Drop-Catching Domains Is Big Business

WebsiteMag brings us news from the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA) about a recent study of drop catching —'a process whereby a domain that has expired is released into the pool of available names and is instantly re-registered by another party.' The eleven day study showed that 100% of '.com' and '.net' domain names were immediately registered after they had been released. CADNA has published the results with their own analysis. Quoting: "The results also show that 87% of Dot-COM drop-catchers use the domain names for pay-per-click (PPC) sites. They have no interest in these domain names other than leveraging them to post PPC ads and turn a profit. Interestingly, only 67% of Dot-ORG drop catchers use the domains they catch to post these sites — most likely because Dot-ORG names are harder to monetize due to the lack of type-in traffic and because they tend to be used for more legitimate purposes."

What needs to change

[FredFredrickson]

What needs to change is getting your domain back if you accidentally let it expire.

Just days after I accidentally let one of my domains expire with godaddy, they told me it's in a probation period where it was protected and only I could re-register it if it was a mistake- the catch was that it'd cost $80, as opposed to the $10 it normally costs.

That price is arbitrary, as it's no skin off their backs to re-register it for standard cost. They're banking on drop-catching. Drop-catchers snatch domains faster than I've been able to, even using godaddy's service that watches and grabs a domain the minute it expires.

Re:

[grapeape]

Early on when I was broke and just starting out I thought domains should be cheaper now that they are I wish they were at least more than an impulse purchase. Drop Catching has turned into nothing more than legalized extortion. I was similarly stung by godaddy...it wasnt a url that anyone else would likely want so I decided not to play that game and let it go.

Re:What needs to change

[CastrTroy]

Maybe you should switch to a different registrar if you forget to renew your domain. My registrar sends me email notices 2 months before mine expires, then again at 1 month, then a couple more times after that. They make it really hard to forget. Also, if you don't remember to renew it, maybe it wasn't worth that much to begin with.

Re:

[Marc_Hawke]

My registrar let me put the thing on 'auto-renewal.' Is that unusual? They just charge me once a year, and if I wanted it gone, I'd have to tell them to make it gone.

Re:

[nprz]

My registrar automatically put my on the 'auto-renewal' and refused to take me off of it. I had cancelled my account with them and they were still trying to charge me for their 'auto-renewal' of my domain. That is the last time I pick a registrar because it is cheap.

Re:What needs to change

[phalse phace]

I didn't know AOL was also a registrar.

Re:What needs to change

[vux984]

My registrar sends me email notices 2 months before mine expires, then again at 1 month, then a couple more times after that. They make it really hard to forget.

Actually, so does goddady. I get all kinds of reminders from them. They also have auto-renewal options.

I suppose the only way to blow it would be to have your contact address some spam catcher address you never check. But that's not godaddy's fault.

No one should take that as a recommendation.

[Futurepower(R)]

Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names [nodaddy.com]

Re:

[vux984]

Re:No one should take that as a recommendation.

Indeed. Then again if you want to host some throwaway site for your friends and family or some non-profit or club or whatever, or you want to squat on a dozen typo-squat domains to redirect them to your main page, while preventing real typosquatters from grabbing them godaddy is just fine.

But no I wouldn't trust a million dollar business site to godaddy.

Godaddy's not right for everyone, but its perfectly fine for a lot of applications.

And as for the site you li

Re:

[CastrTroy]

Well, if you google Dreamhost horror stories, most of the stuff you'll find is actually recommending people to dreamhost after they've had some horror story with another hosting company. Sure they have some problems, like their recent accidental billings, but I've been pretty happy with their service over all. For the price you pay, you definitely get way better service than you'd expect.

GoDaddy's web pages difficult to navigate: ads.

[Futurepower(R)]

GoDaddy is far, far worse than you say, I think. For example, GoDaddy tries to exploit the ignorance of most people who buy from them by offering many, many services of poor value. That makes GoDaddy's web pages difficult to navigate because they are so cluttered with ads.

I wasn't talking about them hosting a web site. I was recommending not even buying a domain name through GoDaddy.

Re:

[macshit]

Which registrars are good, BTW (for reasonably low cost "individual" service)? Seems like the only comment I ever hear about domain registrars is of the "Scum-sucking hell-parasite! Damn you, damn you forever!" variety...

