> This would be too easily abused by domain squatters, I think.

Why? Professional domain squatters are the ones that never forget to renew, because it's their main business. And if they stop paying on 1,000's or 100,000's of domains, the registrar will take them to court pretty quick to resolve the contractual debt. And either the company goes bankrupt or pays the bill, same as literally any other professional service. A contract's still a contract.

And if you're squatting on just a few domains personally and stop paying, it goes to collections, shows up on your credit report, and lowers your credit score like any other consumer debt not meeting payments. Which, if you want to open new credit cards or buy a house, is gonna be a big problem.

There are already avenues to address this, the same as any other debt you incur. "Forever" just means until it sends you to bankruptcy and you lose it formally, worst-case scenario. It's not some kind of blank check to register a billion domain names, not pay for them, and face zero consequences...

Your view here is entirely US / western centric. Billions of people have access to the Internet along with the right to buy domain names that don’t live in countries with collections agencies or credit reports.

You don't "buy" a domain any more that you "buy" your phone number -you rent it.

I assure you all countries have collection agencies even if its 3 guys with ak's in a technical with a DhskA

Most countries have state-enforced debt collection instead of private enforcement like in USA.

I was joking about failed states

It would take a ton of bureaucratic overhead, but you could have a system where you could apply for permanent ownership of a domain only after establishing that you're actively using that domain for the purpose of a business or project. Basically a trademark system for domain names. Perhaps with the caveat that a limited number of domains could be reserved for any one project, so that Google couldn't tie a thousand different URLs to Blogspot.

I'm very unhappy with the impermanence of online resources; some great websites that I used to rely on for information or conversation have just disappeared with time. Some have been archived by the Wayback Machine, some haven't. Obviously, a permanent server is a bigger concern (and a bigger problem) than a permanent domain, but I still think something like this could be a step in the right direction.

> Basically a trademark system for domain names.

Maintaining ownership of a trademark is not trivial. People pay lawyers to do it. Perhaps they should do the same for important domain names?

https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-maintaining-trademark-regis...

They do RELEX (Reed Elsevier) paid a third party to mange their domain portfolio.

I’d like some combination of both: increase the base price (or scale it with the number of domains owned by a single entity?) but have some kind of grace period based on the time you’ve held it where you accrue a charge with interest (to prevent squatters abusing it) but can get it back quickly if you pay in full.

If a business screws up, paying a few grand in late fees is much better than losing it to a squatter and that can protect users from someone malicious buying a domain used by an app or something.

I like your idea of having a time period based on how long you've continually held it, in a paid up fashion.

But even that should be capped to some reasonable time scale, like 90 to 120 days.

Definitely — the main thing I was thinking is that this could be a great value add for a particular registrar focused on businesses. Bake in time and money so they could do something like send registered mail or something to an address on contact in addition to emails.