Even my subdomain from my previous host from 15 years ago is squatted to this day to serve up advertising. It's even aware of the software that I used to host there.

One answer in my view is to remove the maximum length of prepayment for domains. Let us buy a domain for 100 years. Sure, that's $1,000. Maybe throw in a discount. But now we never have to worry about it again, as long as we live. Or at least, as long as the registry lives. It would never be squattable.

Your idea would turn into yet another way to extract even more money from customers without actually bringing additional value (or guarantees) to the table. :(

Not in the parachute selling business...

> One answer in my view is to remove the maximum length of prepayment for domains. Let us buy a domain for 100 years.

Makes sense to me but I don't think I have seen anything more than 10 years.

Which will only work as long as you keep paying for the old domain.

The cost of a domain name is supposed to dis-incentivize buying up domain names simply to squat and/or serve ads, but clearly the price isn't high enough to dis-incentivize that. And we can't raise prices, because then it dis-incentivizes legitimate users. The problem is that the cost of domain names is a larger dis-incentive to legitimate users than it is to domain squatters.

If a domain is $10 and a squatter sells domains for $100, then they only have to sell 1 in 10 domains to break even, so risk is very low: they don't have to really be overly concerned with only buying domains that will sell. And that's a simplistic model: the reality is that squatters have much more sophisticated valuation models, and have therefore have much higher profit margins, keeping their risk even lower. Sometimes domains sell for tens of thousands of dollars.

Meanwhile, the risk is very high for a legitimate user. If you have a company or a nonprofit, you basically have to choose a name that's marketable, memorable, relevant to your business/nonprofit, and unique, on the first try. This can literally make or break a business. And once you have that name, there's basically only one ideal URL for that name: yourbusiness.com or yournonprofit.org. So you have a supply of one and a demand of this might make or break my organization so cost can be pretty much "what is the maximum you can pay?". As such, if the max you can pay isn't enough for the domain squatter to want to sell, you just don't get the domain, and your organization gets a sub-standard web presence.

I don't think we can overestimate the impact of this problem. I've worked for a company which owns your-business.com rather than yourbusiness.com (these are examples obviously--it would be unprofessional to give out actual names). Their marketing is very explicit about the dash, and potential customers still end up at the squatted non-dashed domain, which is only getting more expensive as the company becomes more successful. Luckily their value proposition is large enough, and clients sophisticated enough, that the friction of actually getting to the site isn't as large enough barrier to prevent growth. But if your business is a lower-margin business with less sophisticated clients, that would be a big enough barrier to prevent success entirely.

Whether this should be done and on what level will definitely be interesting. How sure am I that I want my old email address to be telling spammers where I 'live' now?

I would wager that 95% of web users do not even know that IA exists, let alone that they can use it.

> Does it matter than what the current namespace is?

As long as it's the only thing a browser will consider to retrieve information, yes. Which is why cool URIs don't change.

You are far too optimistic. It's probably more like 99.999999%

That would mean only 80-odd people know about IA, which seems a tad low :P

That would mean only 80-odd people know about IA, which seems a tad low :P

I suppose that means that for most people, 99.9999% of the world's population don't know they exist. Interesting thought. I wonder which living person is known of by the largest percentage, and what that percentage is?

But branding, let alone domain names, is proof that namespaces matter. And have immense market value.

> "As we go into the seventh year of the new gTLD experiment, they are meaningless. They haven’t been adopted by almost anybody. Circulation is poor. So many registrations are questionable or penny-promotional. The majority are parked and not in use nor will they ever be. And 99.9% of the people on this planet could not name a single one of them! Not a one!"

Full article: http://domainincite.com/25103-di-leaders-roundtable-4-big-pr...

.io seems to have been accepted by the tech community, as the place to go when you can't get your .com or .net. Maybe .ai too. Are there any new gTLDs gaining acceptance in the wider community?

So anyone who thinks .io is as good as .org is probably not price sensitive, and might be contributing to the worry that .org will go the same way eventually.

.ai is even more expensive, but I haven't noticed .ai domains being used for things I visited, only heard that they are used.

However, that has another problem in that it increases the opportunity for fraud via. The benefit of a small number of tlds is that the most memorable part is typically the most unique and provides human-distinguishable identity, but that's out the window if you've normalized mybusiness.com, mybusiness.biz, mybusiness.business, mybustiness.bz, mybusiness.bus, etc. Typosquatting still exists with .com, but it's far more manageable that the above.

Alternatively, I like the concept of Tor onion services, where the "domains" are acquired in a permissionless fashion. Names are just randomly generated ed25519 strings so there's no squatting and your address never expires. If you want a vanity domain, you just commit compute time to brute force something human-readable. [1] The obvious drawback is that you have to be a Tor client, but if you manage your own DNS, you could use Tor's DNSPort mode as a kind of forwarding target for non-Tor clients on your lan. [2]

1: https://www.jamieweb.net/blog/onionv3-vanity-address/

2: https://www.grepular.com/Transparent_Access_to_Tor_Hidden_Se...

Yes the registry is incredibly cheap to run, it’s the name servers themselves that are so expensive (from what I understand this is partially due to uptime requirements.)

I believe most people, when executing a name look up, will usually just end up talking to one of a battery of ISP provided DNS servers. So while the registry's name servers need to feed those servers (and probably be heavily redundant and reliable) they wouldn't actually end up handling an insane amount of traffic. I'm actually a bit curious now if there are any sorts of requirements on how much traffic registrars need to be able to support or if everyone just over-resources and still makes enough money that the question has never been deeply investigated.

Your right you have to have multiply redundant systems in four continents with everything running on HA kit with auto switch over diverse routing for power and data and I think hot standbys as well.

There are a ton of ISPs, and many of them run regional recursive servers. Each of those servers is going to see a ton of different domains that they need to query at the registry servers. Most registries are serving glue records with a 1-3 day TTL, but ISP caches may not have enough memory to keep the long tail names in cache for that long, and the long tail is long. There's millions of domain names to query the registry servers for.

Correct

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=fin&q=NASDAQ:+QQQ&stick=H4...