Re:

[DMUTPeregrine]

I no longer own a website, but when I did Fuitadnet.com seemed good for me. Their auto-renewal was effective, it just billed me once a year for the domain name.

Re:

[TheLink]

I used Gandi before, they seemed decent to me.

I think their T&C states clearly that in their opinion YOU own the domain name.

Whereas many registrars appear to say that THEY own the domain name and you get to use it as long as you pay.

What's the difference? The difference is how you are treated when the domain name expires or when stuff happens. Those registrars typically start squatting on names you let expire or letting "Partners" a first go at squatting on it,

The other plus is Gandi is based in France

NameCheap. ICANN has made a mess of management.

[Futurepower(R)]

I did a lot of research and decided NameCheap was the best.

However, I got the impression that they planned to charge for WhoisGuard later.

The entire domain business is badly managed. ICANN has made a mess of management, and has allowed many semi-crooked businesses to make messes, too.

This article saved my domain

[donutello]

I had registered my domain with an email address that is no longer valid and a physical address where I no longer live. I had forgotten all about renewing it until I saw this article. Turns out my domain expires on Feb 7th and I was able to renew it (and update my contact information) in time!

Re:What needs to change

[D'Sphitz]

About 6 years ago there was a domain I found that was a month or so from expiring. I checked it every day and it wasn't ever renewed, it entered a hold period and presumably was going to be released to the public after n days (30 i think).

As the date approached I wrote a script to check the domain availability every 30 seconds, and alert me via email, phone, and loud annoying .wav file as soon as it became available. That never happened, it never officially became publicly available.

I emailed the new owner and his response was simply "$4000.00". It has now been parked for over 6 years rather than being used for a legitimate purpose.

I didn't know how the domain name business worked back then, but I learned then how sleazy it really is. These people are in bed with the registrars, and an individual who just wants a domain name less than 40 letters long is SOL.

Re:What needs to change

[Yez70]

Your post gave me an idea. Domains are 'property' in a sense and they have a value. Let's charge 'property taxes' on them. If a domain has a market value, it has a taxable value. It could generate some nice tax revenue for states, or countries. It could also spur some pricing wars with domains other than .com and .net as different countries charge different tax rates. The majority of people own domains worth $10 or less, so it would cost them at most $1 a year per domain. Anyone who owns more than 100 domains would have to pay an incrementally higher rate per domain. It's just an idea, I'm sure a politician would love it.

Imagine being able to forward the '$4000.00' response to the Internet tax office - he's now liable for the $400 in taxes on his $4000 domain, every year. I bet he'd drop the price, or the domain pretty quick.

Re:

[hankwang]

Imagine being able to forward the '$4000.00' response to the Internet tax office - he's now liable for the $400 in taxes on his $4000 domain

Normally, real estate is not valued on what the seller asks, but rather on the price for which comparable property actually is sold.

Re:

[dodobh]

So who collects the taxes (Which country)?

Re:

[Von Helmet]

I'm not aware of any taxes on property that you're holding... Is this a purely hypothetical thing or are their actual taxes on just possessing things on that side of the pond?

Re:

[Chapter80]

We just had an incident where our customer decided they didn't want a certain domain name, so they let it expire. Then they changed their mind, to keep it for one more year, just in case they found a use for it.

The tech guy renewed it, and told us it was $200. As he described it, the domain was in its second grace period (meaning that it got picked up by a bottom-feeder), and that was the charge. I doubt that the customer realized that he was making a $200 decision, when he said "oh what the heck, let'

More than the drop catching

[ContractualObligatio]

It's an interesting study, although it seems you safely ignore drop catching. Things have to become available at some point, so it's what happens after the "drop catch" that's important. As the paper itself concludes:

"Drop-catching alone is not what has led to this problematic environment, but rather it is the abuse of the Add Grace Period in connection with drop-catching that appears to be the cause."

Gotta say domain tasting and parking spoil the internet for me. I've been thinking about setting up a website, and most of the names I checked were domain parked. I could easily live with the registration fee going up significantly if it meant that only people with a real use for domain bought it. The paper suggests that $100 (which isn't too much) is about the cutoff point where it starts to become financially stupid.

Re:

[sssssss27]

And perhaps setting aside a TLD for personal websites that would have a cheap fee and punishing anyone who used them for anything else.

My dad set up a server for our family, immediate and extended, that we all use for e-mail, to share pictures or videos, and anything else that you would want a server for. It would suck to have to add an extra $100 to the server costs.

