Problem:
The .com and similar namespaces are crowded.
As someone who has been searching this weekend for a domain, the sad fact is that a huge number of domains are simply "Parked free, courtesy of ..." or "Coming soon", or "Under construction", or "This domain is for sale, please contact..."
In short, domains are being bought up and not used, and the commons is ruined.
Solution:
Increase the price of .com and .net and other tlds to approximately $X. End the domain squatting market and put the sort of implicit requirement that the domain must generate $X for you to want to hold on to it into the equation.
Now, let's argue about where $X is.
"In short, domains are being bought up and not used, and the commons is ruined."
How are "the commons" ruined?
Domains (as a business) has been going on since domains were available and some people recognized they would have value and bought them up. Call it "squatting" if you want (a derogatory term) which came up back in the day and plays no relation to the traditional use of "squatting" (thank the media for that one everybody just repeats it now).
Real estate has also gone up in value and there are people who recognized and took a chance on that and have made money as well.
"Solution: Increase the price of .com and .net and other tlds to approximately $X. End the domain squatting market "
The price of .com (and all else) is effectively determined by contracts that ICANN has negotiated with the registry operators (Verisign in the case of .com) who then sell to the registrars (like godaddy and the much loved on HN namecheap).
Squatting is an accurate description for rent-seeking behavior that levies a cost on the internet community at large. Unlike land -- a physical, real resource -- domain names exist at the discretion of ICANN, the bodies responsible running the root name servers, the infrastructure providers that default to those root name servers, and ultimately, the internet community.
In that regard, they're even more of a manufactured monopoly than any other form of 'intellectual property'; they require no investment in of themselves, and exist at the mercy of the voluntary participation of the network at large.
In this regard, they're most similar to IP address allocations, which are now subject to considerable constraint and no longer freely available for abuse, as providing unrestricted IP allocations is damaging to internet health.
Likewise, supporting rent-seeking domain squatter behavior is damaging to those that would make beneficial use of the domain name space.
"domain squatter behavior is damaging to those that would make beneficial use of the domain name space."
How would you propose to determine beneficial use of a domain name?
For example let's say the domain "pifflesnort.com" was taken by someone in 2003 who decided to use it periodically to post a list of movies they had watched on TV. Now you come along (in 2013) and you want it to do something more than that (say do some serious writing). But it's taken already. Let's go further and say that it wasn't taken so you grabbed it. Now someone else comes along and wants it for the name of their new foundation.
Where exactly do you draw the line and what constitutes "beneficial" use of the domain? Do you plan to have a body of people deciding that?
(just checked by the way and pifflesnort.com is "parked". Of course that doesn't mean it wasn't used last year and that doesn't mean it isn't used for email (or an ftp server etc.) and that doesn't mean that the owner isn't hard at work on a website but hasn't launched yet either.)
I don't think it's difficult to draw a line between a dude keeping a list of movies he watched and a "This domain may be for sale, meanwhile search for shoes and mortgages" clone page.
We shouldn't be afraid to call things out for what they are. The dude with the movie list is doing it because he enjoys it, so what if only a handful of people in the world ever read it. The clone squatter page on the other hand, provides nothing of interest to anyone and exists solely as a means to extort money.
The "dude" with the movie page could be someone who fully intends to actually sell the domain when the right buyer comes along. People already do this type of thing. Put up a "kinda sorta page" that looks and quacks like a duck.
Once again, how are you expecting this is going to get enforced exactly?
As an aside buying and selling domain names is a valid business model and has been around for quite some time.
People who managed to register domains back in the beginning were confronted with almost unlimited inventory and had to decide what to register at the time at what was $100 per domain (for two years later lowered to $70 for two years). [1]There was no guarantee they would be able to sell the domains that they registered. If there was they would have registered more than they did. Later once the top names were grabbed others took advantage and actually spent real money to buy them with the hopes of reselling (say buying something for $50,000 and hoping to wait a number of years and sell it for $300,000). Some of those people have made money and some are still sitting on those domains.
[1] And of course prior to that domains were free but they actually vetted the applications so there was somewhat of a constraint on what you could register. Additionally the utility wasn't as obvious as it was even a year or two later when Network Solutions (the sole bidder on the contract) asked to be able to charge because of the amount of domains registered exceeded the original intent (or whatever) of the contract.
>I don't think it's difficult to draw a line between a dude keeping a list of movies he watched and a "This domain may be for sale, meanwhile search for shoes and mortgages" clone page.
For a human, it's not that difficult. But if you pay that human $15/hour and he does a site every two minutes, it costs you 50 cents to check each website.
>Solution: Increase the price of .com and .net and other tlds to approximately $X.
I don't like it. Makes things more expensive for normal people.
How about this: Impose a fixed $20,000 fee on the sale of an existing domain name. You can transfer for free if you like, but if you sell the domain then $20,000 is due immediately. Maybe make an exception if the sale is part of the sale of an entire business or other such things that normal people might do but squatters couldn't easily craft sham transactions around.
