With traditional ownership, you can pay a lump sum of money for something up front, and then it's yours forever unless you decide to get rid of it. With domains, you have to keep paying over and over or your "ownership" gets revoked.

Ownership rights vary from culture to culture and from country to country. Even in the US you don't get to own something forever, you get to own it until someone takes it off you to build a shopping mall for example.

In most countries, leased property is often referred to as "owned", yet you have to keep paying over and over to renew that lease.

Pretty surprising to me if others agree, if you lease a car you dont own that car, do you?

Depends on how you think about it. You could say that you 'own' it but you have obligations (lease payments) or it will be seized. The same is true for property you 'own', if you don't pay your taxes or fail to manage the property, it will be seized.

not paying taxes on your property is different from not owning something and missing a recurring payment.

Not really. With property taxes, you lease the title to “your” land from the government.

Except that if you don't pay your taxes, they might not take your house.

If you fail to pay your lease then they will reclaim that particular item.

> if you don't pay your taxes, they might not take your house.

At least in the states they absolutely do. It starts off as a tax lien which is then sold to whoever wants to buy it, so that the private sector handles actually reclaiming the land and re-listing it on the stock market.

That is just how US law is structured though. They could just as easily say that they will reclaim the loss through recovery of your assets or by weight in blood.

https://www.bristol.gov.uk/council-tax/what-happens-if-you-d...

In the UK the process is different, which just shows that they don't have to take your house to reclaim outstanding taxes.

The point is that the government has options, if the property recovery value doesn't cover the missing taxes then I'm sure they will recover through other avenues. If you lease a car and don't pay, they can really only reclaim the car.

Council tax is not the same as property tax.

They are government taxes based upon the value of your house.

The government can take whatever they want in repayment as they are the government.

I realize my huge mistake calling it the "stock market". It's the real estate market.

The registration would show the name of the real owner. I don't think this is a good example.

That doesn't really change much though? It can still be taken from you for non-payment. What does it matter if some piece of paper says you "own" it if the courts will still allow someone to repossess it?

Also this depends on the state, some US states are set up where the bank owns the title until the borrower pays it off, and others have the borrower on the title from the start but with a lien on the car by the lender in case the borrower doesn't pay. https://realestatelicensewizard.com/title-theory-vs-lien-the...

Actually if I remember correctly (at least in NJ) the registration shows the name of the creditor as the owner. That was my only past experience. Mine was a vote in the "no you don't own it" direction and mine was financing not even a lease. (Not that they are fundamentally so different)

Vehicle registration rules in the UK[0] make a clear distinction between the "registered keeper" of a vehicle (the person who "keeps" it, uses it day-to-day, and who is responsible for taxing it), and a vehicle's owner.

A vehicle's registration papers show the keeper's name and details but the document states in large letters "This document is not proof of ownership".

[0] https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-registration/new-and-used-vehicle...

I think our paperwork shows the registration info of the person who registred it. Like in UK this is not ownership by itself. The paperwork also has a section for any liens on the property. This can be the creditor from the beginning or a private person or a government entity can have a claim due to debts. Nowadays these are all in the system of course. The paper card does not mean anything. Everything is looked up on the spot.

Maybe not in common parlance, but if you lease a building for hundreds or thousands of years at a nominal rent, it's difficult to distinguish that from what you might call "true" ownership. Believe it or not that is how a lot of property is owned in some common law jurisdictions. A well-known example is Guinness's famous brewery in Dublin, which was leased in 1759 for 9,000 years at £45 per year.

Long-lease ownership is particularly common for apartments, where it is important that the owner of one apartment does not do anything to impair the structural integrity of other apartments or the building as a whole, and there may also be a common area that apartment owners are obliged to maintain. This means that you must impose certain covenants on the apartment owners and traditionally the only way to do that was through leasehold ownership.

Ownership is a very fuzzy concept and it is interesting to think about what are its hallmarks. There is no single correct answer, but I think a lot of lawyers tend to think of ownership as being a right "in rem" (ie, a right in respect of a thing, which is theoretically enforceable against any third party) rather than a right "in personam" (ie, a right against a particular person, which is generally not enforceable against third parties). In that regard, a leasehold is a right in rem whereas, for example, a licence to dwell on a property for a period of time would be a right in personam.

leases are of two kinds technically. operating and finance lease.

one gives you ownership at the start, the second one merely "rents" you the thing

my parents lease a car. I would regard it as their car, and possibly go so far as to say they own it, if I wasn't thinking too hard about it, and maybe even if I was. it's in their possession.

If they will own it at the end of the payments (what we call Hire Purchase in UK) then yes, I’d regard it as their car. If they making monthly payments over certain amount of time and after that time they need to give the car back then no - they just renting it.

> I would regard it as their car, and possibly go so far as to say they own it, if I wasn't thinking too hard about it, and maybe even if I was. it's in their possession.