Tasting may be on the way out

[gujo-odori]

At a recent ICANN meeting, it was voted that ICANN will cease to refund the ICANN domain fee. The result of that will be that registrars won't refund it either, which in turn is expected to be a bullet to the heart of domain tasting.

ICANN's fee is not a lot - 20 cents (US) per year - but that is expected to be sufficient to make domain tasting unprofitable.

Article here: http://www.circleid.com/posts/81299_domain_tasting_ends/ [circleid.com]

Re:

[ContractualObligatio]

Agreed. Still need to do something about parking though.

Re:

[bepo]

Would we really want to do anything about it? Who decides what is appropriate for a website and what isn't? This could be a good intentions project that quickly gets hijacked into Internet censorship.

Re:

[ContractualObligatio]

Yes, some of us really do. ICANN currently holds that power. At the time when fees were higher, the Internet was held up as a vision of free speech - is there some difference in in free speech principles between a $10 fee and $100 fee that I'm missing?

Re:

[rhizome]

At the time when fees were higher, the Internet was held up as a vision of free speech

Not to rain on your prelapsarian parade, but in the days when domain fees were higher there were a lot of other restrictions that obviated domain parking.

Re:

[ContractualObligatio]

That's not a counterpoint to my post, it's a supporting argument!

I'm not saying things were much better back in the day before some great Fall where domain parking ruined the world, or whatever metaphor you had in mind when you made your pretentious prelapsarian comment. I was pointing out that if we have freedom of speech now with a $10 fee (as the GP implies) and we had freedom of speech back then with much higher fees (as I can attest), there is no reason to fear the impact of a minor rise in fees.

Pointi

Re:

[Psychochild]

There's also, you know, the people affected by the "drop-catching" described in the article? (Yeah, I know, it's Slashdot... who reads the fucking article?)

Due to a lack of action from the person with whom I previously had one of my domain names registered, it went unregistered and some domain parker is now squatting on it. Not much I can do, unfortunately, besides spend over a thousand dollars to try a trademark dispute resolution. It sucks in this case because the squatter is basically profiting off of

Re:

[petermgreen]

There's also, you know, the people affected by the "drop-catching" described in the article?
I agree, there was a domain I was "given" and started to use quite extensively but it was never actually registered to me and was registered with quite an expensive register. When it came up for renewal we naievely thought that the easiest thing to do was to let it drop and re-register it under my name. Since then it has been passing round the squatters. I would really like it back both because I like the name and be

Re:

[ThreeGigs]

To that, I can't say much but "The parker got their first, and unless you can establish some kind of fraud (phishing, etc.,), the first person to register is the one who has the right to a domain."

Actually, the first to _trademark_ the name has the right to it. So if you really, really, really want that domain back, spend the $550 to trademark the name, then apply for arbitration.

Re:

[ContractualObligatio]

I agree, it's not much of a problem, simply a preference. I don't see the downside to a system whereby a domain name must have a genuine use, which no more or less arbitrary has first come, first served. I prefer the option that supports someone with an idea to create something, rather than to merely profit without any creation of something at all. But I doubt there is a strong economic argument.

Re:

[petermgreen]

the problem I see with that system is who gets to decide what is and isn't a genuine use.

Re:

[ContractualObligatio]

Wow. I didn't think anyone could be so shallow as to equate the principles of free speech to "$100 - $10 = $90". But hey, at least you can do basic arithmetic.

Re:

[Marc_Hawke]

I'm paying $10/year.

Are you suggesting that I pay $100/year, or $100 registration fee, and then $10/year 'upkeep' fee?

The former would price me out of the market (personal vanity domain), the latter I could probably deal with.

Re:

[ContractualObligatio]

Good question. I would say the latter, on the assumption going a year without knowing whether an "investment" is going to pay off is a sufficient deterrent to abuse.

That wouldn't address existing parked domains, though. Maybe in addition to the pricing change there could be a mechanism whereby you can apply to have a parked domain treated as "available" for the purposes of someone wanting to register a new site i.e. you get to transfer it against their will for $100. For the "parker" to reclaim the site wou

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

This is not bad at all

[kylehase]

Why are people complaining about this. Most registrars send out several email warnings prior to an expiration almost to the point where it's annoying. Secondly, if a domain is that important to you shouldn't you be using the registrars auto renewal service?

