Comment by Mario Giambanco on "Should it be illegal to horde domain names?"

CommentShould it be illegal to horde domain names?

Mario Giambanco

Director of User Experience Development

Apr 18, 2016

The reason for asking this question happened just this weekend.

We want to build a website similar to an existing one we own. The domain name in question has been owned since 2008. Has no content at it, at all.

It was set to expire yesterday at 1pm and (news to me) registrars have a grace period of 2-4 weeks to renew. Weeks ago, I had setup a backorder at godaddy and this morning, I get a notification that the domain name was renewed for another year.

It's not being used; we have a need for it that's in direct alignment with our business.

IMO, hordeing domain names hurts new businesses.

Lela McKeever

Designer and Front-end Developer

Apr 18, 2016

I can understand your feeling @mgiambanco. But don't you think it would be unfair to the domain owner? It's like purchasing a land and not building a house for years. Suddenly, govt. interferes and takes away the land.

And that's the conversation we had in office about it. The programmers think it should be illegal and the owner thinks it's perfectly fine to do this. Our (the programmers) rebuttal is that a domain name is a finite item. Only 1 exists at any given name / TLD. It would be like buying an extremely rare sports car and just keeping it in the garage, never taking it out, never driving it, etc... never allowing anyone else, who may very well drive it and use it every day, to enjoy it. Where owning a piece of land - for now anyways, there may be many pieces of land just like it / similarly priced and for a similar purpose. Until the world runs out of developable land, hording a piece of land and not using it is "acceptable" IMO

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