Why is this rent seeking? It seems like a reasonable service for their target audience, an easy way to create online portfolio. Reselling domains to be used with a portfolio is just an additional service which makes perfect sense in this case.
Rent seeking is NOT the same as renting, otherwise we would not need a new word for it. Rent seeking is particularly abusing the ownership position or power to obtain rent, not just rent:
> "Rent seeking: the fact or practice of manipulating public policy or economic conditions as a strategy for increasing profits."
That's not what "rent seeking" means. Imagine you have a bench on your property and people can just rest there. One day you start charging money for it but without offering anything extra, same old bench. That "squeezing for money with no justification" is "rent seeking".
It's not like that. They buy mcnichol.com on your behalf, when you request it. They're not registering it in advance and then blackmailing you to rent it through them. Domain is yours, you can move it elsewhere (they explicitly mention that).
It's same as any other domain registrar, except that have small markup (couple of dolars per year) but they provide additional service, i.e. customer doesn't have to deal with DNS.
I don't think you understand what foliohd does. They're not squatting on hundreds of domains in advance. This is how it works, based on 1 minute glance of their site:
- you create portfolio, but it's by default served as a subdomain
- then you decide that you really want to use "mchichol.com". You register through them instead of buying it yourself.
That's it. It's customer's domain, not theirs. They also specify that domain is yours if you ever want to move your site elsewhere.