It's not like they're frontrunning (sniping) domain names. [slashdot.org]

the biggest offender may surprise you

[ILuvRamen]

Guess who the biggest offender is? WEB HOSTS! I lost my old domain because I had my old domain host use their registrar. And guess what happened when I didn't renew with they cuz they sucked? They re-registered it "for my convenience" and sat on. I had to go to .net instead! That should be soooooo illegal under monopoly/anticompetition laws.

The real problem is phony "registrars"

[Animats]

Most of the "ICANN accredited registrars" [icann.org] are fronts for domain tasting. There are only a few real registrars; the rest are dummies for picking up dropped domains. Enom has a huge number of dummy fronts - "Enom1, Inc" through "Enom469, Inc".

One step needed is for ICANN to enforce the provision of the registrar agreement which allows ICANN to prohibit registrars from owning or speculating in domains. And the provision which requires that a registrar have assurance of payment before activating a domain. With that, the end of the "grace period", and Google refusing to monetize domains for the first five days, we should see this problem decrease. The .org TLD recently got rid of their grace period, and domain transactions dropped 90%.

We're working on this from the browser end. The general idea of our SiteTruth [sitetruth.com] system is to filter out the bottom-feeders. It's the next step after ad-blocking - make the link pages, directory pages, typosquatters, and similar junk far less visible.

It's not even clear that advertisers benefit from all those junk pages. If you advertise with Google ads, and get clicks from junk pages, do they really result in sales? Or is this just a way to take money from the real advertiser and divert it to some bottom-feeder?

Re:

[hankwang]

enforce the provision of the registrar agreement which allows ICANN to prohibit registrars from owning or speculating in domains.

Does that provision really already exist? It would be very hard to prove, though, because one could set up a registrar that does the registrations on behalf "of their customers", and ICANN is not really in the position to trace whether those customers are the same organisation as the registrar.

Re:

[mspohr]

I don't know how you judge junk and 'bottom feeders' but I just checked about five sites that I know are legitimate and they all came up as red and yellow... you may need to refine your methods.

The Question Is, How Do They Know...

[Nom du Keyboard]

And how do these people know when a domain has expired back into the available pool? Do they track whois records which list expiry dates, get the listfrom registrars, are registrars themselves, or what?

Simple

[BlueParrot]

$100 to register, Free to renew for the first 10 years. $10 to renew every year after that. That way it works out to $10 per year for those who stay with a domain, and there is a big incentive not to register a domain you do not wish to keep. In combination with trademark law that would probably take the sting out of most of this nonsense.

No Easy Solutions

[Stanislav_J]

I agree that this is a huge problem, but I don't think pricing domain names out of the range of po' people (like me) and putting more money in the pockets of the registrars is a valid solution. The only theoretical solution I can think of is to limit the number of domains you can register at one time, or better yet within a certain time frame. But even that is flawed. Retailers do this all the time by limiting the amount of a certain sale item you can buy -- if widgets are normally $20 each, and they are pu

What about laws?

[grumbel]

We have trademark laws, we have copyright laws, we have laws that deal with telemarketing, why not have laws that deal with domain grabbing?

My family name had this happen.

[Anonymous Freak]

I own the .org and .info domains of my last name. A distant cousin owned the .com. He let it lapse, and it was picked up by a domain squatter instantly. They want over 500 Euro for the domain. Which is silly, since my last name is so uncommon, there are only 40-ish people in the WORLD with my last name. None of us are famous, none of us own a business with our family name in it. (There are a few of us who own businesses, but none with our name in it.)

I've waited three years for the name to expire, but they keep re-registering it. I've told them outright that I'm willing to pay $35, and that's it. By my measure, they'll hit that mark in their own spending next year.

Re:Make em expensive again

[EvanED]

It would also cut me out. You don't need to make them terribly expensive... just $25 or so would probably be sufficient. It would at least cut that percentage down a ton.

Re:Make em expensive again

[sssssss27]

Couldn't you just make it progressive? Have the first cost the normal rate and then have it go up with each new one you register until you hit a predefined limit. That way people like you and I who only have a few domains wouldn't get hurt.

The only problem that I could see with this is web firms that created websites for other people/companies and register it in their name. I imagine to solve that you could just have the count reset after so long. I imagine these drop catchers register a lot of names all the time.

