The .com TLD is supposed to be for commercial use, so for a real company it shouldn't be a big deal to pay $50 or $100 per year or more, and it would free up good domains to be actually used.
You could argue that you don't want to reward squatting, but either way you're going to have to pay off some entity I don't think entirely deserves it.
To handle squatting on .com better, my suggestion would be to have alternative TLDs available at a cheaper price (rather than making .com costlier). That could potentially help by making the others more popular (than now) and reduce the incentives to squat.
And I ought not to have it because I'm not hosting an online store or marketing materials for a megacorp? Fuck me for trying to have something nice without commercializing it, right?
People's personal names are unlikely to fall in that category.
Note: I love Dreamhost, and have used them for 13+ years. The CEO responded to my tweet saying they do not sell queries.
.tk is still free tho!
They cancelled my domain out of the blue. When researching the problem I found out this happened to others as well.
If we really want to stop squatters, I think we should be charging exponentially increasing prices for each additional domain. A domain could be $10 for a new customer, but cost $10,240 for a firm that already holds 10. Such costs wouldn't be prohibitive for people or companies, but incredibly serious for anyone who wants to squat domains.
Another option would be to set a fixed price for ownership transfers and to forbid charging more than that in the ToS. It wouldn't stop squatting, but it would suck all the value out of it because I could negotiate with a squatter to buy a domain and turn around and report them to ICANN so the domain gets revoked and dropped back into the pool.
The biggest problem is that everyone involved, including ICANN, has a lot of incentive to create pseudo property with a limited supply so they can all participate in the rent seeking that comes along with limited supply property.
Even though they'd never admit it, domain squatters are great for ICANN, the registries, and the registrars. The squatters demonstrate domains have value and the (fake) limited supply creates a gold rush style urgency where no one wants to wait until tomorrow to register a domain because a squatter might grab it first.
The most common complaint every year for two decades now.
This is a ridiculous argument that doesn't benefit the company or end consumers at all. Squatting isn't a problem for the vast majority.