Re: [ga] WLS

["Patrick Corliss" <patrick@quad.net.au>]

On Fri, 11 Jan 2002 14:14:06 +0000, Abel Wisman wrote:

> I am sure the lawyers will point out that you can not sell something that
> doesn't belong to you,

Or, perhaps, buy something from sombody who doesn't own it to sell?

Well, yes you can, actually -- in the financial markets (and elsewhere) people
do that stuff all the time.  Let's take a couple of examples:

Bear Trading.  Normally people think in terms of buying stocks (aka shares) on
the stock exchange.  The person who is selling is expected to have them to
sell.  However, it is perfectly possible for a person to sell shares that they
do not own.  Of course, they must deliver shares on the due date (often a few
days into the future) and they will have to buy them in the market on or
before the delivery date.  Naturally the seller hopes the price will go DOWN
before they are required to buy them.   That's sometimes known as "going
bear".

Options.  Although not quite the same thing, "options" can be used.  Options
work both ways.  You can have an option to buy and you can have an option to
sell.  For example, if I wanted to buy some property and didn't have the
money, I could take out an option to buy.  It is a genuine contract which is
valid for a specified period of time.  Basically, the owner of the property
agrees not to sell the property to anybody else during that time.

Conditional Contracts.  There is nothing to stop someone from formulating a
contract that is conditional on some event occurring.  In a way, this is like
insurance where the insurer agrees to pay you iff your house burns down.

In our case, what these registrars are doing is much like insurance where they
agree to register a domain name iff they manage to snap it up when it is
deleted.  There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that sort of approach and,
despite what Joop says, there is really no obligation to inform the current
registrant.

In fact, you could make a case that a registrar who does NOT perfom the
service might become popular with registrants who would rather not take what
seems like an additional risk.

> so unless the registry gains an unfair advantage on
> the entire market by registering names at moment of deletion, thus using
> their (public) systems to their own advantage, and then reselling them,
there
> is nothing to sell.

That's not really the problem.  The problem arises because VeriSign is the
registry.

> abel




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