Re:Make em expensive again

[CastrTroy]

Why not make it $100 to register, and then $5 a year to renew.

Re:Make em expensive again

[armada]

All you need to do is nix the grace period. Simple. If you are not the original registered owner you have to pay full price to register it.

Re:

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Exactly. I don't see why we need all these "convenient" arrangements with grace periods this and reduced charges that for organisations the other who have privileged access to the system. All these arrangements ever do is support people who are abusing the domain system by grabbing expired domains or (as discussed here a few days back) those that someone has expressed an interest in via a look-up, at sub-normal rates that make them attractive as advertising platforms.

Does anyone know the politics behind t

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only would it be unprofitable for these "drop-catcher's", it would make it much harder for spammers to run their operations as well. So I'm all for domain names at 100 per year. Or even $50. Right now a domain for 5 or 10 bucks.. at 50 it would cost all these people 5 to 10 times as much to operate. When you are talking about a few thousand domains. Well that would get really costly.

Re:Make em expensive again

[DaveWick79]

I think this is a great solution. Force the squatters to pay a lot up front, and eliminate the grace period. That way they won't want to output a lot of money, even if it's about $50, to register because they won't make enough money on the domain to make it worthwhile. I think that most people would not mind paying a bit more up front as long as renewal was easy and cheap like it is now.

While they are at it, they should make scams, like Domain Registry of America does, to deceive people into switching registrars. There should be huge fines for this kind of thing, to the tune of $1000's per domain. You've got to make it financially devestating for people to engage in nasty behavior like this.

While I don't think you can make the squatting illegal, I think you can make it harder to make money on, which will effectively eliminate within a couple of years.

Re:Make em expensive again

[cheater512]

The Domain Registry of America never fails to send me a letter telling me to renew with them.

Even though I'm in Australia.

Re:

[Jugalator]

They are good hearted and follow the advice given here too in making it expensive to register your domains with them. I'm sure they're just waiting for others to catch on!

Re:

[CastrTroy]

Also, since they don't really need all that money to register domains, they should give the money to charity, rather than to line some executive's pockets.

Re:

[the_womble]

The only problem that I could see with this is web firms that created websites for other people/companies and register it in their name.

If you create a site for someone else, then the domain should belong to them anyway.

Re:

[rtb61]

It seems to be an excellent idea, why stuff about, simply double the domain name fee for each additional domain, registered by the same company or individual.

Re:

[EvanED]

I wouldn't want to do this. There are plenty of reasons why a company would, very legitimately IMHO, want to register multiple domains. First there are typos; I don't think it's reasonable to expect Google to pay through the nose to get "typoed" domains like googel.com or gogole.com (both of which they have). Maybe the need for these domains would go down a lot if there weren't squatters who would snap them up if Google didn't though, so maybe this isn't terribly convincing. (That said, Google apparently cu

Re:

[rtb61]

With a limited number of readily memorable and understandable words to be shared amongst hundreds of mliions of companies and individuals, there is no sane reason to allow squatters top mindlessly hoard hundreds of domain names and not use sub-domains. Australia is very strict with it's domain naming system and a company must have a registered business name prior to obtain a matching or nearly matching domain name.

For approximately 99% of the population it will have a positive effect and only the greedies

Re:

[petermgreen]

People generally expect website urls, email addresses etc to remain the same over a long time. If a TLD has had strict policies from the start then I have no problem with that but I wonder if there is any good way to kill off the existing squatters without hurting those legitimate operations who have ended up with thier stuff spread accross multiple domains.

Re:

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

If a TLD has had strict policies from the start then I have no problem with that but I wonder if there is any good way to kill off the existing squatters without hurting those legitimate operations who have ended up with thier stuff spread accross multiple domains.

I don't think that would be a huge problem in practice. Most people abusing the system don't keep the domains they grab for very long. They just step in for a few days, take advantage of the pricing structure and grace periods to grab a few ad hits, and then let any domains that aren't raking in the profits drop again. If you changed the rules today, you'd probably undermine most of the abusers within a couple of weeks.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Make em expensive again

[suresk]

I agree. This is the only sensible way to solve this problem.

A while back, some friends and I were working on a business idea. Every single idea we had for a domain name was taken. I remember looking at all the sites to see what they had done with the domains, and out of 200 or so, fewer than 10 were actually doing something with the domain names aside from parking them and making money off the PPC ads.

