From: Erik Aronesty (erik@zoneedit.com)
Date: Thu Apr 08 2004 - 10:42:30 MDT
Announcing a new product without doing a trademark search was irresponsible at best.
-----Original Message-----
From: "rhinoceros" <rhinoceros@freemail.gr>
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2004 19:01:53
To:virus@lucifer.com
Subject: virus: Re:What is Google really building?
[rhinoceros] On a remotely related note, I can see that domain-name squatting can make money, providing value to the squatters, but can anyone explain how this can be justified? What value does the squatter offer in return? My closest guess is that it is a result of an abuse of the concept of property which has found its way into the legislation. Any other explanations?
[Blunderov] At the risk of being hideously simplistic, does the value not derive from simple ownership of a scarce resource? 'Mail' is almost indispensable in a domain name that intends to deal in e-mail, and there are only 26 letters in the alphabet.
[rhinoceros]
It is still puzzling... Apparently "moogle.com" or "noogle.com" don't have any special value now, for all their scarcity, but that didn't stop the squatters from sitting on them (you can check), just in case Google decides that these names are good for something. If that happens, the value will jump up, not because Google took the (previously useless) idea for the names from them, but because the law allows them to register the names like any other property. In this scenario, a value was produced while the scarcity of the name did not really change. Granted, it was the law of demand and offer which came into play, but I still can't see where value was produced.
Here's another magic picture. We are in the wild west. Some people ride around and plant sign-posts and register land which they are not going to use, expecting that the ones who will want to use it will pay. Society has no reason to repect this (this was my point when I posted the Jefferson quote about how the right to permanent property is granted by society), because what these people did doesn't seem to have any value. Remember that peasants have done revolutions (yes, the ones with those big forks) for much lesser causes.
(x)mail.com is a bit different. It has already some special value, because of the ease of association with the word "e-mail" by the user -- i guess the memetic template you mentioned is the ease of recalling what to type. It is somehow more difficult to do the same analysis here... One can bitch if the owner doesn't use the domain, but the potential exists.
Registrar sites such as daddy.com make business out of this. People pay a fee and godaddy grabs sites for them the very moment their registrations expires. That's what happened to WW and Sat.
Heh... and I won't get into the concrete vs abstract thing. I do buy abstract items all the time. Or concrete items containing abstract items. Or abstract items containing concrete items.
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