Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

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You have to increase the yearly renewal even more (imo). $120/year is only $10 a month. That is two coffees at Starbucks. If that is too expensive for your legitimate non-commercial purpose, then you probably don't really need a domain. Yeah, some squatters may still try the long game but it starts to get cost prohibitive. The hope would be that if it is expensive enough, the squatters may only hold the most likely TLDs for a specific domain instead of holding all of them at almost no risk. I also think that we can extend this by adding lots and lots of new TLDs. Yeah, the single word domains will get snapped right up but the space becomes ever bigger and harder to corner the market. We could also make a rule that when there is a new TLD, that existing domain holders from the longest lived TLDs get first right of refusal. So if ".cars" is added, Ford would get the first shot at ford.cars

This squatting is the same reason we need a LVT on land to prevent people from squatting on property that could be developed to provide housing.

As the owner of a couple of domains (not .io, but these aren’t the only ones that go up in price in January) with no commercial use whatsoever, I am very happy to learn that you have decided that I should not get one. You sound exactly like those landlords who think it’s all jolly good when the average rent goes up at twice the inflation rate.

In the meantime, we got those domains because we use them, and not all of us actually get 2 Starbucks a month. The price going up 30% without any recourse and with a 1 month notice is a sad joke. We cannot seem to trust private interests with the management of public resources.

> coffees at Starbucks

I hate this argument. All the small fees priced in "Starbucks coffees" add up quickly and all of a sudden running a personal website to share one's hobby dries up the monthly coffee budget and then some. Then there's the fact that a significant part of the world lives on a single US Starbucks coffee per day.

That's a very US-centric view. There are many countries in the world where median wages are below $1000/month, and then $10/month is 1% of your income, which is a significant expense.

Increasing the price even further means that people from poor countries won't be able to afford domains (at least not a .io or .com), and this is bad for the open web, because it means that fan forums move to Reddit or Discord, small businesses move to Facebook and WeChat, and so on, until all content is inside these walled gardens instead of the open web.

Some of the best sites on the internet are run for less than $120/year.

> This squatting is the same reason we need a LVT on land to prevent people from squatting on property that could be developed to provide housing.

Yes because private property all exists to become housing.

> So if ".cars" is added, Ford would get the first shot at ford.cars

Actually .cars exists and ford.cars is indeed taken by Ford.

Your "solution" to squatters would be to make sure normal people can't afford domains at all, the only affect this would have on squatters is that they would be a little bit more picky about their inventory and raise prices to compensate.

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