As an example of this: I registered uresk.com (Uresk is my last name, and it is a very uncommon last name) back in 1997 or thereabouts. I was still in high school, and the $100/year ended up being prohibitively expensive so I didn't renew it. It has been passed around by speculators for almost a full decade now, despite the fact that it never had much traffic and "uresk" isn't a very common type-in. Bizarre.

Re:

[sssssss27]

So should I be concerned that when mine expired no one picked it up? I'll just have to let my wife name any kids I might have...

Bad idea

[TheLink]

I disagree.

The whole problem was the domain speculators hardly ever had to pay for the domains they parked on in the first place with the Domain Tasting and other stupidity that the ICANN allowed (or planned?). Imagine being able to "taste" a house and only pay for it when people wanted to rent/buy it, how stupid is that?

Now to fix the problem THEY caused, you are suggesting that we PAY THEM MORE?

I bet if the domain tasting idiocy is really gone for good, this crap will drop to a manageable level in a few years.

It's really fishy that people are conveniently suggesting this, just after a dubious source of revenue stream is drying up for the registrars.

Re:

[suresk]

The more I think through the concept of domain testing and look at the statistics (wow!), the more I think you are probably right - getting rid of this available tactic will help a great deal.

Domain names (useful ones, at least) are a fairly finite resource, though, and it seems inefficient to require a fee to own the right to them that is so low that people will still speculate and squat at a fairly high rate. Yeah, tasting will reduce this by quite a bit, but you only need to make $10 or so per year for h

Re:

[TheLink]

I suggest it would be best if we wait and see if doing away with the tasting stuff fixes things enough.

Sure it's only 10/year, but if you are required to pay for the duds, it starts to get expensive.

Previously they didn't have to pay for the duds at all - so no surprise if many made enough money just from "tasting", parking and getting some money from ads.

If someone is good at knowing which names are worth it and has to actually pay for speculating, I think it's fair.

In my opinion the name isn't that import

Re:Make em expensive again

[curunir]

Rather than making domains prohibitively expensive (and artificially so...a database entry should not cost $100), what needs to happen is a drastic expansion of top-level domains. The shortage of domain names is entirely artificial. The problem is not that there are too many PPC sites. The problem is that these sites make those domain names unavailable for legitimate use. But if there were more top-level domains to choose from, the likelihood that legitimate users would have problems finding a suitable domain would be significantly less.

ICANN wants to keep this artificial scarcity since it enables them to propose fee increases that keep the registrars profits obscenely high. And, as evidenced by this discussion, even technophiles have bought into their BS. We need to remember that there's nothing magic about 'com', 'net', 'org', 'edu' and 'mil' (and the relatively few others that have subsequently been created). Why is there no '.auto' TLD for car companies and automobile enthusiasts? Why is there no '.music' TLD for bands and music enthusiasts? Why are there not thousands of other TLDs that are appropriate for other purposes?

Because ICANN says so. There's little to no technical reason why. And changing this makes a hell of a lot more sense than upping the registration fees. All increasing registration fees accomplishes, other than annoying PPC site operators (who will adapt, just as SPAMers adapt to every technical hurdle that is sent their way), is to funnel even more money to the registrars.

Re:Make em expensive again

[suresk]

Well, when you are paying for a domain name, you aren't paying for the database entry - you are paying for the right to exclusively use that particular name, right?

Creating more TLDs will probably help, but causes other problems. If I am interested in purchasing an Audi, do I go to audi.com or audi.auto? Is it permissible for me to register audi.{something} for my own use? What if I register {somedomain}.books and someone already has {somedomain}.com? That is bound to cause confusion. I don't know - I like the idea in some ways, but it seems like it would open up a whole bunch of other problems.

Re:

[curunir]

Well, when you are paying for a domain name, you aren't paying for the database entry - you are paying for the right to exclusively use that particular name, right?

Of course, the value of the domain is much greater than a database entry, but the cost to the registrar is the cost of a database entry (and your share of the maintenance of that database). I'm sure the $35/year the Microsoft pays Verisign is well worth the cost. But it doesn't change the fact that Verisign is probably making $34/year or more in

Alternative TLD's generally don't work

[hal9000(jr)]

At least in the US, when was the last time you went to a TLD that WASN'T a .com, .net, .edu, or .gov?

