How do you define squatting? Is the owner of nissan.com "squatting" on it because he wouldn't sell to the japanese car company? How much interest do you need in a given domain before it's not squatting?
- Hosting a website
- Operating email accounts
- Infrastructure (mail, DNS, etc.)
- Misc. Services (Minecraft server, TeamSpeak server, something)
Then you're squatting. Like if you own turkeyonapig.com and it's literally just a web page with a picture of a turkey sitting on a pig? Not squatting. It's odd but it's clearly doing exactly what it's meant to be doing. If you own turkeyonapig.com and are doing nothing but advertising that fact, and that someone can buy it? Squatting.
> Is the owner of nissan.com "squatting" on it because he wouldn't sell to the japanese car company?
I mean, it depends. One would argue that people going to nissan.com are clearly looking for the Japanese car company, so it's in the public's interest that that domain be sold to them. On the other hand, if someone owns it and is using to run a Nissan fan website? Well I suppose that's trickier, but that would also probably be better suited to something like nissanfans.com.
It's a tricky thing but not impossible to figure out.
GPT/Cursor will create that page for you in 5 min. I bet a NotSquattingAsAService startups will appear which will create the "not squatting" fake site for you for $2.
But also like, then you aren't advertising it for sale. So I'm wondering how many offers you're going to get to sell that domain, which is the point of squatting it.
That's an improvement. Adding $2 to $5 to the cost of a squatted domain will start to dissuade people who squat on tens of thousands of domains, if they have to suddenly have to pay $20,000 to $50,000 for the not squatting service.
There's no way static site hosting and a email service costs $2-$5 per year per domain, especially for bulk users. Even if we take that price at face value, a .com domain already costs around $10/year. A 20%-50% increase will only change behavior at the margins. It won't make chat.com magically become available, and at best will make some D tier domains available. Ironically the introduction of gTLDs probably had the same effect. Squatting harrisonburgrealty.com is suddenly going to be less profitable when there's harrisonburg.{realty,realestate,realtor,homes,house,place,properties,rent,apartments} available as well.
See my example of turkeyonapig.com.
Good to hear. So after that you'll be sorting out world peace - right?
Squatters are a massive blight on the internet.
Is not unique to domains, this is why the world is uts.
First past the post is "good enough" for me if the intrinsic value of the domain to you is greater than the domain registration fee of like 3-10 bucks a month.
There shouldn't be a major reselling market, that would be like if the majority of space in the yellow pages was just advertisements that said "your business ad here!"
If you get caught, the domain is blacklisted. Ownership transfer is public, so there is little incentive for buyers to go with this route.
cloudflare offers free website hosting and email forwarding, so it's basically free for a squatter to check those boxes.
>I mean, it depends. One would argue that people going to nissan.com are clearly looking for the Japanese car company, so it's in the public's interest that that domain be sold to them.
So you basically want the Kelo v. City of New London decision to be applied to domains as well? You own "erictrump.com" but aren't the president-elect's son? Well tough luck because it's "in the public's interest" that president-elect's son gets it rather than you.
Sure. But it still takes time, or as someone else suggested, a GPT query. Putting literally even the tiniest amount of work in front of squatting will reduce the amount of squatting.
> So you basically want the Kelo v. City of New London decision to be applied to domains as well? You own "erictrump.com" but aren't the president-elect's son? Well tough luck because it's "in the public's interest" that president-elect's son gets it rather than you.
I mean, it is. And putting the phrase in scare quotes isn't a counterpoint.
One could argue in fact that one of the multitude of reasons for the rise of platforms is that it's so hard to find anything on the actual internet, and part of that in turn can be blamed squarely on squatting.
It doesn't matter if you're just a dude or a corporation, you play by the same rules. There isn't anything to solve here. These problems are solved between those those 2 parties and no one else.
Good Lord. It's in the public's interest it remains this way.
Another person here had it right, companies have been playing with fire with their URL shenanigans. From one time TLDs to abusing tracking parameters. Not to mention browsers in their insane quest to strip useful information out off their UIs, making you CLICK to see who owns the place. Clown world really.
And you don't really own your domain. You are just renting it from whichever authority is responsible for the TLD. If you stop paying, the authority will eventually take it back.
Of course this raises valid question if using names in this way at all is a good idea. For example telephone system and lots of banking stuff is based on simple numerical identifiers, and lots of countries have also some unique (numerical) identifiers for companies and persons. So there is fairly strong precedent for using assigned ids instead of names when uniqueness/specificity is required. But somehow we have jumped to the conclusion that for example IP addresses would be too confusing to average joe, and in attempt to hide them we have created even more confusing system.