That's just price control, which always works great in market systems. /sarcasm
If you did that, squatters would just lease out domains instead of selling. $20,000 to be listed as the whois contact on the domain? No thanks, just agree to point it at my DNS servers and you can keep ownership yourself. Or you know, take this gift of bitcoin in thanks for free transfer to me.
>That's just price control, which always works great in market systems.
It's not a price control. Price controls are like minimum wage laws which regulate the price at which market participants can sell goods and services, and are generally broken because they lead to a shortage or surplus (depending on whether the price control is set higher or lower than the would-be market price).
This is effectively a tax. Taxes are an extremely effective method of behavior modification. Their primary economic consequence is to discourage the taxed activity, which is undesirable in the case of e.g. employment, but in this case is exactly the desired outcome.
>If you did that, squatters would just lease out domains instead of selling.
Are you serious? Nobody is going to lease a domain name, because the minute the lease expires after you've put all your marketing efforts into telling everyone what "your" domain name is and having them use it, the squatter could just raise the price by a factor of a thousand and have you by the short hairs. And a lease that allows perpetual renewals should be considered a constructive sale for the purposes of the fee and require immediate payment.
>Or you know, take this gift of bitcoin in thanks for free transfer to me.
That would be fraud and could be subjected to criminal penalties. Also, the fee would apply to the seller, so the non-repeat purchasers just buy the domain name pursuant to whatever covert payment method the seller is using and then report the squatter to the authorities which costs the squatter the $20,000 plus penalties and gives the buyer the satisfaction of sticking it to the jerks who were squatting on the domain they wanted.
It seems like this solution means that if you want to have your own domain, either you must be rich or the website must be profitable. You're basically saying that only the rich should have access to domain-branded blogs and other non-commercial sites, and everyone else can make do with subdomains like a blogspot or blogger website. I think raising fees would have consequences for well-intentioned users far beyond the effect it had on domain squatters.
In particular I refer to the .com namespace which, after all, should be used for commercial purposes. We already have .name and so forth for personal sites. Given that .name presents the ultimate namespace collision factory we do come down to a scarcity problem though. Thoughts on how we can handle that?
Also: Note that I said we should argue about the value of $X. I did not at all imply that $X should be such that "only the rich" have access to the ability to purchase a domain. That said, people spend $1200 annually for cell phone service, which I think we can draw comparisons between and DNS. If a person pays $1200 a year for a number they can be reached at through the POTS, is it unreasonable to expect them to pay $X (which we still haven't defined, simply said should be higher than $10) to be reachable on the Internet?
That's an US centered view. No regular person spends anywhere near $100/month on cellphone service where I live, nor could many afford it. For $80/month, you can get a cellphone plan with unlimited sms and calls, 100mbps home internet, 100 TV channels, and a POTS-over-IP line. And yet, many still can't afford cable TV or home Internet.
And this is the problem is pricing global product and/or services; what's reasonable in a market like the US is prohibitively expensive in many others.
"It seems like this solution means that if you want to have your own domain, either you must be rich or the website must be profitable"
Not really. Looks like the namespace is big enough for all of us. Your post made me curious how crowded the .com space really is and within 30s of trying, I found this free gem: notrichbuthappy.com Nothing wrong with it for a blog, right?
Not at all. I wasn't saying the .com namespace was crowded. I was responding to someone who thought it was and who thought the appropriate solution was increasing domain registration prices.
From my understanding, there also was/is a loophole that allowed squatters to hold on to a name without cost for a period. Once it rolled off, they were able to grab it again at no cost. Don't recall all of the details or whether the loophole was closed, but at one time it powered a lot of the squatting activity.
You are talking about "domain tasting". It was closed because it wasn't good for the registry operators (once again Verisign in the case of .com and .net).
That said there is a cost. A registrar needs to keep money on deposit with the registries for the domains that they have purchased. So if they have a constant 1000 domains being registered and dropped and registered it will cost them money. They will make that money somehow from the registrant (in addition to a registry closing the loophole for other reasons).
"Domain tasting should not be confused with domain kiting, which is the process of deleting a domain name during the five-day grace period and immediately re-registering it for another five-day period. This process is repeated any number of times with the end result of having the domain registered without having to pay for it."
You just need to research, pick up the phone or email and negotiate. Even squatters know the relative value of domains fairly well and you'd be surprised how many names are held by someone who doesn't even remember he owns them.
One should never pay money to squatters. It only encourages them to proliferate. If everyone would just let them keep paying yearly fees for thousands of domains nobody ever buys then they would eventually go out of business.
Solution: Increase the price of .com and .net and other tlds to approximately $X. End the domain squatting market and put the sort of implicit requirement that the domain must generate $X for you to want to hold on to it into the equation. Now, let's argue about where $X is.