Alternative TLD's are great in theory, but the .com TLD is so well branded that it has 'stuck'. Users think everything is a .com. How often have you heard on TV or radio mentioning a TLD other than a .com? Um, never, perhaps?

If alternative TLD's are going to have any uptake, at least in the US, I think a few things need to happen. First, there needs to be some regulation on who can apply for a .com, .n

Re:Make em expensive again

[SL Baur]

We need to remember that there's nothing magic about 'com', 'net', 'org', 'edu' and 'mil' (and the relatively few others that have subsequently been created).

.edu and .mil (and .gov) are special. They are reserved for United States institutions for education (colleges), military and the federal government respectively.

Why is there no '.auto' TLD for car companies and automobile enthusiasts?

Because the way domain naming was designed, all such domains would be assigned under .auto.com for automobile sellers or .auto.org for the enthusiasts. It worked when only a handful of (very large) organizations had registered domain names.

The mistake of flattening the tree (to name an example that I still have a valid email address under, the Japanese government should be .japan.gov, not .go.jp) was made and everyone followed it when internet access was unleashed on the masses. National domains were politically expedient, but a stupid idea. Almost as stupid as the TLD .us being assigned geographically.

How many of you young folk in the United States have ever had an email address with multiple dots in it? My record is <[e-mail]> or <[e-mail]> in the 1980s.

Re:

[Actually, I do RTFA]

How many of you young folk in the United States have ever had an email address with multiple dots in it? My record is or in the 1980s.

You're making me feel old...

Re:

[SL Baur]

I've had !'s in my email address. As was posted here not too long ago, I just happened to be working for one of the first companies on the internet at the time they got their domain name.

It used to be that you wanted to get email from strangers ... Thank God Microsoft fixed that.

Re:

[curunir]

.edu and .mil (and .gov) are special.

I know there are rules that make those domains special. But my point is that there's nothing about existing TLDs that makes them special other than the fact that ICANN has sanctioned them. They created so few originally because computers and internet connections were slow and making DNS monolithic made things work better technically. But computers are faster now and net connections are faster. There's no longer a technical reason why we can't have more TLDs.

Believe me,

Re:

[petermgreen]

look at what happened when they introduced info and biz, everyone legit stayed where they were and info and biz became nothing but another place for spammers to abuse.

I'm in favour of new TLDs but only if those tlds have strict rules about who can register what in them. A greater number of "anyone can register anything" style TLDs (of which there are already loads) would bring nothing of value IMO.

multiple dots?

[alizard]

boo!tweekco![e-mail] . . . or [e-mail] . Or even pacbell.com!boo!tweekco!alizard

I managed to miss out on :: in my e-mail address.

For younger people around here, that's what addresses looked like in the early 1990s. A "smarthost" with a path to a user address. This was in the days before there were commercial ISPs everywhere. Connecting to another e-mail address back then was occasionally an adventure.

Re:

[KnightTristan]

For an obvious reason of course ... If you know the name of /anything/ (be it a company, band, organisation), the first thing you're gonna try is anything.com. You don't want to remember anything.anywhere because anywhere is rather "arbitrary". Yeah, you could go like .auto is for car dealers and .music is for bands, but where does a dealer of auto radios go? No sir, a wildgrow of top-level domains shall only pollute the domain name landscape.

Domain name parking should be dealt with, that's for sure.

Tri

Re:

[RpiMatty]

When looking for a new site, the first place I go now is Google. I wanted to visit the website for Dick's Sporting Goods. I always refer to this store as Dick's. When I typed in dicks.com I did not get to the correct site.

Re:Make em expensive again

[FredFredrickson]

Not only would $100 cut me out, but even $25 would cut me out. I already spend quite a bit of money keeping my websites registered at $10/month. I don't need a stupid tax to keep spammers and squatters down, because that would greatly affect my personal sites. And I don't generate much of any income on my sites, they're are mostly personal.

Strict regulation, maybe. Remove domain tasting? Yes. But raising prices for honest customers? Hell no.


A better question would be whether there's copyright infringement having somebody register a domain that uses your site's name.

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[larry bagina]

Copyright? No. Trademark? Yes. But you need to have a registered trademark, then you need to dispute to with ICANN, which costs $5000 or so (plus your lawyer fees), which means it's cheaper to buy it from a squatter (or not let it expire in the first place).

