It's to stop squatters from buying 10000 common word domain names and trying to sell them for crazy amounts.

... by letting the registry sell them for crazy amounts instead, and letting them continue to overcharge the owner on an ongoing basis.

Yes? Generally owners of those huge popular simple word domain names will be making far more than $850/year from them, if they actually put a modicum of effort into making the site useful. That's better than someone snatching up thousands of domain names and then holding them hostage with contentless park pages until someone coughs up $X00,000 or more.

> Generally owners of those huge popular simple word domain names will be making far more than $850/year from them

This might have been true in the past, but it isn't true anymore, especially not under new gTLDs. Nobody goes around typing in <word>.<tld> domains out of curiosity anymore, and advertisers don't pay anywhere near as much as they used to for impressions on domain parking pages. The vast majority of premium domain pricing is driven by pure greed.

Try something like Newsy

https://newsy.co

Which is a modern take on domain parking.

So, following the logic, the NYC should charge crazy extra tax on properties to 10x the prices to make the market, hm, more affordable?

I live in NYC and the city does indeed charge higher property tax on more valuable properties, so I'm not exactly sure what point you think you're making here? Charging property tax proportional to the value of the property is common across basically the entire world (as far as I'm aware).

I know. I'm just wondering if they increase the tax by 80x for those properties (like $12 -> $850), do you think it will make the overall market better somehow?

If people were buying properties, and leaving them desolate and unused for long periods of time in the hopes of cashing out one day later, then yes absolutely.

That's why I mentioned NYC. Because people say it's a problem there, i.e, a lot of properties are just bought and not occupied.

What happens in NYC is actually the opposite of laws that discourage squatting - the tax laws, depreciation schedules, and other financial products like property value estimation actually encourage building owners to pursue unoccupied-ness in many cases.

Clearly it’s become much more than just that.

i HaVE nO cHoIcE bUt To ReNt SeEk MySeLf.

An extremely low quality, low effort meme comment more appropriate for reddit, but I'll respond earnestly in any case.

It's not rent seeking, which should be clear because the premium domains have a fixed price schedule that is far lower than what domain scalpers would charge, instead of a variable charge based on what they think they could get away with. Even at $850/yr, you can probably renew premium domains for multiple human lifespans before you end up paying as much as the scalpers might ask for certain domains. Instead of rent seeking, it is priced such that scalpers can't afford to squat on thousands of common word/phrase domains.

The comment deserved half the effort I put into it, and this one deserves a quarter of the effort I’m putting into it.

No one forces anyone to pay a domain squatter. This is literally a “problem” that only exists in people’s heads.

And no one forces anyone to buy a .dev domain. So what's the issue?

Now you get it.

The same premium domains are still squatted and sold for thousands. Absolutely nothing changed for the end users, but now Google takes a piece of the cake. Admit it.

Yep it’s nonsense and a complete racket. It should just be first come first serve, for the initial registration and for lapsed renewals. Like it used to be (forever ago, but still).