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Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

The domain name provider I use[1] takes $2 less per year for a .com compared to a .info.

For an unregistered .com. Most desirable .com's have been squatted, and the squatters want five to six digits for the domain. The business model deserves a fiery death, yet it thrives.

So cities recently have been toying with vacancy taxes that target rich people using prime real estate speculatively or who wish to reserve a unit without anyone having lived there for cultural reasons - maybe that's the sort of tactic we need to examine with domains, some sort of creative usage bar that utilizes distinctness from other domains to detect squatting and levy a fee.

At scale, distinguishing a squatter's markov-generated WordPress landing page from a genuine pre-product startup in stealth mode sounds like a Hard Problem. On the other hand someone with 10,000 domains and zero business plans is obviously a squatter. There's probably a way to draw the line that's viable to enforce.

Seems like it would be fairly trivial to find any instance of a phrase similar to "this domain for sale" on any page and flag it for human intervention. Because that's how squatters get buyers, right, by indicating the site is for sale? Am I missing something obvious?

Additionally, as a web developer, when I see squatting on a domain I want, I will be absolutely livid. Give me a place to report squatters and I'll happily help you crowd-source what was previously a Hard Problem.

That's actually kind of genius. Domain squatting is highly automated, so in most cases it's not hard to figure out when a domain is squatted rather than simply inactive. Taxing squatters 10% of their sale offer every year would make them think twice.

It could even be done through the registrars: for every year you hold onto a domain, the registrar withholds another 10% if/when you sell it. Legitimate companies and people wouldn't suffer, since they would want to keep their domains more or less forever. Those looking to flip domains would have to consider their diminishing returns.

Fair point. Most of my domains have not been .com's but when I've registered I've checked if the .com was available and for the most part they have been.

That page says €9.95/yr for .com which is $11.17 USD...

$11.95 vs $13.95 for me. Similar in my local currency if I go to their regional page.

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