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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

All domains should really cost $1000/year from the registrar at a minimum to stop this idiotic "I'll buy thousands of them and sit on them forever until someone offers me enough for one of them to make the whole enterprise worth it".

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Expensive domain registration would make it cost prohibitive for average people to start a website. The better thing to limit is how many domains you can own, or at least how many domains you can park.

Limiting number of domain registrations per-person probably won't work, because one can get thousands of sockpuppet "shareholders", each having registered a sole domain.

And parking domains is indistinguishable from using them. Unless under "parking" you mean explicitly stating this domain is for sale. But with imposed restriction squatters will just remove those and park domains with "this domain is... well, you get the idea".

Treat domains like a trademark registration. You have x amount of time to show that you're actually using it for something. And that something has some kind of value.

There's issues with what's considered value, but our existing system is nonsense.

So what happens when you have internal domains?

If it's 100% internal, you don't need to register them. If it's internet-facing but designed for use by registered users only, it'll still have some sort of authentication page, which should be enough proof that you're using it for something.

I agree that $1000/yr would be too high for your average person but I think raising it to $100/yr should be reasonable enough and would still solve a lot of the squatting issues.

What about those who live in developing countries? Should they be excluded from owning domains?

Not all TLDs have to be priced the same. .com could be $250/yr and .biz could be $8/yr.

So the average person can no longer afford to have a website on a domain they own? That sounds much worse to me.

Would it be possible to ban the re-sale of domain registrations? This way squatting would only be done for trademark protection. I could see issues where bigger companies buy up all the related domain names to their specific industry, in the hopes of hindering future competition. Without re-sellers, that tactic would be easier, but it still might be better then the current system.

There are much better auction systems and property tax systems than this.

Land should be priced the same way! There are lots of places I'd like to build a new home, but people own the land and aren't using it.

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