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Drop-Catching Domains Is Big Business
WebsiteMag brings us news from the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA) about a recent study of drop catching —'a process whereby a domain that has expired is released into the pool of available names and is instantly re-registered by another party.' The eleven day study showed that 100% of '.com' and '.net' domain names were immediately registered after they had been released. CADNA has published the results with their own analysis. Quoting:
"The results also show that 87% of Dot-COM drop-catchers use the domain names for pay-per-click (PPC) sites. They have no interest in these domain names other than leveraging them to post PPC ads and turn a profit. Interestingly, only 67% of Dot-ORG drop catchers use the domains they catch to post these sites — most likely because Dot-ORG names are harder to monetize due to the lack of type-in traffic and because they tend to be used for more legitimate purposes."
It would also cut me out. You don't need to make them terribly expensive... just $25 or so would probably be sufficient. It would at least cut that percentage down a ton.
It's an interesting study, although it seems you safely ignore drop catching. Things have to become available at some point, so it's what happens after the "drop catch" that's important. As the paper itself concludes:
"Drop-catching alone is not what has led to this problematic environment, but rather it is the abuse of the Add Grace Period in connection with drop-catching that appears to be the cause."
Gotta say domain tasting and parking spoil the internet for me. I've been thinking about setting up a website, and most of the names I checked were domain parked. I could easily live with the registration fee going up significantly if it meant that only people with a real use for domain bought it. The paper suggests that $100 (which isn't too much) is about the cutoff point where it starts to become financially stupid.
Couldn't you just make it progressive? Have the first cost the normal rate and then have it go up with each new one you register until you hit a predefined limit. That way people like you and I who only have a few domains wouldn't get hurt.
The only problem that I could see with this is web firms that created websites for other people/companies and register it in their name. I imagine to solve that you could just have the count reset after so long. I imagine these drop catchers register a lot of names all the time.
Why not make it $100 to register, and then $5 a year to renew.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Not only would $100 cut me out, but even $25 would cut me out. I already spend quite a bit of money keeping my websites registered at $10/month. I don't need a stupid tax to keep spammers and squatters down, because that would greatly affect my personal sites. And I don't generate much of any income on my sites, they're are mostly personal.
Strict regulation, maybe. Remove domain tasting? Yes. But raising prices for honest customers? Hell no.
A better question would be whether there's copyright infringement having somebody register a domain that uses your site's name.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
It's not like they're frontrunning (sniping) domain names.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
All you need to do is nix the grace period. Simple. If you are not the original registered owner you have to pay full price to register it.
"This message was sent from an Apple
Not only would it be unprofitable for these "drop-catcher's", it would make it much harder for spammers to run their operations as well. So I'm all for domain names at 100 per year. Or even $50. Right now a domain for 5 or 10 bucks.. at 50 it would cost all these people 5 to 10 times as much to operate. When you are talking about a few thousand domains. Well that would get really costly.
I think this is a great solution. Force the squatters to pay a lot up front, and eliminate the grace period. That way they won't want to output a lot of money, even if it's about $50, to register because they won't make enough money on the domain to make it worthwhile. I think that most people would not mind paying a bit more up front as long as renewal was easy and cheap like it is now.
While they are at it, they should make scams, like Domain Registry of America does, to deceive people into switching registrars. There should be huge fines for this kind of thing, to the tune of $1000's per domain. You've got to make it financially devestating for people to engage in nasty behavior like this.
While I don't think you can make the squatting illegal, I think you can make it harder to make money on, which will effectively eliminate within a couple of years.
Rather than making domains prohibitively expensive (and artificially so...a database entry should not cost $100), what needs to happen is a drastic expansion of top-level domains. The shortage of domain names is entirely artificial. The problem is not that there are too many PPC sites. The problem is that these sites make those domain names unavailable for legitimate use. But if there were more top-level domains to choose from, the likelihood that legitimate users would have problems finding a suitable domain would be significantly less.
ICANN wants to keep this artificial scarcity since it enables them to propose fee increases that keep the registrars profits obscenely high. And, as evidenced by this discussion, even technophiles have bought into their BS. We need to remember that there's nothing magic about 'com', 'net', 'org', 'edu' and 'mil' (and the relatively few others that have subsequently been created). Why is there no '.auto' TLD for car companies and automobile enthusiasts? Why is there no '.music' TLD for bands and music enthusiasts? Why are there not thousands of other TLDs that are appropriate for other purposes?
Because ICANN says so. There's little to no technical reason why. And changing this makes a hell of a lot more sense than upping the registration fees. All increasing registration fees accomplishes, other than annoying PPC site operators (who will adapt, just as SPAMers adapt to every technical hurdle that is sent their way), is to funnel even more money to the registrars.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
Your post gave me an idea. Domains are 'property' in a sense and they have a value. Let's charge 'property taxes' on them. If a domain has a market value, it has a taxable value. It could generate some nice tax revenue for states, or countries. It could also spur some pricing wars with domains other than .com and .net as different countries charge different tax rates. The majority of people own domains worth $10 or less, so it would cost them at most $1 a year per domain. Anyone who owns more than 100 domains would have to pay an incrementally higher rate per domain. It's just an idea, I'm sure a politician would love it.
Imagine being able to forward the '$4000.00' response to the Internet tax office - he's now liable for the $400 in taxes on his $4000 domain, every year. I bet he'd drop the price, or the domain pretty quick.
Well, when you are paying for a domain name, you aren't paying for the database entry - you are paying for the right to exclusively use that particular name, right?
Creating more TLDs will probably help, but causes other problems. If I am interested in purchasing an Audi, do I go to audi.com or audi.auto? Is it permissible for me to register audi.{something} for my own use? What if I register {somedomain}.books and someone already has {somedomain}.com? That is bound to cause confusion. I don't know - I like the idea in some ways, but it seems like it would open up a whole bunch of other problems.
The mistake of flattening the tree (to name an example that I still have a valid email address under, the Japanese government should be
How many of you young folk in the United States have ever had an email address with multiple dots in it? My record is <steve@romulus.sedd.trw.com> or <baur@venice.sedd.trw.com> in the 1980s.
$100 to register, Free to renew for the first 10 years. $10 to renew every year after that. That way it works out to $10 per year for those who stay with a domain, and there is a big incentive not to register a domain you do not wish to keep. In combination with trademark law that would probably take the sting out of most of this nonsense.