Thought experiment: If they were to damage their vehicle (but assuming it's still legal to drive), who gets to decide whether it should - or indeed must - be repaired? Your parents, or someone else?

(Full disclosure: I recently added some scratches to my wife's car after a concrete pillar jumped out in front of me in an underground car park. I don't need to involve the insurance company, I don't need to talk to any bank or finance company, I can simply go to any local independent provider and have the car repaired. Or indeed not, if I decide it's not worth it.)

> I don't need to involve the insurance company, I don't need to talk to any bank or finance company, I can simply go to any local independent provider and have the car repaired. Or indeed not, if I decide it's not worth it.

This is all true for a leased car as well. The only difference is that when you turn the leased car in at the end of the term, you may get charged by the leasing company for any damages that are currently on the car.

> This is all true for a leased car as well

Almost, except that:

> The only difference is that when you turn the leased car in at the end of the term [...]

Yes, correct, and exactly what I was alluding to: the significant difference between owning and leasing!

EDIT: Maybe I'm missing something (we've only ever owned vehicles outright, never leased). Q: If you are leasing a car and you have a (let's say fairly serious) crash, are you allowed to have it repaired in the manner of your choice, even at a third-party repair shop, and not even be obliged to inform the leasing company about the accident and/or the repairs?

that's a ridiculous cope, they rent the car they do not own it, the bank owns it

By this standard, nobody owns anything: as long as you pay property taxes, you're just renting from the State. I don't entirely disagree with this interpretation: as others have pointed out, whatever you "own" can be quickly expropriated by local powers to build a highway, airport, stadium...

And local powers can be dismantled, or see part of its territory being annexed by an other sovereign power. As we say, nothing lasts forever.

In that regard, ownership is more like "sizing the window in a large enough shape so that all stakeholders are convinced that it will never be required to put special attention on it again, despite ineluctable changes".

Maybe privileges, responsibilities and liability are less delusional terms for that matter.

Moreover, the state protects what you "own" from being appropriated by the person with the bigger club. "Private property" very much depends on public goodwill.

If they owned it, they might hand-paint it, or saw off the roof and make it a cabrio, without consequences. Can they?

Even if they "fully owned" it, they still couldn't paint or mod it without consequences. Vehicles must abide to certain regulations or they cannot be driven on public roads. Can't paint a stop-sign on it, for example. Can't saw off the steering wheel.

Name some of those countries.

Residential leasehold properties are often referred to as 'owned' in the UK [1] and Ireland [2] and can be bought with mortgages. However, the structure is quite controversial [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leasehold_estate [2] https://mullinstreacy.ie/freehold-vs-leasehold/ [3] https://www.ft.com/content/b8068d5f-b4b9-4be6-a67e-1866fee68...

USA is one

"But these buildings have an even lesser-known sibling in the world of condominiums, known as leasehold condos. In this scenario, condo owners get an actual deed and therefore own their property, even though the building is technically under lease to a larger ownership entity, to which it pays rent."

https://www.brickunderground.com/buy/what-is-a-leasehold-con...

Germany. All land belongs to the state, save for some historical claims held by the Catholic church and (I think) former aristocracy.

Note that private property rights still exist on top of that but this is why the state can decide that e.g. an energy company's interest in your land is more beneficial to the people than yours. You'll still get reimbursed although legally speaking I'm not sure the state would have to do that in order to seize it. The difference is that they couldn't do this for land owned by the Catholic church for example.

As a caveat note that not all land used by the Catholic church in Germany is owned by the Catholic church, this really only applies to historical claims and contracts the state decided to uphold.

I can only assume you're somehow extrapolating this from Article 14 of the Basic Law for Germany, but the other half of your assumptions are at the same time contrary to it. Reimbursement is written directly into that law.[0]

About six years ago there was a publication summing up the current state of affairs[1]. I believe we can safely say your comment doesn't reflect it at all.

[0]: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_14.html

[1]: https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/414774/826f537e22a405...

> Germany. All land belongs to the state

Maybe that's a technicality (at first glance it feels like an almost outlandish claim), but in the spirit of enquiry I'll put it like this: can you share a source for that?

FWIW I skimmed [0] and failed to come up with anything that comes close...

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundeigentum

The GP is referring to Germany's counterpart to the US' eminent domain, I think: if the state lays a claim on your land, you are bound to comply.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteignung#Wiedervereinigtes_D... (third paragraph):

Since 2009 there have been 1647 procedures initiated in the Bundesrepublik for expropriation of landownership for road construction projects. As of August 2020, 448 of these procedures have been completed. Paragraph 19 of the Federal Funeral Street Act allows expropriations, "insofar as they are necessary for the execution of a determined or approved construction project" and are in accordance with Article 14 of the Basic Law for the benefit of the general public.

