Check out the February article linked in the body of this article about when it went up for sale. It provides a little more context. Sounds like Mr. O'Connor was pretty reasonable about it.
"O’Connor said Microsoft actually offered to buy the domain several years back for $20,000. He turned them down, saying that at the time he thought it was too low and didn’t reflect the market value of the domain."
I can't even imagine how an appraisal system would work. How do you even do price discovery? Ask people how much they'd spend on it without actually having to put their money where their mouth is?
Land is nothing but objective and quantifiable qualities like its distance from the city, natural resources, size, fertility.
Domain names are arbitrary. If people want to swap $millions for vanity, I say let them.
Price discovery is easy. Every domain is available once a year. Anyone can bid. If you want to keep the domain, you pay 1% of the highest bid, otherwise the bidder gets it (they have to put in the money to secure the bid).
The only downside is that well capitalized bidders could harass small owners with outsized bids, if they were willing to possibly end up with ownership.
Agree, but economists do have a solution for this problem. Self-assess the value and pay taxes based on that value. If someone/the government makes an offer that is some percentage greater than that value, you must sell.
Sounds like a solution only an econ could think up of, which doesn't take into consideration other external factors that would apply specifically to the person holding the property, such as:
- human psychology (loss aversion, endowment effect, mental anxiety due to risk of being forced to sell your property)
- switching costs (monetary, mental, time spent searching for alternatives, costs to moving to something else)
- replacement costs (transaction costs, etc)
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/02/dangerous-domain-corp-co...