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   feld (feld@friedcheese.us)'s status on Saturday, 15-Aug-2026 03:21:49 JST feld

   • Imogen
   @HopelessDemigod
   
   > Changing money for an ASN, an IP address and a name out of dictionary.
   
   If you don't put a price on these the entire system doesn't work. It will be a race to squat on them all and then there will be a secondary market which is even more abusive. There is no other option. There has to be price discovery because of the scarcity. We don't have infinite IP addresses or domain names.
   
   This is called How Shit Works 101.
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   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@friedcheese.us)'s status on Saturday, 15-Aug-2026 03:22:11 JST feld

     in reply to

     • Imogen
     @HopelessDemigod this is just stupid framing, the world was so much different back then. The internet wasn't the backbone of the world economy. The dotcom bubble didn't even happen yet. Paul Krugman still was shouting that the internet was a passing fad. There were no malicious actors trying to acquire it all.
     
     So what is the NSF/Internic expected to do? Only give out one domain and IP allocation per entity? What happens when I register 10,000 shell companies and use them all to acquire as much as I can? The NSF/Internic won't know who is really behind them, they'll just follow their normal allocation policies and hand out exactly what the entity requested
     
     oops, now the address space and all the good names have been squatted on
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   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@friedcheese.us)'s status on Saturday, 15-Aug-2026 03:22:12 JST feld

     in reply to

     • Imogen
     @HopelessDemigod because nobody valued it yet
   • Embed this notice
     Imogen (hopelessdemigod@mstdn.social)'s status on Saturday, 15-Aug-2026 03:22:12 JST Imogen

     in reply to

     @feld

     Or because the National Science Foundation / Internic did a fine job without a profit motive.

   • Embed this notice
     Imogen (hopelessdemigod@mstdn.social)'s status on Saturday, 15-Aug-2026 03:22:13 JST Imogen

     in reply to

     @feld

     I didn’t pay money for my IP blocks or domain names in the early 1990’s.

     I wonder why that was.