Tell the average person the renewal fee for their domain will be a derivative function and see how that works out.
I agree a bit with what he's saying, but it's obvious that rich people live in a different world than the average person. You can see it when he talks about congestion based pricing.
Cities have a hard time
adding congestion pricing, even when it's painfully clear that the only two choices are paying congestion fees in dollars and paying congestion fees in wasted time
and weakened mental health driving in painfully slow traffic.
There are 2 choices
for rich people. Normal people have a 3rd (non) choice foisted on them. If they're poor enough they get priced out of the system and can't participate. Consumption based pricing is great for rich people because it subverts progressive tax systems. Instead of improving and expanding infrastructure, where a majority of the capital would come from taxes paid by the rich, consumption based pricing allows for less infrastructure (ie: less taxes on the rich) because poor people can be deprived of using that infrastructure under the guise of equitable, consumption based pricing.
I'm skeptical of anything resembling solution 1. What happens in cases like nissan.com? The original owner undeniably has a right to that domain and shouldn't have to sell it to anyone. A market value based surcharge favors large businesses and rich individuals. For the sake of argument, say that domain is worth more than $1 million. Nissan Motors could bid $1 million which, using the 0.5% example, increases the renewal fee to $5000 / year. That case was 20 years ago, so would it really be fair for the rightful owner of the domain to pay an extra $100k in renewal fees over that time just because they're not willing to sell their domain to a wealthy buyer for less than fair market value?
What about people that own a domain for a popular surname? Should they be forced to start paying fair market value if they're using it for a vanity email address? Should every participant without commercial ambitions be priced out of the domain market?
I wish I were better at figuring out the math because I don't understand the numbers he gives in the second part. In the linear growth example it's a $15 increase per year. Assuming face value for the first year, I would expect 0 + 15 + 30 + 45 + 60 + 75 + 90 + 105 + 120 + 135 = a $675 premium over 10 years. Where does the $1250 come from?
Can someone explain how the exponential growth fee in solution 2 works? I don't understand the math. Is that a hard cap or is it a function of the market value? For example, what does that number look like if someone bids $100k on a domain? Is it still $836 for 10 years?
I don't know what the answer is for fairly allocating domains, but I think solutions that boil down to charging more money end up out of reach for the bottom of the market before they have an impact on the participants with enough capital to game the system.
