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Comment by akerl_ | Hacker News Reader

How do you identify who is squatting and who isn't?

Someone could make a complaint with the registry if they see no changes after a period of time that's reasonable? I think it could be automated for many cases such as when domain squatters aren't even pointing their domains anywhere.

If someone dies and the family wants to keep the blog running as a memorial, it will be consider a squatter?

If someone serves adds in a few the typosquatting domains, there are changes all the time, and from time to time the squatter can change the formatting (like the background color, or change the add network, or swap the adds and the ring), will it be consider not squatting?

How does that work? There's plenty of use cases for a domain that don't involve hosting a public website.

I own a domain to use for internal DNS for my systems. Am I squatting?

You're confusing the web for the Internet. As someone who has actively used a custom domain for email for literally decades but does not have or need a web presence, I can assure you that a domain name can have daily, extensive active use without any sort of obvious public-facing changes.

Should still work for email as well. Domain registry can confirm if domain is setup for email.

I don't think you understand how all this works.

I've setup a domain for email. So please explain to me how you don't think wherever you park your domain has access to that information?

What’s the test? Your registrar can see if you have MX records, or they can send a test email to those records, but that just means squatters need to stand up 1 mail server and set all their MX records to point to it.

Currently squatters aren't even bothering to setup the countless domains they own for that example. Sure, they could automate the process for their collection of domains but someone could always draft the policy to make a person abusing the system to get banned from the domain registry.

What’s the hypothesis for that policy? How do you detect that somebody is abusing the system?

Add fees, real users will pay those fees.

Wasn't there a huge uproar when TLDs tried to increase the cost to register?

yes, the squatters felt the knife at their throat...

Do you have some kind of citation for the uproar being from squatters? If memory serves, the uproar was that most folks felt like registrars were trying to squeeze ordinary folks for more cash for a resource that costs them next to nothing to manage.

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