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by dist-epoch 565 days ago
> a web page with a picture of a turkey sitting on a pig? Not squatting

GPT/Cursor will create that page for you in 5 min. I bet a NotSquattingAsAService startups will appear which will create the "not squatting" fake site for you for $2.
2 comments
ToucanLoucan 565 days ago
I mean, that's an improvement in my mind over millions of insipid "BUY THIS DOMAIN!" web pages. At the least the internet would be more interesting?

But also like, then you aren't advertising it for sale. So I'm wondering how many offers you're going to get to sell that domain, which is the point of squatting it.

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dist-epoch 565 days ago
That's not how most squatting pages are sold. They are registered for sale in places like NameCheap and you can see it directly when you search for domains.
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reaperducer 565 days ago
NotSquattingAsAService startups will appear which will create the "not squatting" fake site for you for $2.

That's an improvement. Adding $2 to $5 to the cost of a squatted domain will start to dissuade people who squat on tens of thousands of domains, if they have to suddenly have to pay $20,000 to $50,000 for the not squatting service.

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gruez 565 days ago
>That's an improvement. Adding $2 to $5 to the cost of a squatted domain will start to dissuade people who squat on tens of thousands of domains

There's no way static site hosting and a email service costs $2-$5 per year per domain, especially for bulk users. Even if we take that price at face value, a .com domain already costs around $10/year. A 20%-50% increase will only change behavior at the margins. It won't make chat.com magically become available, and at best will make some D tier domains available. Ironically the introduction of gTLDs probably had the same effect. Squatting harrisonburgrealty.com is suddenly going to be less profitable when there's harrisonburg.{realty,realestate,realtor,homes,house,place,properties,rent,apartments} available as well.

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ToucanLoucan 565 days ago
To be clear, when I said make it cost more, I was thinking more like taxes. Similar to how we should be taxing vacant homes to raise the cost of keeping empty properties and lower the rents in turn.
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