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Comment by r3trohack3r | Hacker News Reader

Honest question, are people outside the domain squatter economy (squatters and their customers) actually paying for .com domains?

I’ve never been able to secure a .com for a project, they are all squatted and being sold at a massive (like 1000x+) markup.

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It's usually pretty easy to get a .com if you're willing to put a prefix like "get" or a suffix like "app" on it or something -- or both ("getbluebirdapp.com" isn't taken). Or combine the brand name with the product class ("bluebirdhumidifiers.com"). Or any non-obvious two-word combo, really.

But yeah, if you want a .com that's a single-word brand name without any prefixes/suffixes, basically everything's been taken for a long time.

Definitely! You need to be a bit creative / flexible, but it's quite practical. I probably have about ten, all in active use and most of them registered within the last five years.

I have been in your shoes and I honesty feel your pain.

I'm trying [0] to fix that and hopefully be a part of the solution. Renewal price increases won't magically prevent people from squatting, so that's pure milking by the VeriSign monopoly.

[0] https://zlipa.com

I have both the .com and .org domains for my project Filmulator, though I have .com redirect to .org.

They were not expensive at all.

Sure am, never had a problem with it. E.g. https://ragdolldynamics.com

The problem is finding a suitable name for a project that also has an available domain. The easy ones are all picked.

There are literally an infinite number of un-squatted .com domains available.

> There are literally an infinite number of un-squatted .com domains available.

Definitely, literally-literally, finite.

I was using hyperbole

I've registered multiple 5 letter brand name .com domains in the last five years. They are out there, it just takes time and creativity to find them. 6 letters and more are even more abundant.

Well the fact that the practice continues suggests to me that someone is spending the money. But I don't know of any examples.

It could also indicate that it’s relatively cheap to sit on domains for 20 years, patiently waiting for someone to pony up. It’s not like valuable domains are more expensive to renew.

Right but at some point there must be some return. Sitting on domains is cheap, not free.

then maybe it should be forbidden to renew domain if you haven't use it for a year instead of increasing prices for everyone, how convenient for domain registrars

How would they define “using it”? I’m guessing there would be easy ways to skirt around any automated system that checks for whether a domain has been used. Update the text on the “for sale” landing page? Look, I used it!

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