[lkesteloot]

I feel like .com should be much more expensive than it is. Too many people squatting. I have friends who have dozens of .com, and not even "just in case", they're just collecting them because they like the sound of them. Then when you have a real idea all the good ones are taken, most unused.

The .com TLD is supposed to be for commercial use, so for a real company it shouldn't be a big deal to pay $50 or $100 per year or more, and it would free up good domains to be actually used.

[ozmodiar]

I have my own name registered, which I use for email. It would be a pain to give it up, and nobody else wants it anyway. I don't see why I should have to deal with a price increase. If a company can deal with these increases couldn't you also argue that buying from a squatter is not an issue? This has the advantage of pricing the domains based on demand.

You could argue that you don't want to reward squatting, but either way you're going to have to pay off some entity I don't think entirely deserves it.

[plopz]

How do you know nobody else wants it? Someone has my real name registered, it would be nice to have, but I've never tried contacting them about it.

[francisofascii]

I have my own last name, and would not want to lose it, but I don't think I should be entitled to it just because I registered it first.

[wtmt]

Your suggestion is about a couple of decades late. Nevertheless, I don’t agree with it. Other gTLDs and ccTLDs May have issues of their own (price, control, lack of Whois privacy). Squatting will, and does, happen with other TLDs that are nowadays more common and recognized by laypeople. Making .com more expensive after all these decades will just enable rent seeking while harming millions of people. Many squatters would get a lot more money for their domains, and this would cause a rush to squat on more domains.

To handle squatting on .com better, my suggestion would be to have alternative TLDs available at a cheaper price (rather than making .com costlier). That could potentially help by making the others more popular (than now) and reduce the incentives to squat.

[kingludite]

Just raise the annual fee to 500 USD. 3 letter domains 50 k, 2 letter domains 100 k, words that are in the dictionary 25 k, refunds for squatters.

[forgottenpass]

So my personal email account just got $490/year more expensive? Or $24990/year if we count non-english dictionaries?

And I ought not to have it because I'm not hosting an online store or marketing materials for a megacorp? Fuck me for trying to have something nice without commercializing it, right?

[dawnerd]

Cool let’s hurt small businesses.

[harikb]

It should be priced the way Google priced .dev - Good names cost slightly more than what one can make from squatting, but not prohibitive for a real business.

People's personal names are unlikely to fall in that category.

[minifigone]

Forgive my lack of knowledge of the TLDs, but is there then an alternative TLD that can/should be used for personal projects or portfolios?

[btrettel]

I'm switching my personal website from .org to .us. There are a few major disadvantages of .us: 1. only available to people in the US, 2. private registration is not allowed. While the latter is not a major problem for my personal website, I have a project that I'd like to not have attached to my name, so .us isn't a possibility there. I don't know what TLD to use for that project yet but I'll figure something out. I'm open to suggestions.

[Aperocky]

Hmm, by private registration, do you mean Whois guard? I’ve made that mistake once, but I don’t know if we’re talking about the same thing.

[btrettel]

Yes, looks like WhoisGuard is Namecheap's version of private registration. Some registrars don't charge for that, by the way.

[Aperocky]

Not having that seem to be a disaster, you wouldn’t believe the amount of calls I received offering to commercially make my website that were clearly personal by name.

[NiloCK]

Not sure if I understand the first disadvantage. People not living in the US live someplace else, with its own TLD.

[btrettel]

Fair point, you're correct. Private registration not being available is the main disadvantage then, which as I said is not a problem for a personal website.

[kps]

It is possible for some people to cross some borders.

[TaylorGood]

On the opposite end, I've had continual bouts with HugeDomains.com. Specifically, I have a theory that they buy domain search queries from Registrars. A handful of times I'll search and click on an available domain, and if I don't buy immediately, HD has registered the name in just hours. Poof! A landing page appears that it is for sale at $2,300 and can be financed monthly. I've searched through DreamHost and LeanDomainSearch and almost exclusively.

Note: I love Dreamhost, and have used them for 13+ years. The CEO responded to my tweet saying they do not sell queries.

[0x0]

If you are just checking availability, just cut out the middle-men and do a whois query directly.

[pergadad]

Please be aware that there's many countries for which $9 is not a negligible sum. Essentially what you're saying is that anyone not willing or ABLE to pay more should be squeezed out.

[kingludite]

You could limit sales to nationals and adjust the fee to force productive use.

.tk is still free tho!

http://www.dot.tk/en/index.html?lang=en

[hwj]

I don't recommend .tk.

They cancelled my domain out of the blue. When researching the problem I found out this happened to others as well.

[_v7gu]

Higher prices just introduce a deadweight loss to the consumers, and whatever added utility will just be captured by Verisign.

If we really want to stop squatters, I think we should be charging exponentially increasing prices for each additional domain. A domain could be $10 for a new customer, but cost $10,240 for a firm that already holds 10. Such costs wouldn't be prohibitive for people or companies, but incredibly serious for anyone who wants to squat domains.

[donmcronald]

Yeah. Some type of non-linear pricing would be a nice solution, but it would be tough enforce. Once you realize there are lots of fake companies on Google, you realize the domains would all get owned by dishonest people willing to lie and cheat to beat the system.

Another option would be to set a fixed price for ownership transfers and to forbid charging more than that in the ToS. It wouldn't stop squatting, but it would suck all the value out of it because I could negotiate with a squatter to buy a domain and turn around and report them to ICANN so the domain gets revoked and dropped back into the pool.

The biggest problem is that everyone involved, including ICANN, has a lot of incentive to create pseudo property with a limited supply so they can all participate in the rent seeking that comes along with limited supply property.

Even though they'd never admit it, domain squatters are great for ICANN, the registries, and the registrars. The squatters demonstrate domains have value and the (fake) limited supply creates a gold rush style urgency where no one wants to wait until tomorrow to register a domain because a squatter might grab it first.

[AviationAtom]

It used to be $35/yr, and you had to prepay for two years, IIRC. That was when Network Solutions had a monopoly on the registrar market for .COMs.

[jotm]

> all the good ones are taken

The most common complaint every year for two decades now.

[DarthGhandi]

If it's "no big deal" for a company to pay $1000 a decade more, why exactly is squatting a problem? Why not give that money to a squatter who'd likely sell it to you for a fraction of that.

This is a ridiculous argument that doesn't benefit the company or end consumers at all. Squatting isn't a problem for the vast majority.