Re:

[Magic5Ball]

There's no need to raise the prices, just the initial commitment. $100 per domain name, which includes 10 to 20 years of registration, would be reasonable, and would also keep domain names from dropping in the first place (but at the increased risk of having their admin/billing/technical contacts become incorrect). Having been on this Internet thing for ages now, I find far fewer compelling technical reasons for domain names to expire than business (recurring revenue) reasons.

Re:Make em expensive again

[debatem1]

Make it a $100 deposit refundable in 6 months.

Re:

[Anpheus]

That's a genius idea, I think. The barrier to entry is then sufficiently high (squatters who own thousands of domains would have to fork over much more money than they have on hand.)

This would vastly slow the ability of anyone to actually create domains. Let's say there's a squatter out there with $100,000 in the bank, they can only register 1000 domains every 6 months, and they are then out $10,000+ for the year-long registration. So if they haven't made $10,000 of those domains, they can only register ano

Mine, too

[Dr. Manhattan]

But fortunately it was on dyndns.com and they pulled the stolen one for TOS violations. Now I have the same name, but in .net instead of .org. Nobody cared about it, anyway, but it was a major annoyance personally.

Re:

[TheRaven64]

A year, to within a few hours, after I registered my .org domain someone registered the .com version. I discovered this when a friend asked me 'why are you running a porn site' and I discovered she'd typed .com instead of .org.

Re:

[ContractualObligatio]

It's difficult to see what you're proposing here. What would your "use fee" be a percentage of? And what are the market distortions you refer to?

Re:

[Baldrson]

What would your "use fee" be a percentage of?

What bankers call "liquidation value in place". Essentially, the use fee would be the risk free rate of return on the no-brainer value of the property as defined by bankers looking for loan collateral.

Market distortions basically occur when the government departs from the ideal anarcho capitalist system where everything is market driven, including force. Economists like to talk about it in different terms -- such as "no deadweight loss" due to "perfect ine

Re:

[ContractualObligatio]

You're scoring high on the bullshit meter here.

Why liquidation value? The site owner is not under duress, or acting as loan collateral. Why not market value or book value?

Putting that aside, the no-brainer value of a business is normally calculated through discounted cash flows. The discount rate already takes the risk-free rate into account. To then attempt to re-apply the risk-free rate is simply sloppy thinking. It's almost as if you think we should treat an intangible asset as physical equipment that mi

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[ContractualObligatio]

Is it legal to just mass buy buildings and use them for profiteering?

Yes. Property speculation is an old business. But the prices are rather more than a few bucks for a property, and property rights do not suddenly expire. It's a very different situation, so your point isn't clear.

I agree that something like zoning laws would be great if the correct formulation is possible, but I don't see how raising the price above the easy profits threshold stops the normal guy. There were plenty of vanity registration

Re:

[Warbothong]

"Is it legal to just mass buy buildings and use them for profiteering?"

It's called renting.

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[petermgreen]

There is very little unclaimed real property in desirable areas and property rights don't generally just expire in the same way domain names do.

Imagine if a simple accident could transfer your valuable real estate into a pool where anyone could buy it at far below it's real value. That is what the situation is like with domain names.

Re:

[Actually, I do RTFA]

There are whole industries out in the real world that absolutely count on people being too lazy or too stupid to to keep up. People that can't handle the [SEE BELOW] should stay the hell away from it. Of course it's always easier to blame someone else than to take responsibility for your own (in)action.

Yes, and typically we use government intervention to deal with those industries.

I smell something fishy going on

[TheLink]

But it's not stealing in this case. The domains have expired.

The domain tasting BS has to go. And it looks like it's on its way out.

The bulk of domain spam squatting problem is because the ICANN and many registrars have been doing dubious/stupid stuff in the past.

BUT, now someone is appears to be saying "let's fix the problem by giving the registrars more money per domain".

Amazing. Rewarding people for doing something bad/evil.

Re:

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Personally, I don't think it's an ICANN issue to get rid of domain spammers. Like any good capitalist, I think the market should take care of itself. Major advertisers should shun the money from Domain Parking - much like Google did in the past. Smaller companies should press to get the option to NOT display their ads on parked domains. Consumers should do like I do and immediately close a parked adspam page as soon as I accidentally hit it.

And like any good realist, I don't blindly trust the free-market,