Domain Registration

This is an article I had for quite a while as a draft. As part of my yearly cleanup, I've published it without finishing it. It might not be finished or have other problems.

The registration of domains (such as martin-thoma.com, wikipedia.org, understand.ai, unicode.party, …) is kind of broken. There are people who register domains just because somebody might want them sometime. Then they sell it to them. They do not intend to put content there. This is called "domain parking". I guess it is similar to people who put their car on a parking spot which they actually don't need. Then they put a sign in there "if you want to park here, pay 20 Euro and call XYZ".

Why is this a problem (though not a too serious one)?

For physical goods people who buy stuff just because they think in future other people might need it provides value. It smoothes the price over time, allows the producers of that good to continue producing it while somebody else takes care of storing it.

However, for rights it is different. There is only one domain like comment.it. There will never be another one. There is no smoothing of the price over time (as it can only be bought once). If it is not registered, there is no cost in holding it available. In contrast, it is much more complicated to buy a domain which is already registered by somebody else than registering it yourself.

Whois Lookup

With sites like whois.domaintools.com or tools like whois you can look up who owns a domain:

$ whois comment.it

*********************************************************************
* Please note that the following result could be a subgroup of      *
* the data contained in the database.                               *
*                                                                   *
* Additional information can be visualized at:                      *
* http://www.nic.it/cgi-bin/Whois/whois.cgi                         *
*********************************************************************

Domain:             comment.it
Status:             ok
Created:            2001-01-24 00:00:00
Last Update:        2017-01-08 00:41:49
Expire Date:        2017-12-23

Registrant
  Organization:     Valerio Morfino

Admin Contact
  Name:             Valerio Morfino
  Organization:     Valerio Morfino

Technical Contacts
  Name:             Tophost Srl > Registra il tuo dominio con www.tophost.it
  Organization:     Tophost Srl > L'hosting più conveniente d'Italia

Registrar
  Organization:     Seeweb S.r.l.
  Name:             TOPHOST-REG
  Web:              http://www.tophost.it

Nameservers
  ns1.th.seeweb.it
  ns2.th.seeweb.it

Examples

Here is a list of interesting domains which are just held for the purpose of selling it too expensive to somebody else:

And a couple of examples where I'm not too sure:

  • ai.data: This is strange. I get an Apache2 default page, but I can't find a WHOIS record
  • comment.ai (whois): Registered by Benjamin Milde in 2001

Misc

I came across some interesting examples:

  • stalk.com: I guess this can be used for training a model to find the geolocation just by image data?
  • personal.id

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