(Not that I necessarily support a Georgist tax in this case, since it seems that your interest in the domain is noncommercial in nature)
E.g. if you owned and actively used greyface-.com and I'd make an offer of 10 000$ just for the fun of it, either you literally give up your name (I eat the cost but that's a risk I could want to take) or you're stuck with a percent of that to pay every month/year even as nothing else changed for you.
If you're willing to pay $10000 for it, even if only out of spite, then it's worth that much yeah. The domain is suddenly in more demand than it was, taking it out of circulation is a bigger imposition on society than it was before, so isn't it right that the tax on that goes up?
As a society I think we don't want to encourage adversarial pricing on taxes, the same way property tax isn't just based on raw demand (or even linked to it at all depending on the country) and has elements of controls to prevent too much gaming of it.
"Someone might get angry about this tax and do something malicious" is an argument you can make about any kind of tax.
We already have to deal with people squatting domains, and we have laws about trademarks, libel and so on. A tax on valuable domains ought to reduce domain squatting (since it makes it harder to just hold a domain that you're not using, you'd be paying every year) and reduce the market price of domains, which would increase competition and be good for customers. If someone manages to make a viable business out of buying up domains whose owners have been lowballing their value to keep their taxes low, fair play to them, they'll be helping keep everyone honest and keep domains in circulation in the market (but notice that a business like that is only going to be viable if they can sell the domains on to someone who can actually use them pretty quickly, because every year that they're holding them in inventory they're paying the taxes themselves).
> As a society I think we don't want to encourage adversarial pricing on taxes, the same way property tax isn't just based on raw demand (or even linked to it at all depending on the country) and has elements of controls to prevent too much gaming of it.
The current property tax regime is exactly the kind of failure I want to avoid; those "controls" are what leads to all the gaming that locks up our property market and means young people have no hope of ever owning anything. A more raw market-based system would be fairer and more effective.
You also have to eat the increased tax going forward. Which could be spent on eg universal healthcare.
Also, what jurisdiction are you aware of that takes un-accepted real estate offers into account for tax purposes?
Under what I propose, people using or squatting a popular domain that lots of people want would pay more, and people using an obscure domain no-one cares about would pay less. That would be more equitable.
> Or: What entity should be entitled to the tax, and why?
It's a Pigovian tax, so it has a positive effect even if you burn the proceeds. In an imaginary ideal world I'd put them in a kind of sovereign wealth fund for all humanity, that every natural person was equally entitled to, because no-one owns the word "milk" and everyone on Earth (other than the one person who does get to use the domain) is equally deprived by not being able to use the domain for their own website. In practice, using it to run internet infrastructure or putting it into general UN/government coffers would be fine.
If so: How does consistently using a domain (any domain) for literally 30 years (as of a week ago) for a personal website and an email address constitute "squatting?"
Please note that there is a significant time cost (both senses) switching one's email address. Speaking personally, I have found some organizations are effectively incapable of updating an email address in their systems, at least not on the first N attempts over the course of M years.
I probably wouldn't call it squatting, but it's something economically similar.
> Should its registrant morally pay more than the default annual registration cost?
Yes.
> If so: How does consistently using a domain (any domain) for literally 30 years (as of a week ago) for a personal website and an email address constitute "squatting?"
If someone's using a highly-in-demand domain for a small website visited only by friends and one email address, then I see that as wasteful and icky. It's like having a /8 IP block because you registered in the early days of the internet, and using it for your home network of 5 computers. Or having a giant mansion in the middle of town where you live in a couple of rooms and leave the rest to rot. Or owning a bunch of historic paintings/cars/etc. that sit permanently in storage and are never used or seen. More "hoarding" than "squatting" I guess, but equally gross.
I think the whiners who carp about its current use are just crypto-jealous.