The fact that I find a service like this as cool as I do really speaks to how messed up the domain name service is.
Why is domain resale even allowed? "Ownership" of a domain seems silly to me. You should be licensing it from ICANN, and you should not be able to sell it. Part of the licensing agreement should be "if you are a domain squatting piece of scum, your contract will be terminated and you will not get your $6 (or whatever it is) registration fee back".
while i don't like squatters, I do believe by holding onto domains they are taking a big risk that there won't be a sudden shift away from the current DNS system in the future. i think the domain market is subject to black swans.
I wouldn't be shocked if in 10 years we rely on something else entirely to navigate to websites and .coms become virtually worthless.
i can see why a piece of physical property has lasting value and won't be subject to extreme changes, but i think the value of domains in the future has a very fat tailed distribution and there is a decent risk of them all plummeting to zero.
it is certainly a bubble. the question is how long it will last.
I agree, and that's an even bigger problem. I find it far easier to just google any site I haven't been to before, but that is relatively easy to poison, especially if the domain/site/service is particularly new.
And then the squatters will throw up a fake personal blog filling all available whitespace with ads, and since they are actually "legitimately" using it, nobody else can get the domain.
But those ads would be unlikely to cover the yearly registration fee. Without the possibility of making hundreds or thousands of dollars from a single domain sale, domain squatting becomes a lot less financially viable.
The fact that I find a service like this as cool as I do really speaks to how messed up the domain name service is.
Why is domain resale even allowed? "Ownership" of a domain seems silly to me. You should be licensing it from ICANN, and you should not be able to sell it. Part of the licensing agreement should be "if you are a domain squatting piece of scum, your contract will be terminated and you will not get your $6 (or whatever it is) registration fee back".