[_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.