Comments on: The Misconceptions of the Cybersquatter

By: Fox

Fox — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:49:26 +0000

I have become a victim of this practice, due in part to my own negligence. I owned a domain for roughly 6 years that had no value but due to the length of time I had it, it gained a considerable amount of traffic and it was used to promote a project. There was a problem where the card that the domain was under expired just before the renewal, and by the very next day it went up for grabs, it was taken even though I had fixed the error on my part. Immediately resold to me the original owner for 2000 dollars, I still haven’t been able to repurchase it, and due to this the networking I had done through the site was completely lost. There was a trademark on the domain as well, but I had let it expire after this incident, and this was before the everyday term “cybersquatting” became common knowledge.

My whole point is, not EVERYONE is doing this with honorable intentions. A well-travelled domain is published in a public list as soon to be renewed/expired, how many commodoties do you know of that advertise to people sitting in the comfort of their own home that they are up for grabs with just one click? Nowadays you can even reserve a domain years in advance and pull an enormous profit from. I’m not fond of the ebay resellers either you pointed out, because most of them obtain things by shady tactics that a common person may not be aware of. Anything online is a game to these people, because most of it is automated.

I don’t disagree with the nature of your post, but there are other factors (the human factor).

By: admin

admin — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 08:05:03 +0000

I can’t make a name valuable by holding on to it, the value must already exist to the person trying to buy the domain. It is obviously not worthless if someone is willing to pay for it. Water is needed to survive, you would be scum because you would be forcing people to buy from you or die. Someone holding a domain is not at all the same as someone controlling something required to live. Laws exist against that, basic human rights laws, also not all domains are being bought by these people. You are using a straw man argument so I will leave it at that.

By: Not a Bot

Not a Bot — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:47:39 +0000

I disagree completely. When you buy up domain names in the hope that you can resell them for a lot of money, your just trying to make something valuable by hording a lot of worthless property. I’d compare domains to water. Extremely cheap, available to everyone but if I blocked off all lakes and rivers, damned it up and tried to sell it to the public for $20/L would I be scum, or just a business man running a business?

By: AM

AM — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:49:59 +0000

“It’s a supply and demand thing, the domain name is unique, if you want that domain over the ones available for lower prices you will need to pay more. Nothing is scummy about someone buying a domain before you ever wanted it and than selling it to you for more than they paid for it.”

Fully agree! It’s similar to owning brands and then selling those off. The same thing’s happening with twitter and other names now (something to write about?). Have a look at sites like http://assetize.com – you’ll notice many accounts for sale there too.