Jonathan Brun

How to end domain squatting

Domain squatting is a major problem. Companies go around picking up every imaginable domain name in the hopes of reselling it or placing ads that generate revenue. This land grab slows growth and drives people and businesses towards less intuitive names. Many registrars allow you to grab a trial period for a domain before purchasing it further increasing the incentive to bulk grab names to test traffic before splurging the 5$ on the actual purchase. To solve this issue, we could raise the cost of domain registration and renewal and remove the trial period. Nothing exorbitant, perhaps 50$ or 100$ per domain – the revenue from the increased price could be donated to charitable causes, schools, hospitals or some other worthy cause. The effect would be increased revenues for our struggling public services and a reduction in domain name squatting.

Published on February 6, 2011