That's effectively cybersquatting and trademark infringement when you target someone's business and then outbound to them (even without outbounding and holding something so specific is really past the line).
There isn't a single UDRP panellist that wouldn't find someone guilty for holding such a specific and targeted domain .. and they would be 100% correct in their finding.
Obviously nobody is going to bother paying the $2000 for a UDRP when they can buy it for $75 ... but that doesn't mean that it's not wrong (and has potential to significantly tarnish the industry as a whole if this is done at scale) .. or even illegal ... but even more importantly .. even with such targetted names many people will simply not buy the domains at a markup when they could buy several similar alternatives for handreg.
Unfortunately I wouldn't really count on this idea ...
First problem is getting all the possible countries covered. I'm in Canada .. it would involve a completely different set of paperwork than someone in England or the USA.
The second problem is value. No government tax agency is going to give you more than what you paid on an asset with such an intangible value as most domains. Plus given the lifetime of a renewal cycle, the more logical amount you'll likely be allowed to claim is $8.49 MINUS the prorated amount of time since the domain was last renewed. So if you donate the domain with 36 days before expiration (1/10th of a year), the tax credit will likely be $0.85 .. which in turn would net you about $0.25 depending on your tax rate. Certainly not worth the paperwork even if you were to donate 10-20 domains! (In Canada I'm pretty sure charities don't give receipts until $20 .. which would mean donating about 23 domains for an approx $20 tax receipt if you donated them with a little over a month to go before expiration)
That being said .. if Rob were to miraculously somehow find a way to give tax deductions based on "appraised" retail values of the domains .. then basically no domainer would ever pay any taxes! So I most certainly hope he finds a way ... but I'm just not very optimistic at the chances of that!
Unfortunately this is where I disagree .. and why I'm posting a bit more often in this post.
If this grows in scale, it has potential to hurt the industry as a whole if there is a lot of spam or TM issues. Even if unintentional as you see with most newcomers.
I also feel that giving people false hope can also hurt them .. particularly if they invest time that could have been put towards more effective means of self-improvement. Domaining is very difficult .. the VAST majority of people who try it fail ... and unfortunately there is absolutely nothing about this program that mitigates the significant failure rate in any way ... in fact .. the people who this program is actually intended for unfortunately in general have fewer of the complimentary knowledge based resources and skills beyond the basic technical side of domaining. Basically it's already very bad .. and I feel it's not appropriate to tout this to potential applicants as a credible path to prosperity unless they are also told that even after many hours of work they have a sub 10% chance of making it (and I'm being EXTREMELY generous with 10%).
That's one thing I definitely 100% agree with! Icann should really be ashamed of themselves .. it's a total scam how they are completely ignoring their potential mandate to help make the world a better place via digital empowerment! Some of their decisions, actions and non-actions have to make you wonder how it's possible they aren't being paid off to make the absolutely worst decisions for the Internet and humanity!
You make a lot of good, and valid points.
We shouldn’t be afraid to fail, my first domain I registered in 1997 started with Nasdaq lol, and believe it or not, the domain is still registered to this day, and not to the proper Mark owner. I believe I renewed it for 2 years before I dropped it, but we all started off with some level of failure before we grasped it.
Fast forward going in 2020 prices are expensive, good inventory is very hard to come by, the drops are gamed by a big few players, the deck is defiantly stacked against new entrants for sure. I’m at the point where I see a cross in the aftermarkets where it is to expensive to buy from an investment point of view. Time to sell, hold, and wait for a economic downturn.
But my point is we all started our portfolios with one crappy domain, but somehow we figured it out along the way. Granted most wont, but back then in the 90’s, it was Rick’s one page front page webpage domainking.com that was all the information you could find online, and that wasn’t a blog, it was just some fixed content he had put up.
Now the tools, resources, strategies at the hands of domainers is simply amazing, and that is why a few largely funded companies are gaming the space as their own. Thing is the little guy if he buys smart, and looks hard enough, can still do pretty decent.
There are threads, names here on namepros people won’t bid on, maybe sell for $10, $20, that go on go be sold for tens of thousands of dollars. Names most thing are junk, or not worth the time, most sales people go punch into Namebio, but most don’t have a clue how much goes unreported, how many sales never see the day of light. It takes years to figure it out, but after a while you can look at a name, and the light bulb goes on, or off, and you just know.
I wouldn’t underestimate Rob, I don’t know where he gets the energy, but he gets it from somewhere, but most people probably don’t know pre Epik, he purchased and started Healthcare.com back over a decade ago. Now I don’t need to tell most but when the whole Obamacare fiasco hit, those owners literally struck gold with their quote engine. I know it’s a different start with such a category killer name, but we all have to start somewhere.
Some people think Huge Domains is a curse registering all those reg fee drops, others see it that they are keeping hand reg names at a premium $2k value, and making all domains worth more as people can’t simply register them, and have to acquire them, two trains of thought. So would adding more domajners to the eco system make aged portfolios worth more, or less?
Where better to get this growth in the space than from emerging markets, I know it’s a huge task, with a high risk of a lot of things going wrong, but this kind of stuff is usually trial, and error, with tweaks along the way.
Before big companies started buying portfolios this space had like absolutely zero liquidity. Let’s face it the majority of domains we sell, usually drop after 5 years as those startups fail, but that is how the internet evolves from MySpace to Facebook Etc...in most cases it starts with a domain, and an idea.