[henpa]

I remember around 1999 when I used to work for a big ISP and I ran a simple perl script that would "nslookup" all combination of 3 letters domains. It generated a huge list of available domains, but none that called my attention because all the good ones (not just random letters) seemed to be already registered. I would never thought that all those random 3 letter domains would sell for so much money many years later! :-)

[kristopolous]

Being an obdurate domain squatter would have been a successful strategy.

All the things I thought would have been too stupid to work seems to have been very profitable

[sublinear]

Calling a strategy "too stupid to work" is an implicit assumption of what the rest of the world wants.

Someone else made a comparison to phone numbers which turned out to be accurate. Simple sells.

[Suppafly]

I'm missed out on a bunch of profitable tech booms just by a combination of being lazy and by feeling that things like domain scalping are somewhat inherently immoral.

[1123581321]

If it's any consolation, it was only profitable because not enough people thought to squat on them so enough of them were turned into sites that made the web interesting enough to become massively popular. I tell myself such things, anyway. :)

[BitwiseFool]

I prefer the term "Domain Scalper". As it so happens, domain squatting is a legal term and it refers to buying the domain of a registered trademark just to sell it to the owner of the trademark. It doesn't even have a good resolution rate either.

[nucleative]

>All the things I thought would have been too stupid to work seems to have been very profitable

Isn't that the truth. The amount of stupid ideas that have turned out to be wildly successful.

[ak_111]

I think there are some 3 letter domain available on most TLD including .ai, I wonder why these haven't been taken up yet?

[indianets]

Because of exorbitant price set by the registry. After the apps boom, domain name has lost half of it’s value. And, rest was messed up by the new TLDs.

I strongly believe if there was original gTLDs and ccTLDs, internet would be a better place.

[Gigachad]

This sounds like a good thing though. The high price makes squatting unviable so domains are left unregistered and available for someone who will actually use them.

All the new TLDs removed scarcity from the system which didn’t provide any value.

[geraldhh]

new-age tld's don't count

[schwartzworld]

I have a .world tld, and it's not unusual for email inputs to wrongly mis-validate my perfectly valid email.

[geraldhh]

even my brain has a hard time validating those ... idk {com,net,org} for international audiences and cctld for local stuff seemed enough

[Gigachad]

Seems like these issues come from the tlds longer than 3 chars.

I have a .red and a .me and never had an email field fail to validate.

[tjpnz]

They're people's initials.