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Comment by crs | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if I completely agree with why the author thinks this is unnecessary. However, I do agree that this would be a bad thing. I think making domain names anything under the sun would make it harder to find things and more confusing overall. I like the defined structure of the specific tld's that exist now and it does feel like a 10k fee for new ones is a money grab.

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$10k? Try $185k application fee and then $25k a year. The prices might change but that's the current plan AFAIK.

ouuuuchhh.

That sounds prohibitively expensive for things like news.yc (does this site produce money at all?), or my blog, or fark, or any other site that isn't backed by some sort of multi-million-dollar corp. and generating a couple million uniques a day (or more).

My prediction is that, especially at that cost, this will fail MISERABLY. .com will still remain the brand-name, and anything else will be a generic.

Similar to .net, .biz, .tv, .anything other than .com

What really needs to happen is for icann to have a review board that can determine if cyber-squatting is taking place or not.

The board needs to exist because a 16 year old sitting on theirname.com because they haven't bought hosting or anything yet, and a company that is sitting on a few hundred THOUSAND domains hoping to sell them are drastically different. I am perfectly fine with the former, and believe that the latter is a cancer on the DNS.

Basically their needs to be a terms of use that prohibits cyber-squatting.

What do you mean, this rules out news.yc? That already works:

  $ ping news.yc
  PING news.yc (174.132.225.106): 56 data bytes
  64 bytes from 174.132.225.106: icmp_seq=0 ttl=47 time=204.946 ms

In fact if I was PG I'd deny access to any other host in the request headers .. that'll keep out the proles.

Anyway, I think the new gTLD scheme will be a (qualified) success. Just not quite for everyone. But a lot of people will snap them up. http://www.ibm/ will be irresistable, and there's a lot of interest already from cities, etc (.paris, .roma, etc).

On the subject of domain squatting - all I wish they'd do is massively raise the prices on .coms. It is ridiculous for people to be able to squat on them for $7 a year. And if they are sold, or for sale, the owner should have to pay property tax at the sale price for the duration of his ownership.

I don't mind people owning and trading "investment grade" .coms - what I can't stand is people buying tens of thousands of the damn things and then just sitting on them because they're so cheap.

How about the price depends on how many names you have? That way the little guy can have his $7 domain but if you want to buy thousands of domains each successive one is more expensive and having millions of domains is prohibitive (as there is really no good reason to have them anyway).

That's a neat idea but might be a hassle to enforce, since people could use different registrars, etc. I really like the idea of making domains taxable like property, simply because the tax system already exists and is ruthlessly effective.

Combine that with, say, a price rise to $100/yr minimum charge per domain; that could include, say, hosting services or an ssh cert or something, the point is you cannot pay less than $100 per year per domain you own. That would hit the domainsquatting industry like a nuclear bomb.

I'm not sure $100/year is right... think experiments and personal domains. Plus it's an awful lot of money for people in other countries.

It would be nice if ICANN or someone would shut down the big squatters though. Everyone knows what their pages look like, and who they are.

have you added this to your hosts file?

pinging news.yc doesn't resolve to anything on my openbsd, gentoo linux, or windows xp boxes.

I imagine that it won't on the default install (and using (normal DNS) of most any computer.

Yeah, I was cheating and joking : D

  $ grep news.yc /etc/hosts
  174.132.225.106   news.yc

Sorry for making you check! Actually I don't even use it, HN comes up even if I just press "h" in firefox.

As someone who has spent hours whois'ing for domain names coming up with a name for a new project, I couldn't agree more with the statement about squatters being a cancer. On the other hand, my guess is that squatters make up the lions share of registration fees...

Hard to bite the hand that feeds you. (ICANN does get a big chunk of the reg/maintenance fees, right?)

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