Hacker News Reader

Comment by hsbauauvhabzb | Hacker News Reader

The solution, I think, is to raise the price. 20x the cost of a Dotcom, most people only need one or two and should be able to afford it, you’ve just increased the cost of squatting hugely.

That being said, I’d be scared about domain names raising the price 200x - all providers could literally hold domain renters hostage here, so it’s a double edged sword I guess..

View on HN

Incredibly American - centric view, unless you think the developing or poorer parts of the world (that are majority) shouldn't have access to dot com.

Even in the developing world, double the current renewal price would be nothing for a company who owns one or two domains. Do you think the literal poorest people in the world are creating startups or even websites? The demand you're conjecturing just doesn't exist.

GP said "developing or poorer", not "literal poorest". You're creating a strawman to shoot it down.

I can only speak for myself, but if prices doubled overnight, owning a domain would not be feasible for me because I don't conduct business or earn income on the domain I own, and the only reason I went for this fairly obscure TLD is because it was the cheapest decent one I could afford. Some of us aren't "businesses", and unless you think we don't deserve a corner of the internet, you'll find there's tons of us.

Well talk about strawmanning, who said you couldn’t have a corner of the internet? There are plenty of TLDs that aren’t subject to the issues .com has.

Sorry but yes, if you’re not making enough money from your .com to pay (say) $50/year, I think it’s perfectly fine that you can’t use it for your random hobby project. The lost value that comes from .com being messed up is so much greater.

I thought your first two sentences were independent of each other and that you were talking about all TLDs. Sorry, probably a language barrier thing.

.com is very clearly commercial so what I had to say isn't applicable to it (which is why I mentioned I use a relatively obscure TLD like .site or .xyz).

Oh, no, I just meant businesses using .com for commercial purposes. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Of course they do? Not everyone builds a business for the whole world or expects a SV growth with pumped in money. 13 has value at plenty of places where people are able to build stuff.

The poorest people in the world are struggling to survive. They barely start start businesses at all, let alone those that need global reach via a .com. The people in developing countries who do need such things and do have such businesses can easily afford $50/y.

I don't agree with it what so ever because I've been at the same situation. Businesses, especially online, are not only made by some Silicon Valley of the local types. I'm sorry but everything you write comes from a place of privilege unless you think dot com should be reserved only for the richer parts of the world.

I’m an Aussie who cant/won’t afford the 1000x prices squatters want for domains. Reducing the overall cost for domains by increasing them.

Way to stereotype though.

That would just increase the possible gains as well - while also making all the squatters with their existing portfolio all the much richer. Also makes domains harder to reach for common folks. Wins for squatters, loss for society, yay.

Would it? Squatters charge you the maximum they can, increasing the cost reduces the profitability, if you 10x the price of domains, you will see less squatters as a result.

I’ll also point out they trade in volume - they may run 9 romaine at a loss to successfully sell one, putting all in profit - if you increase the cost to them by a small amount, it decreases their profit substantially. Most Dotcom owners can probably afford $200/year for a domain.

Raising the price would solve the issue overnight. It doesn't need to be a uniform price increase, either - ICANN can guess which domain names are likely to be pricey based on length, dictionary words, or other heuristics. It can't be that hard. There's no reason why every domain name needs to cost the same amount per month. Domain squatters only do this because it's economically viable for them to register 10K domain names and just extort anyone who wants to do anything productive with them.

Also, ICANN should directly auction expiring domain names themselves. It's infuriating that when a domain name expires, whoever has the fastest script pays $10 and then immediately resells it for $100K to whoever actually needed it.

It sounds like your proposal would not change anything except who the money goes to, which hardly seems like an improvement.

I’d rather pay my local government for drugs over a drug dealer who then used that money to do more bad.

Your local government would at least attempt to spend that money on useful things.

ICANN and the registries are just bigger drug dealers, they too will use that money to do more bad.

Just doubling the price would harm parkers a lot more than legitimate users.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com