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Have any TLDs attempted to implement a property tax on domains according to value to reduce cyber squatting? To implement a property tax, Glen Weyl and Eric Posner have proposed using self-assessment so that users pay what they want (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2818494 and https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting-Capitalism-...)

⬐ Avamander

I know that having a domain name is a fun way to get to know a lot of computer-related concepts, making that opportunity less accessible for people does not sound like a good thing to me - I want future kids to be able to play with internet the same way, don't know if you relate or not.

Not to mention if domains were more expensive we'd have more link-rot, which is already really nasty.

⬐ yonran

We can apply the same techniques used for progressive property taxes to prevent the two problems you identified: e.g., an owner-occupier exemption for a single domain name per person, and a deduction for investments in building the domain’s brand so that a domain with high pagerank or marketing investment pays a lower tax.

⬐ rhizome

What are the terms by which value is measured?

⬐ yonran

In the paper by Glen Weyl linked above, the property tax should be set at about 1/normal turnover rate (e.g. 1/30 years = 3.3% per year), owners should declare their own assessed value for which they pay the tax (e.g. on the $1500 asking price in the article, the tax could be about $50/year assuming a 3.3% tax rate), and then if someone else wishes to buy the property they can purchase at the same self-assessed value.

⬐ rhizome

So the holder assigns their own "make me move" price? For e.g. Disney this would be "infinity," and I've taken a math class recently enough to know that 3.3% of infinity is infinity.

⬐ yonran

fyi in Weyl’s book, he says that to avoid this problem, “Possessors would be allowed to group their assets into clusters and to pull them apart, as they choose.” In other words, Disney could bundle the domain with the business (which is already listed for only $243 billion, not “infinity”) http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s11222.pdf

I think in general the business should be bundled with the domain, although I think that probably there should be some oversight preventing completely unrelated domains from being bundled together.

⬐ Dylan16807

That sounds terrible. Companies should not have to pay millions of dollars per year to keep their domain safe.

If a website-needing company pays based on how badly it would hurt them to lose that site, it would destroy their margins. If they pay a more reasonable amount, or if they're just a smaller company, they're vulnerable to competitors kicking them offline at a whim.

Land is pretty much the only area where taxing a significant percentage of value makes sense, and even then it's frustrating and awful to do it with a buyout system.

⬐ oh_sigh

I don't understand how you can ever have a just society if society can deem at any point that your property is too valuable for you to hold anymore. Of course they happens in society today, but I don't see how making it easier for property to be forcibly reallocated would help create a more just society.

⬐ yonran

Do you realize that the reason the squatter abandoned the domain (instead of keeping it forever) is the $8/year registry fee? My question is why should the squatter pay only $8 per year, and not, say, $50?

⬐ emiliobumachar

Collateral damage prevention. A poor-ish hobbyist on the fence about creating a website or not would be discouraged by a higher fee.

⬐ pests

Why should they pay $50? What are you charging for above cost of service?

⬐ yonran

When speculators hold onto domain names without using them, their right to exclude imposes a cost on the other member of society who wishes to use the property productively. So like progressive property taxes in general, a domain tax should be high enough not only to pay for the direct cost of services, but also to discourage idle speculators and encourage owners to use the domain productively.

⬐ ulucs

As a Glen Weyl-esque solution, make an owner of x domains pay x dollars for each domain they own. This way personal users get cheap domains, and we extract quite a lot of money from squatters.

⬐ vidarh

Property rights over scarce resources are inherently exclusionary to the rest of society: By holding onto property you deny others access to it.

The question society then need to come to terms with is to what extent it is prepared to grant that exclusionary control.

It is not clear to me how you can have a just society without curtailing property rights. Every country on the planet add substantial restrictions to what you can do with "your" property already in order to reduce the negative impact that property rights has on the rest of society, so the question is really to what extent property rights are balanced to maximize benefit.

I first heard this described in a book written by Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl. The book has a lot of other cool reasonably doable ideas.

https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting-Capitalism-...

There's a (relatively new) book, Radical Markets[0] by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl that looks at how mechanisms for this might actually work in practice.

Core to their argument is that most things we care about in society have increasing returns to scale so that under our current system we systematically under-allocate and mis-allocate to public goods.

While I disagree with a lot of it in practice, I highly recommend reading it if you're thinking the way the parent comment of this comment does.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting-Capitalism-...

⬐ selimthegrim

Was this the Eric Posner who was suggesting adopting immigrants?

⬐ matt4077

That does sound like him.

Posner is probably best known for (a) suggesting an open market for babies, and (b) being one of the smartest humans of our era.

He's a Chicago School market-mechanisms fetishist, but a reasonable one believing in the necessity of regulations to tackle externalities and anti-trust.

His writings sit in that perfect spot where I instantly notice the author is way smarter than me, but can still understand the jokes.

It’s true that the current income tax has shortcomings due to the mobility of capital owners. I think it would promote competition to focus more on wealth taxes on immobile assets (on e.g. land, patents, spectrum, and ownership of networks) as an alternative to some income taxation. See e.g. Glen Weyl’s book Radical Markets on this topic (https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting-Capitalism-... https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2818494)

The seminal paper on this topic seems to be Anticompetitive Effects of Common Ownership[0] by Azar et al, and there's a whole chapter on this topic in Radical Markets[1], a recent book by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl. Both are worth reading if this is a topic you're interested in.

[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2427345

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting-Capitalism-...