant to avoid. And we'd have to resolve those conflicts by having the DNS providers agree that a particular advertisment was correct. I think that gets a bit closer to the heart of what "owning a domain name" means.

Owning an agreement with these entities to manage those disputes looks very similar to any other kind of security or bond. It also has qualities of an asset: you can trade it, it's not very liquid, you can derive an income from it by developing things on it, etc. That's why I lean on the side of the "domains are property" camp.

If they are indeed different, I would argue that learning of an emerging product and preemptively buying the domain is not cybersquatting but more like IP theft.

Regardless, the point remains that the .com TLD is saturated with parked domains, meaning folks must go to more poorly managed TLDs for reasonably priced domains. Personally, that’s not the way the world should work. A parked domain does not offer value to the world the same way that undeveloped/underdeveloped land does. Indeed, a small store holding its own against gentrified land often provides more value to the community that if it were consumed by public domain. And even with physical property, it is possible to seize underutilized land in the name of public good.

TL;DR: I get that you #define cybersquatting in a way that excludes speculative parking. Not only do I disagree with your definition, but I don’t see how speculative parking or whatever you call it is reasonable.

There’s no sane way to validate a domain isn’t in use.

This is such a self-defeating effort, but I don't define it that way, most everyone does. Because the root -- squatting -- refers to occupying someone else's property. This isn't a point in debate -- a quick search verifies that every single authoritative source seemingly in existence is in agreement with me.

"And even with physical property, it is possible to seize underutilized land in the name of public good."

That is an extraordinary action that happens incredibly rarely and is extremely contentious. It does happen, but it's certainly not comparable with "I got an idea and I want that domain".

And let's be real here -- those domain resellers usually sell the domains they are "squatting" [sic] on for an absolute _pittance_. If a couple hundred dollars is what ruins some great startup plan, I'm going to go on a limb and say it wasn't such a great startup plan.

Indeed, what most people want is to say "Hey that's unfair that he's parked on that! Let ME park on that and sit on it indefinitely because I've got a Great Idea that I'm going to get around eventually". That's what 99% of the parked domains already are.

Or how about investment? If you can see the future, pay for the valuable domain before it's valuable, then get your return by selling it to the company that wants it. Isn't that quite a lot like giving money to the company in exchange for a share of the profits? The risk is that you might misjudge and waste money on worthless domains, just like traditional investing.

It would make more sense to let registrars charge what they please instead.

It's the opposite of investing. Squatters aren't providing value they are pure parasites. People are most apt to learn of the parties smartly chosen name not through their marketing but via being the second person to come up with it and learning they must pay the squatter.