[Adlai]

  People asking questions, lost in confusion
  Well, I tell them there's no problem, only solutions
    - John Lennon

The other solutions proposed here work at the wrong level. The approach taken by I2P[1] does away with the concept of globally squattable names[2], leaving public keys as the global identifiers and letting individuals define local nicknames or delegate to trusted lists.

[1] https://geti2p.net/en/docs/naming

[2] Even http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko is susceptible to squatting by those who can invest (or rent) computing power.

PS: I had a chance recently to talk with a "DNSquatter": the doorman at a building I frequent. Poor guy bought tens of thousands of domain names, years ago, with money he had available for investment, and asked me for advice on how to cash out his investment. It seems to me that he's the victim of a chumpatron[3], rather than the scammer himself; although his actions do help keep the scam alive. I advised him to consider the money lost.

[3] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1446

[Natanael_L]

Agreed, and my approach so far for naming is this:

https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/web-o...

One of the advantages of it is that it can be used to mimic the DNS/SSL model or any other PKI just by imposing the right priority calculation rules, so you at least don't lose any capabilities with it.