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?

It would also prevent most private individuals from owning their own domain - hardly a solution without collateral damage.

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.

Wouldn't that be harmful to small businesses though?

That's a horrible solution. How about we add more TLD's so it costs effectively $5000/yr to squat the same domain on all the alternative TLD's

Do that and I'll drop my personal.com so will lose control of my domain for email and handover more lock in to Google/email provider of choice.

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.

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.