This event is a matter if interpretation. This is a blurred line between illegal, unlawful and not legitimate.phelix wrote:If that someone did his thing in a legitimate way it would certainly mean that the system is broken. Lucky us we have several squattersbiolizard89 wrote:If you seriously do not think that someone who DoSes the system by registering the entire d/ namespace would qualify as an attacker, and argue that such a person is simply exercising private property rights, then I do not think you can be reasoned with. I will save my time and not bother engaging you further.
Academics call this spillover effects which is usually desirable from the public policy point of view wrt innovation. However, biolizard has made the slippery slope argument that this can be applied indefinitely to squat on the entire space which may or may not be a flaw in the allocation policies. The analogy would be block A addresses in the IPv4 space where early participants basically blocked out large swaths disproportionate to their actual usage. This is the reason why early land titles were "leases" and conditioned on the land being "improved" to prevent the locking up forever of (future) scarce resources (cf perpetualities rule in trust law).somename wrote: (in cases like Onename, they're engaging in "permissionless innovation").
As someone who was the Alternative Dispute Resolution officer for an FOSS co-op, I would suggest a possible 3 stage approach
- a delegation of NameCoin developers/thought-leaders approach OneName and seek an undertaking for them not to be greedy and voluntarily limit their acquisition to something reasonable (yet to be defined).
- promote an secondary namecoin protocol/scheme which introduces competition, for example counter-bidding on inactive domain names. This is a subtle difference in that it changes the property right from absolute title to option to acquire, with minimum strike price for someone else to acquire .... cf US PTO rules where registered patents need renewable fees to keep their monopoly. A threshold can be set so that this renewable fee is escalating if a single entity (and this is a legal definition) owns/controls different levels of domainnames
- absolute last resort is to change the code base to impose punitive measures for squatting/hoarding. This is debateable but I suggest should involve ALL participants, including future followers of OneName business model. This is an area of competition law, if OneName has a "lead" to what extent does this crowd out alternatives?