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Comment by giovannibonetti | Hacker News Reader

Bear with me for a moment: I firmly believe that in order for good .com domains to be available for a smaller price the registry fee should be far higher.

The reason for that is speculation: even though a .com registration is dirty cheap, getting a decent .com domain is very expensive because for many companies it is worth it to keep the domains parked, and when someone wants to buy one of them it gets very expensive - quite often it costs thousands of dollars.

However, if registration prices went 10x overnight these domain hosting companies would be forced to get rid of many "second class" domains, which would be soon available for regular users without intermediaries. Off course "premium" domains would still be expensive, but it's an advancement anyway.

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Honestly (disclosure: I own some of those second class domains), I highly doubt it.

This is a case where efficient markets mostly apply I would assume. Sure, I'd reconsider if I'm really going to ship this dream side project in my lifetime and I may drop some of those domains, but if they're good, professional domain resellers will snap at them before you get a chance.

And if you think that $10/year is too cheap, what makes you think $100/year is closer to an optimum? Why not $1000? I don't want to get into politics but this is a universal problem.

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if this makes things worse. Raising prices evicts small domain speculators from the game and concentrates the supply into fewer hands.

This is a money grab. No one in charge intends for this increase to make things fairer. I don't think anyone looking for a domain name should rejoice that taxes (going straight to for-profits) got higher.

This will only get rid of the small domain investors with their insignificant portfolios you don't care about anyway.

If we really want higher prices, how about we at least get more features for it. Such as built-in privacy protection.

Or how about we restructure the whole relationship so that wildly excessive amounts of money don't end up in either Verisign or ICANN regardless of what the price is.

Why do we still consider the "perfect domain" valuable? Most users will search on Google for the company rather than typing the address (even for companies that probably do have a .com, like their bank) so why is it something we still care about?

Thank you for saying this. I think a lot of people probably haven't felt the pain of actually acquiring a trademark and branded domain these days. My personal opinion is that .com domains should be a minimum $100 per year. At this price point the number of available domains would skyrocket effectively overnight as it became untenable for squatters to hold on to them. If you can't afford $100/year for a domain to be used for something actually useful, you probably don't need that domain in the first place.

Of course at that price point, HTTPS should be the default and the extra profits should go somewhere other than ICANN.

Youre thinking about yourself. Students etc who have .com domains cant afford $100 a year for their domain? Should they be forced to give up their domains because people like you couldnt get their chosen domains from squatters/

Also ignoring poorer countries in the world. Not everyone makes high western developer salaries. Why should .com domain names suddenly be gate kept and all the profits going into a monopoly and a corrupt oversight organization?

I'm not sure why students etc. need specifically .com domains.

Right, they can use free .tk, .xx.yy domains that highjack their content to serve ads. It's fine. /s

We've been there people and it sucked, hard. Neither anybody here, nor ICANN, should get to decide what people can or cannot use domains for. Stipulating such restrictions or unreasonably raising prices to exclude any group that is neither rich or a company would essentially break the TLD. In that case you can just get rid of .com and tie it into the US trademark system if you like. Maybe that's where the internet is going these days but it's neither natural nor a good direction in my book.

Explain please?

Is there something about a .com that makes one group of people less "needy" of it.

This could cause more centralization of the web. It's likely that other TLDs will follow since .com is one of the cheaper ones and the most commonly sought.

The worst squatters don't pay the same prices as we do.

This will price more people out of their first domain than price out any serious squatters.

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