I don’t know why it took me so long to think of this, but I realized today that paying for domain names is like paying protection money.<\/p>\n
Maybe I’m having a slow day, but I can’t think of anything else off the top of my head, that you own, but you pay repeatedly for as if you were renting.<\/p>\n
Maybe you don’t actually own domain names, I failed to read the fine print, forgive me.<\/p>\n
Domain names are somewhat unique in the world of purchasable goods in that they are by definition world unique. You can’t go somewhere else and get the same thing for less money. There’s only one deadpelican.com domain name and it’s mine.<\/p>\n
Except it’s not mine. It’s my registrars, and every year I have to pay them not to take it away from me.<\/p>\n
Sounds like protection money.<\/p>\n
So I was trying to think of other things like that. Diamonds are world unique. No two are the same. They’re pretty expensive but once you own one, it’s yours. And you don’t have to pay anything once you’ve bought it. Except insurance. Read back a few to see my latest rant on insurance.<\/p>\n
What else is world unique that has some value to people. Land. That’s a good one. Once you buy land, it’s yours. You have to pay property tax, unless you manage to buy your own country, but still, you actually own the land and don’t have to pay anybody repeatedly not to take it away from you. Tax notwithstanding.<\/p>\n
But I’m not paying tax on my domain name. I’m paying to own it for a year.<\/p>\n
So there’s a market there, becoming a registrar that let’s you own your domain name forever.<\/p>\n
Maybe what you’re really buying is the registrar’s service. After all they’re really just hosting the resolution (resolvation?) of the domain name for you.<\/p>\n
I suppose if I could run my own dns server and become a registrar, I wouldn’t have to pay anybody to keep my domain.<\/p>\n
But then I expect I’d probably have to keep paying somebody to keep being a registrar.<\/p>\n
I think I get it, but something sounds a bit fishy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don’t know why it took me so long to think of this, but I realized today that paying for domain names is like paying protection money. Maybe I’m having a slow day, but I can’t think of anything else off the top of my head, that you own, but you pay repeatedly for as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notes"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":326,"href":"http:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions\/326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}