[cubesnooper]

I don’t exactly like it, but isn’t it an effective measure to reduce scalping? So many .com domains are owned by entities who bought piles of dictionary words just to slap them on a SEO ads page, only willing to part with them for exorbitant prices. What better means are there to fight these people who insert themselves into the internet namespace to siphon money while providing zero value?

[lupire]

Unless the money goes to help the Internet somehow, it is still going to scalpers, but only a few billionaires instead of anyone who is willing to speculate.

[wiremonger]

Here’s another perspective. We own voltive.com. It cost us $28k. “Us” is me and my partner, small business owners with families and bills, working to build something of value in the world. We bought the domain from someone who had never used it for anything. Is it just that some guy fleeced us for $28k by squatting on that domain for 20 years at $12/year when we were actually trying to do something productive with the name? I certainly don’t think so.

[pclmulqdq]

Out of curiosity, why pay so much for the domain name? Could you not have chosen a name that had an open .com domain?

Aldo, if this was your trademark before buying the domain, are you sure you couldn't have used the ICANN trademark squatting process to seize it? That would have only cost about $1500. Some people look for trademark registrations to preemptively buy the .com domain (and then sell it back to you for $10,000+), but the ICANN specifically has a process in place to prevent this kind of extortion.

[wiremonger]

We were deciding on a business name at the time, so we didn’t already own the trademark. Based on other similar names that we were considering, voltive.com should probably have been under $10k, but the seller absolutely refused to budge (why not, carrying cost is only $12/year after all).

But getting a decent name is hard. We wanted something that was two syllables, not trademarked (trademarks are important when selling on Amazon, as we do), easy to spell if you hear it said, had a toll free phone number available (we have 888-VOLTIVE). That narrows things considerably.

[noduerme]

Maybe HN can pool together to form a non-scalping, dev-friendly TLD.

[koolba]

Why does it even have to be a TLD? You have have a subdomain of an existing TLD. Kind of like the dynamic DNS services that give you your-custom-name.foo.example.com.

[chillfox]

I would rather pay a once off high price to acquire a domain than randomly have a domain I have owned for some time get marked as premium and now the price is high every year and I can’t move it around anymore either.