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Comment by zsoltkacsandi | Hacker News Reader

There should be some regulatory mechanism for domains if the owner doesn’t use them for something meaningful, they should pay and increased price for it, and/or lose the ownership after a certain amount of time.

They way how it currently works is bad for the SaaS/app developers, bad for the content creators, and bad for the users.

It is ridiculous that nowadays you cannot buy a good domain name, because someone mass registered all of the meaningful combination of words in every existing tld, in hope that they can sell some of them for a few thousand dollars to someone who is willing to pay for it.

Not to mention these obviously unethical cases like this.

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> There should be some regulatory mechanism for domains if the owner doesn’t use them for something meaningful, they should pay and increased price for it, and/or lose the ownership after a certain amount of time.

this sounds absolutely terrible for ADHD. it can sometimes take 3-5 years or longer for me to make good on a project.

I can totally relate to this. But if there won't be the pressure coming from shortage of good domain names, you could register once you finished your project.

> you could register once you finished your project.

that is exactly what was attempted here only to fail due to the squatter

>There should be some regulatory mechanism for domains if the owner doesn’t use them for something meaningful, they should pay and increased price for it, and/or lose the ownership after a certain amount of time.

There is, they're called "trademarks".

Trademarks only help after you've built something and are recognized as a brand. They don’t help indie developers, small startups, or creators at the starting point who just want to launch a project with a reasonable, memorable domain name. On top of that, pursuing a trademark or legal dispute over a domain isn’t approachable for most people—it’s time-consuming, expensive, and often out of reach for solo devs or small teams.

The current system encourages mass domain hoarding purely for profit, which ends up killing innovation and creativity. Trademarks don’t solve that, and they’re not meant to.

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