- "Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?"
"Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!"
- "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"
from 'A Man For All Seasons', by Robert Bolt
If a startup had snagged one of these domains and had built a community or SEO with it, could you imagine that being taken away from them without any sort of due process?
The sealed bit is weird, but bankruptcy judges are awfully sensitive to economic value. I'd be surprised if they would do something like that.
Of course, if the domain were seized in that case, due process would still be available. The startup's lawyer would immediately file with the judge in question asking for control to be temporarily restored to the startup while the legal stuff plays out.
What makes you so mad towards them?
You can tell from the language that the OP knew of an opportunity to buy mispriced assets and/or renew their domain, and having failed to take the opportunity is now upset at others having taken the opportunities they missed.
You know the kind of people that couldn't be bothered to spend $90 for a 10 year registration and now have to pay a few hundred to get a domain back they wasn't worth $10, or clicking the 'auto-renew' button to them.
There has to be some mechanism to release unused & unregistered domains back to the market.
And careful - you just dehumanized an entire set of people ("they're not people") because of the work they do. Domainners might be annoying - but they're not gangsters.
Only reason they they let this happen is because it's good for business. I'm sure domain like 95 percent of domain registrations are done by these so called "domainers" or people protecting themselves from then.
You'd have to be a big fan of the coase theorem to enjoy paying $20 for a $0.20 parking space, when the only thing the seller has done to add value is get in your way.
Applicability to domains: maybe they should all be auctioned?
In this space - it's akin much more to having parking spaces near a sporting event or concert. In which case - there's lot of happy people willing to pay $20 for the privilege of parking.
Also - you should know that pricing goods based on "what they cost" isn't the proper way to valuate a property, service, etc. If that was the case, every user past 1,000 in most SAAS apps should just ask for their subscription to be free.
Also - calm down. There are businesses that are way worse than domainers.
That might be a reason for you to not do something even worse. But it doesn't make you less of a parasite.
In some cases, speculators provide actual value. E.g., they prove or maintain the assets that they speculate on. In others, as with financial speculators, they provide liquidity to the market.
Neither is true for domain speculators. They get paid for making the world worse.
Some domainners have lots of domains & develop lots of them into valuable properties. Sure - they have a few that are parked - but that's a percentage.
Typically - money is a measure of value you add to the world. They have to be adding some sort of value in the world or they wouldn't be able to extract value from their activities.
The classic medieval example is a bandit or a warlord who take over a section of road and extracts tolls. He didn't build the road, but he can extract plenty of money as long as he controls it.