_for-sale DNS records

Something I've wondered... if you publicly say that a domain is for sale and someone has a trademark for it would you automatically lose in arbitration?Around 1998 I registered a domain. Sony registered a trademark with the same name a few years after that. Someone on a Gmail account asked if he could buy it - I later found out he worked for Sony. I told him no - it's for a game I've been working on. I went on a vacation for a month and when I got back there was a fedex package filled with documents from Sony saying I'm violating their trademark and they'll take the domain.I got a lawyer and he told me that I shouldn't offer it for sale as that would show the arbitration board that I don't need the domain. But he also told me that in order to fight the trademark it would probably cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars. So I could keep the domain but not use it for commerce...In the end I ended up selling it to Sony but through my lawyer - I never stated it was for sale. But this was early on for domains and I wonder what the process is like now. reply: Reminded me of a Planet Money podcast episode with the milk.com owner, who also had early internet years domains....

RFC: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc10023.html reply: Thank you, for a moment I wondered why a specification was being written by AI.

They need Georgism for DNS names. You set your own price for your domain. But you have to pay 2-5% of that price annually to keep it.That way, squatters are incentived to sell it to someone who's going to use it. reply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harberger_Tax

> Remove it when the domain is no longer for sale. The convention has no “not for sale” value; absence is the only way to say no.Since most domains that are for sale don't currently have such a record, it would be wrong to assume they are not for sale. Therefore, absence of such a record does not explicitly mean "not for sale." It's no different from a house: a "for sale" sign in the front yard means it's for sale, but lack of a sign doesn't mean it's not for sale; it could mean the owner doesn't wish to advertise that way, or at all. reply: ..so? It’s better than what we have now

It’s interesting that domains apparently are still such a big business, despite how browsers have been deemphasizing URLs and domain names, and given the prevalence of apps. reply: Domain names are a mess in my opinion. Even though we have over a thousand TLDs only a very small handful are considered for commerce or even thought to be valid.I have a domain name with the TLD of "today". Many people think my email is [email]@[domain].today.com. It's not just the common person's fault but also software engineers / product managers who still have a very restrictive view of what a TLD is (under 3 three letters is the primary restriction I hit).Since I don't believe we'll ever convince people that domains longer than 3 letters / full words are TLDs, I think the solution is every human being gets 10 domain names at marketprice then every domain ownership above that gets graduated ownership costs; the first year is market, second year is $100, third year is $500, fourth year is $1,000, and so on until the 10th year where it levels out at $10k per year.The idea of it being if you want to hold onto a lot of domains you need to pay for it or make the domains economically viable....

Yeah cause we really had to improve domain squatters lives.In my opinion domain squatting should be banned instead. reply: Like a lot of things, society would probably benefit if we had caps on how much a single entity could own.

I noticed few commenters mention something like a rule: If you say your domain is for sale, they will take it from you because..... And was wondering, few years back, twitter was sold to mr Elon. I will just say it like this: Did they lose all their trademarks and rights to all domains, if someone register twitter.cc or twitter.it or similar, because twitter is for sale and they did not need the trademark for business anymore? reply: The concern is if you own a domain that you don’t own the trademark for.Twitter owned both the domain and all trademarks so it’s a non issue.Basically in fairly limited circumstances you can have your domain taken off you if someone else holds a matching trademark. Saying you are selling it can go some way to demonstrating you are not holding it in good faith.

This would have been great for a 2-letter .st domain I had been wanting for years (which appeared to be parked and just redirecting towards ticketmaster or something, with no contact info available). I was bummed about it for a long time, as the .st nic had a sale on 2-letter domains which made me want to pull the trigger, but it got scooped up a day or two prior apparently. I lucked out this year and saw they let it lapse! (I did have a yearly calendar reminder telling me to run whois :)

This was first done by SIDN I believe, the company that orchestrates the .nl domains. They however, do not implement most of the spec.When searching their online whois[1], they'll tell you if a domain is for sale and link to the for sale page. They don't use any of the info you put in the DNS though. The URL comes from their internal system. You need to register it separately. They also don't use the price, txt or anything else you put in the DNS.All they use is the "fcod", to look up the url in their own system. They had a different syntax for this before, but this functionality has existed for some years.[1] https://www.sidn.nl/whois

I am bit puzzled, read through the RFC itself (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc10023/) but could not find who is going to use it and why?

(Not quoting the article directly due to HN's auto AI filters)In "Common mistakes" this article first says not to add this record if you're not actually planning to sell the domain, then says that the record doesn't oblige anyone to do anything, that feels quite weird to me.

Can't wait for some kid to slip this into Google.com via AI chatbot and then massage the chatbot to complete the sale for $1.

From the RFC The "_for-sale" leaf node name can be placed at any level of the DNS, except in the .arpa infrastructure TLD.There used to be a number of sites that would let users create {username}.some.subdomain.apex.tld. Perhaps this is not a thing any more I honestly don't know. If it is still a thing and someone registers the username "_for-sale" they could cause some confusion.Why allow any level of DNS? If you are selling a domain that should include the entire domain and thus the _for-sale should only be valid at the apex unless the goal is to cause legal problems for some big providers.

“This domain is somewhat worn.” -UO joke

This is probably the only item that can sold without saying, "Used, Like New"

But what about the costs? There are several domains I want. They're just sitting there and no one is doing anything with them. But when I ask to buy them, they ask for outrageous prices (at least in my opinion.) If someone else bought the domain, I would think, "I'm just being outbid." But they never change hands. I've tried telling the owners that I'm their only hope. They just sit there because they have some insane idea for how much it is worth.

Wonderful. Another tool for domain campers. Just what standards bodies should be spending time on…

Sigh, I'm not a fan of domains becoming the new kind of real estate.Wonder how hard will it be in 20 years to get a good, unused name in a reasonable price.

this is how we get under-the-radar marketplaces for llms

Making things easier, and more profitable, for domain squatters is exactly the wrong direction to be going in! I hate how the internet has turned to squeezing every last penny out of its users. This is pathetic and raw.

Is that good or bad? That's a genuine question here.

How long until these links are swimming with malware?

my slop detection instinct is so good that I can tell it's slop before even clicking the link. I precogged the neon colors of the website, the pill modals, the 'it's not X, it's Y', the emdashes...

They should keep this up for a year and then seize all of these squatted domains and auction them off.

Between this and domain-owner secrecy the whole domain name system has become financialized over the last 30 years. We are not in any way better off.