You know what? Domain name prices are too damn low. And that means that it’s profitable for domain name squatters – aka “scum of the earth” – to just sit on hundreds, thousands, millions of the things, making puny amounts from advertising on every one, but multiplied by thousands adding up to quite a bit – at least enough to cover the re-registration of the domains.
Probably a good half of people looking at those domains are people wishing they could buy them.
Sure, back in the Network Solutions days we all balked at paying USD$35/year for a .com or .net. But at least you knew that people who would pay that much for a domain would actually use it. At least you could GET a domain – maybe not a perfect one, of course. But when you didn’t get one, it was because someone else was genuinely using it, or if not, was paying through the nose to keep it anyway. Not just some scumbag squatter sitting on it with yet another useless “search the web!” page of ads.
Evidently, prices are too low. Now, I’ve benefited from cheap domain names. But such is my loathing for the squatters that I’d pay more, just so they’d have to pay more as well. I’d like prices to double or triple. I don’t want Verisign to get the money, though – maybe it could go to the IETF or some other worthy internet-related cause. Just anything to force the squatters into bankruptcy is fine with me.
Who agrees with me?
March 28th, 2006 at 4:21 am
I do. tj7.com has been sitting there, wasting away, for 2 YEARS.