I Got Milk.com
milk.comGood for him.
milk.com was registered back in July 94, same month amazon was created. I suspect that many people have attempted to get control over it via naferious means in the past, however I also get the feeling the value of domain names has decreased since the early 00s -- how many normal people still type in domain names, rather than typing in "milk" and clicking the first result.
Way to really milk ownership of the domain.
At first I thought this was a Reddit-style pun response, but then I read the linked page. I read it to mean "Yea, I really want to sell it, but it's going to be costly. Otherwise I'm happy to sit on it until a satisfactory offer comes around." Of course, there's nothing wrong with that at all.
The page states that research has been done, and there is a perceived value that as of yet hasn't been offered. The domain owner is clearly uninterested in haggling - give the right offer, or no deal.
FWIW I don't think he actually ever intends to or expects to sell.
I have a couple of friends who own various single word or three letter domain names. They universally say that companies attempting to buy their domains tend offer seriously not life changing amounts of money and often resort to threats when rejected.
Consider what if Land o Lakes owned milk.com and you demanded they sell it to you for $5k? Bwhahaahahaha!
> not life changing amounts of money
I don't know how high the offers can go these days. But then again, we're not exactly in the dot-com bubble anymore. In 2001 I bet it could have attracted life changing amounts.
The most a friend of mine got offered for a four letter com domain during the dot com years was $5k. He said he would have sold it for $15k.
I checked he still has it.
Business.com was sold for $7.5 million at height of the dot com boom. Have you ever visited that site? Neither have I.
Yeah sometimes people spend inane amounts of money for things. If someone was willing to pay $7.5 million for milk.com it'd be theirs. But no ones offered even 0.1% of that. So the market says milk.com really isn't worth very much. And the owner of milk.com and my other two friends that own single word domains are using them for their personal websites not squatting on them.
I would be willing to bet a very large amount of money that this is the case.
Check Dan's responses to emails he received over the years. Hilarious!
Did anyone ever come up with a workable method of preventing this kind of rent seeking that plagues domain names?
The best scalable and impartial methods that I’ve seen mentioned were high renewal prices and limits on the number of domains one could own, but I get the feeling neither one would work when there is even a remote chance of extracting >$10M in the end.
Given the current system it’s hard to blame him either — I don’t know whether I would find the altruism to let such a domain expire.
Best thing to do would be to charge Joe Random the same rate (on the order of $10 per domain per year) as the company wanting to buy millions of domains. That way it's much less profitable to camp on domains. Currently companies can get domains for pennies, so they camp on millions, hoping to find some sucker to pay top $.
What "rent" is he seeking?
"In public choice theory, as well as in economics, rent-seeking means seeking to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth."
I didn't ask for a definition.
In what way does that apply to milk.com? Is the owner seeking to get wealthy from it? And if so, is he also somehow failing to create sufficient wealth in the process?
What should he be doing differently right now to not fall on the wrong side of the line?
He (like most domain squatters) is blocking milk.com from being used for a practical purpose (from what I can tell), hoping to get $10M+ for no other reason than being the first to register it. He is definitely not creating any wealth in the process.
My read on his "value" page is that he doesn't actually want to sell. Assuming he just wants to keep using the domain for his personal site and have the same email address he's had since 1994, would that make it okay for him? Would that still somehow be immoral rent-seeking? What makes those uses of the domain "impractical?" Who is he morally obligated to give or sell the domain to, and if it is to be sold what is a fair value that wouldn't make it "rent-seeking?"
Yes, those are good questions.
Pretty sure the main answer is that he's not actually engaging in rent-seeking in any pejorative sense.
Domain name registration related shenanigans is so weird to me.
Lately I've been getting mail from various folks notifying me that the `.com` equivalent of one of my `.net` domains is going to be available. It's weird to me that it would be worth doing, but I'm assuming they're making money out of it.
This gets posted every few months. Every time I wonder how it's not been taken away for squatting. I wonder if (or rather how often) he's had to go to court.
Nissan.com has been the target of a few attacks if I recall correctly and is arguably less valuable and much more defensible (since the person who owns it is actually called Nissan).
In what way is this site "squatting?" I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure you can't get a trademark on simple English words like "milk."
what about Apple then?
Apple doesn't in fact have a blanket trademark on the word "apple."
Because it's not squatting.
As the owner of a few interesting domain names, why does everyone think that unless the landing webpage is a fucking advertisement that I have no legitimate claim to a domain?
It's exactly backwards. Say I want a domain to use for my primary email address, but it's currently owned by a business with thousands of domains, and is one of a dozen domains dedicated to a tertiary brand nobody has ever given a single fuck about. I should be able to file AND WIN a UDRP claim that just says 'they're not doing anything valuable with this, but I have a clever pun I want to make into an email address.'
And the absolute balls of people to get mad at me when I politely decline their insultingly low offers. I totally understand why the milk.com owner wrote this page.
Why is this being up voted ?
It might be unrelated but this page was mentioned in a fairly highly upvoted comment on a recent top story here. Dan Bornstein is also a relatively well known engineer.
His brand is strong, perhaps.
Good question!