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Comment by grono | Hacker News Reader

Sigh, I'm not a fan of domains becoming the new kind of real estate.

Wonder how hard will it be in 20 years to get a good, unused name in a reasonable price.

Have you tried getting a good, unused name today? Anything remotely close to a dictionary word, if unused, is squatted with a $xx,000 price tag. Do registrars get a cut of these sales prices because it seems ridiculous to allow squatting.

Well, at least there's still some room for that with some of the new TLDs.

But at some point we will also exhaust all nice TLDs too...

It will be even more difficult than it is now

Registrars get a lot more domains registered at 5-20 $/year this way. How would our lives improve if squatting were "not allowed"?

For anyone trying start a small business, it’s frustrating to go through dozens to hundreds of potential company names before you can find a reasonable URL that isn’t being squatted for 4-5 figures.

What positive outcome comes from squatters sitting on unused domains?

Many registrars operate as brokers for domain sales indeed (i.e. godaddy, namecheap). Then you have tlds operators with their "premium" domains that go for 1000x the regular price. Premium usually being defined as the top 10k english words and every kind of l33t spelling of sexual words.

Neither registrars nor tld operators care about squatting, even when they don't get a cut. Why would they? The squatter is paying them the same as you'd pay them.

I'm not a fan of domains becoming the new kind of real estate.

Welcome to 2003.

hah, fair point..

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