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Comment by louischatriot | Hacker News Reader

Raising the price for tld would actually be a good thing, as it would make "domain investing" (domain hoarding) unprofitable.

Let's say a .com costs $1,000 per year. For a legitimate business / organization, that is a trivial cost. For a domain hoarder, that makes keeping domains by and large unprofitable.

Killing this parasitic activity is a good thing.

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Except that a .com won't cost $1,000/year because the number of domains registered in it is so large (more than 130 million) that the uproar would be deafening and the registry has no incentive to slice off its nose just to go after squatters.

The .org domain is a tenth the size (about 14 million domains) so it's possible that a massive price hike could go through with no one able to stop it--as we're discussing here--but in doing so, you've thrown the baby out with the bath water and made a whole lot of historical domains with no commercial purpose (remember that .org has usually been where "non-business" groups and individuals register) prohibitively expensive in order to tackle a speculative problem.

Wow. That's around 1% of some of my clients take home simply to have a web site for their small business. This drives everybody to "Facebook pages" instead of their own website hosted on Wix, Wordpress or Squarespace.

Speaking of parasitic activity ...

> Let's say a .com costs $1,000 per year.

I know you meant this as an example, but $1000 is a lot of money for many students, hobbyists, bloggers and startups.

For that matter, even $100 will put many at a huge disadvantage in low income countries. I'd rather have squatting than make domains unaffordable for the developing world.

So keeping the domain for my primary email address that I’ve used for 15 years is “hoarding” now?

Personal anecdote: If the e-mails I get every few months are to be believed, yes. I was lucky enough to be around on the Internet when domains were free so I have two .org domains (because to have a .com back then was a sign that you were one of those "dirty businesses" who wanted to "sully the InterNet"[0]) that are old enough to buy their own drinks in the States. Both have been used for e-mail and internal naming schemes for as long as I've had them; only one has a web site.

Every few months, I get e-mails asking if I'll sell one or the other for a small sum or donate the domain to the group that's asking. I used to reply and politely decline but the vitriol about my "pointlessly" keeping a domain that I'm "obviously not using" that inevitably comes back now has me shift-Delete e-mails like that. The times, they have changed.

0 - And getting a .net meant showing you were an actual Network Operator. Anybody else remember FTPing the template down from internic.net and sending it to hostmaster and waiting two months for the zone delegation?

The average price a domain investor sells a domain for is around $2,000. That's a one time charge, and then after that they pay just about $10 a year to renew.

And people register alternative domains rather than one an investor owns because they don't want to pay that amount.

So I don't agree with your thinking.

And in some countries $1,000 is a lifetime's earnings.

I know several organizations using .org for which 1k would be a substantial chunk of their yearly operating budget.

Would this not also affect individual bloggers, many of which often make the HN front page with high quality content?

Perhaps there is a more sophisticated approach to this problem than simply raising prices across the board.

its an interesting discussion you are starting.

I would have to seriously reconsider my domain if it cost a lot of money.

Perhaps domain registrars could do a lot to stop a lot of hoarding if they charged progressively by the number of domains with the same payment details?

Of course, perhaps registrars don’t want to stop hoarding?

That's complete nonsense. Many many people hold TLDs for their private websites. That's a thousand dollars for each one of your websites. That's ridiculous, not everyone can afford that. This would be the death of small independent websites. Though I wouldn't be surprised if that's what's happening.

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