I'm a hobbyist with a few domain names (under 10 total); of those, the majority are in "use" (that is, there is something of mine they resolve to - not to a blank page or a "for sale" page or anything like that). But a couple or so have no content behind them (and honestly, some day I'll probably let them go back to the wild).
Should I have to pay the amounts you list for something that is a hobby? What about others with hobby domains and sites? Should they have to pay such extreme amounts just to keep their hobby site going?
There are people out there who run sites "just because" - giving away information and content for free, like the web used to be - like it was meant to be, not this almost seeming abomination we have today, built on ephemerous "likes" and other useless metrics.
Your solution would do nothing but turn the web even further to corporate control, and leave hobby sites to only the well heeled, or to those who can scrape by (perhaps NPR fund-drive style). The majority would simply fold up shop, never to be seen again.
I get it - I don't like true squatters any more than the next person; that is, those who sit on a domain hoping to make a buck off of some words. I have no problem with a business establishing a valuable domain based on their name and reputation. I don't like those who sit on domain names that sound or seem like a similar company's name, and try to bank of that (or worse).
But I think your solution of "raising rates" - at least unilaterally - isn't the answer, unless we want a worse web experience than we already have today.
Wouldn't this completely prevent small local organizations/business owners from running their own websites and push them in the Facebook/Google/etc ecosystem? or do I not understand what a "renewal" is?
No you understood right. He's suggesting that a domain should be 5000 a year so that you or I could never possibly own any .com domain for personal use.
And they would keep the web from being usable by anyone that is not in it for business, but wants to put up a site.
$20 a year for a domain plus $50 a year is an easy price for getting a server to experiment with. If things cost 10 times that, it would price out a lot of activity at the margins of the web.
I absolutely disagree, but I think it is reasonable for domain authorities of various gTLDs to incorporate company names into domain name rights a bit more - if your company is FooBar and foobar.com is taken you may get some legal advantage in any efforts to secure it, this could just shift the domain name squatting issue to a company name squatting issue though. And, I'm also making the assumption that we're fine with pushing personal pages and other domain uses off on a different gTLD.
> And, I'm also making the assumption that we're fine with pushing personal pages and other domain uses off on a different gTLD.
This is a sure sign of getting old, in the vein of "old man yells at cloud," but you can have my personal domain that's been registered in a common gTLD long enough for it to buy its own beer when you pry it out of my registrar's hands.
Yeah, it sucks to have come along at the end of the landrush and all of the good spots are taken. That's, sadly, life when it comes to scarce things like that. I sure wish I'd been alive in the 40s or old enough in the 80s to buy waterfront property in Ballard when it was cheap but that time has passed, too.
This is one benefit of having a unique name. My good friend, "Robert Miller" is out of luck. Me, well, yeah. Only one person with my name in the United States, possibly the world.
> I think it is reasonable for domain authorities of various gTLDs to incorporate company names into domain name rights a bit more - if your company is FooBar and foobar.com is taken you may get some legal advantage in any efforts to secure
What about Foobar Plubbers? Do they get Foobar.com? And Foobar Restaurant in Dallas? Split it to FoobarPlubmers.com and FoobaRestaurantDallas.com? And FoobarPlubmersOhioLimited, vs FoobarPlumbersTennesseePartners? Mr Foobar for a personal domain, or Ms Foobar for a portfolio of work?
Perhaps a better solution would be for each subsequent domain cost $1 extra to renew. I.e. your 11th domain would cost you $10 extra per year, your 101st domain a hundred extra a year.
I don't have a big problem with people holding onto a half dozen domains for years at a time and not making much use of them, but companies owning thousands of domains as speculation? F that noise.
Holding companies would break an approach like this very quickly - it's likely that the cost burden of this change would hit smaller companies much quicker than large ones.
Correct me if I am wrong, but are you saying domain sqautters could spawn 1000s of holding to maneuver around my proposal? I guess there could be countries/states where you can register a company for a very low cost. What is the cheapest place one can start a company?
Interesting, but there are typically recurring costs involved in keeping a company open. Mind you, I guess accounting/filing costs also can get pretty cheap at scale, especially if each company is identical in nature.
This seems pretty hard to enforce. What if instead the fee per domain just increased by a dollar per year? The first few dozen years shouldn't be too onerous for those who aren't squatting on a mountain of domains and if your domain is 50+ years old maybe you've found a way to monetize it.
