Morality

[khalfani]

do you think its moral to take domain names that just expired so the site has to find a whole other name

 

[officevalue]

Price fixing can be done for positive or negative - I was talking specifically about prices that were fixed in crisis or relative to need. (For example, raising the price of medicine to beyond what one would consider reasonable remuneration when an illness was spreading).

This is called gauging and is generally illegal. People don't need a domain to live but it is generally considered quite immoral to refuse to sell a person dying of thirst water for less than say $100 because a hurricane wiped out all of the fresh water.

Child labor laws are interesting because the morality is a matter of perspective. I'm talking here about using cheap child labor in an exploitative system. Morality is usually in the eye of the beholder - the west (myself included) look at it generally from an economic standpoint and not an overal general welfare standpoint which means that we can force changes from "bad" to "worse".

I am not following you here. Child labor laws and many other protection laws were not implemented from an economic standpoint (i.e. the economy will be better off if we eliminated exploitation of children) but that it was wrong to do so.

Also, if only economics were considered, slavery would probably have never been eliminated.

[snip]Not really - with the number of people who think doing that was stupid (there are many threads here). Some people think that the answer is "$500 to prove that they really want it" etc.

The act is as meaningful regardless of the underlying asset (though maybe harder to do for some). How hard it is doesn't change that much, imho.

Clearly Ray is a stand up guy... but some of us already knew that.

It sucks when you lose a domain regardless of who's fault it is and it is not generally immoral for the person who gains it to do so.

One of my domains was lost due to having used hotpop for email after having in the late 90s, early 00s gone through several dial-up ISPs due to changes in the pricing and caps on usage, so I started using hotpop for email forwarding.

Well, hotpop all of the sudden stopped its service and I didn't get my renewal notices (partly my fault, partly my email provider's) and my name, a dotcom version of a username I use on many message boards (not officevalue but my name plus a geo) was snapped up by someone who put up a one-page site in Japanese about investing and bicycles or something. Didn't make any sense (and not due to a bad automated translation) but had several redirects to several online stores which I presume are owned by the site owner. Geo was for a place in the US.

Unfortunately, they recently renewed it so I will have to wait another year until it drops. It's not worth a lot more than regfee to me so I doubt I'd ever make an offer.

BTW, even Microsoft has screwed up twice with hotmail.

Good Samaritan squashes Hotmail lapse?

Microsoft Forgets To Renew Hotmail.co.uk

I guess the only way to be sure you get those domain notices is have your own domain for email.

 

[DU]

I am not following you here. Child labor laws and many other protection laws were not implemented from an economic standpoint (i.e. the economy will be better off if we eliminated exploitation of children) but that it was wrong to do so.

I didn't phrase it well. For wealthy countries child labor laws are an economic luxury. We can look at child labor and say it's exploitative and therefore immoral and should not be allowed.

For some nations it's not that simple. Children working is something that was needed to help provide for the family. Simply taking that income away has proved to be not as beneficial to them as it is for us. Many families faced with further economic hardship have reverted to the children prostituting themselves.

UNICEF has criticized some of the child labor laws that impose bans on imports (from Bangladesh etc) as simply protectionist measures - which IS an economic based consideration.

Obviously exploitation is bad - but many times we're so far removed from the results of our actions that we can't see what's actually happening. This is what's so scary about the attempts to roll democracy across the world - we're unable to see the effects from our ivory towers.

 

[alien51]

Exploitation, is taking advantage of someone's predicament... for profit or personal gain; which makes it, immoral.

But if the other party to this transaction is happy consummating the deal/transaction, then it's not exploitation... but business.

For example, Prostitution can be exploitation if the prostitute is doing it to alleviate a personal misery (e.g. poverty). But it is not exploitation, if the prostitute has willfully accepted prostitution as easy money and a legal job.

So going back to Domaining, exploitation would be taking advantage of someone's desperate situation for "exorbitant" financial gain--- wherein the price of the domain is not tied to its practical inherent value, but on how desperate the buyer is.

 

[officevalue]

So going back to Domaining, exploitation would be taking advantage of someone's desperate situation for "exorbitant" financial gain--- wherein the price of the domain is not tied to its practical inherent value, but on how desperate the buyer is.

That's why you never want to seem to eager to buy when you're the buyer (or likewise to sell when you're the seller).

 

[ProSence]

There is no obligation if you registered an expired domain, it is a business and if you don't register other would register as well, however, those domain names which are not good for society we shouldn't register, whether they are new or expired.

 

[imrsa]

Great question :D Normally domain expire if they are not doing well and the owner gave up already on them