Of course, you can sue against that, and sometimes for decades (and thus prevent the project from getting ever finished, see the planned, and eventually forsaken A85 project that was meant to connect Stuttgart to Schwäbisch Hall roughly where today's B14 is [1]. They weren't able to seize two key farmer's fields and gave up - when the old farmer died in 2002, they build a nice bypass through there. Having lived in the area, a fast connection to the local capital would have made a lot of people's lives a lot better and saved millions of litres of fuel each year.

[1] http://www.autobahnatlas-online.de/A85.htm

What are you talking about? Former GDR or something?

United Kingdom is one.

To be fair, if I pay for my personal domain name - at 8.99 a year, for the next..6 decades, then that will last longer then I am likely to live.

So the total outlay would be around $540. The biggest issue with that is the possibility the registrar ceases existing over that time period.

There is a maximum to the renewal time that I don't remember right now, but i think you can't renew your domain for 60 years in one go.

You do have the right to sell your domain for any price, but I guess it could be seen as owning a rental contract..

You are selling the rights of registration rather than the domain itself. So yes you are buying the domain so long as you keep paying the registration fees and comply with the rules set by the domain registry.

In many, if not most, countries, if you don't pay your property taxes, if you don't do "adequate upkeep" of the property, or if the government decides it's needed for something more important, it can be forcibly bought off and you'd be lucky if they pay you current market value and not the price you paid when you bought it. Or, in less developed places, they just confiscate it.

That's exactly how it works with land and housing. Except you have to both pay a lump sum and a yearly fee to keep your home otherwise the government comes and takes it away from you.

> What traditional sense?

In the sense of renting != owning

Na it's not really true, you don't rent it (the name), you pay for the administrative work, you still ~have the namerights, like google.com...they own that name, because they are the "creator" of it.

They're not the creator, Verisign created it. And I don't know about Google's specific agreement (they may have paid decades in advance for all we know) but in general if a company forgets to pay they lose their name, there were a few high profile cases like that already. That isn't ownership, that's rent.

>They're not the creator, Verisign created it.

They registered it, NOT created/invented it. It's like saying the Patent-office created your patent, but yeah you can loose the url, like you can loose your patent when you forgot to pay the patent-office.

Renting is just not the right word, because renting means that you never owned it, but someone else.

Sure but don't pay your property tax and let me know what happens there.

Government will sue you and if courts find you owing money to the government and you fail to pay up, some of your property will be seized and sold off to cover the due tax and legal fees.

That "some" might not be the property you failed to pay the tax on (eg it could be your car whereas you failed to pay property taxes on your house). There are usually protections on the property you inhabit, but otherwise they should look to seize whatever is smallest but big enough to cover the amount due.

With domains, you lose the domain that you failed to pay fees on, and no other property will be seized to pay it off.

The difference is in requiring a court system and in what way you are liable (any of your holdings can cover it).

Yes, that's a good analogy, it's pretty much the exact same situation, with the only difference that the government collects tax while DNS is in the hands of private corporations.

Imo there is a good argument for property tax if you view land as a somewhat public good. After all some wealthy family can and in some cases in the old world literally does own vast stretches of land for centuries. That's basically hereditary aristocracy, probably not the best political system we could come up with. So imposing a tax/rent on land ownership seems reasonable to me.

Anyway, I may be digressing because the point wasn't even if it's good or bad, just that it isn't ownership in the way people generally understand the term. With DNS I find it personally questionable why it's in private hands if we as a society have decided to impose a tax/rent. It used to be public afaik, it's a bit like privatizing the water supply. I think most people would be against it if they know how the internet works. They simply never noticed it even happened.

>DNS is in the hands of private corporations

https://www.icann.org/ ??

> you pay for the administrative work

If you were truly buying a domain name, the administrative work would be one-time, indeed one might think the entire overhead of maintaining a registry would be significantly less.

Domain names were historically much cheaper and the price for acquiring one was effectively administrative fees before domain names became a highly profitable and competitive market. Some domains are still free, whether 3rd/4th level domain from eu.org, or 2nd level domain from public-service TLDs like .ml (Mali) or .ga (Gabon).

It's a shame we have to pay at all for what is essentially a text entry in a database. I'm not opposed to having commercial domains (.com) or private TLDs paying off infrastructure for all other users, but i believe it's an essential component to a free Internet that anybody can own many names for free. Many projects would have died before birth if not for friendly operators giving away names or a shell account and some storage space on a server.

Economic barriers kill innovation, especially from poorer countries where 10$/y is not cheap, or for people for whom access to banking services is not easy/guaranteed (such as homeless or indebted folks in western countries).

A traditional sense that makes no sense for intangible concepts like a domain name.

You lease it, you don't buy it.

Like an appartment. Can lease it, or purchase it.

Devil’s advocate: the appartement or land you own still requires paying annual government taxes (and sometimes various other fees) in most places.

That isn't the apartment though ? I'm just demonstrating the difference for every day folks.