Here’s my take:
The domain aftermarket has a big problem… it exists. This market shouldn’t ever be allowed to exist in the first place. ICANN should’ve blocked this bullshit a long time ago and forced registrars to just let domains expire and free the space. Also add a few provisions about unused domain names and about selling them.
Domain squatting is incredibly scummy, but I have no idea how it would be possible to have any other system.
My understanding is that domains do expire unless you pay the fee to renew for another year.
Regarding unused domain names, how would anyone know if a particular name is being unused? Domain names are used for more things than browsable websites. You’d have to have a system that could determine if traffic is going to those names, which seems bad from a privacy standpoint and also pretty easy to script around.
The problem is that this isn’t what happens today. If you register a domain and never pay for it again then providers will often renew the domain and keep it to themselves and try resell it later. This is one of the biggest issues in the domain name market and GoDaddy is one of the worst offenders.
Yes that’s a good question but I’m sure that ICANN with all it’s wisdom and infinite resources and teams could define something reasonable. I believe the first step could be to simply make sure registrars can’t do what I describe before.
I accidentally let my personal domain expire because I was using PayPal with my registrar but they couldn’t use that for auto renew. Someone else bought it but they’re not doing anything with it. I can’t see who owns it because they’re doing a private registration with the same registrar I used, so as far as whois is concerned it’s the same registration it’s always had. This happened once before to me years ago and the people who bought it that time put up a fake YouTube clone in French but I just waited them out and they abandoned it a year later. This has been going on two years now and it still hasn’t been abandoned. It’s not critical to have but it’s annoying that someone’s squatting on it hoping I’ll pay a premium to get it back. It’s not that valuable to me.
Maybe it isn’t another person, it’s more likely to be your registrar holding the domain to sell on auction later on. This is the typical GoDaddy behaviour.
I’m using Namecheap but I have had this suspicion that they’re the ones holding it this time. If I could confirm that it would definitely have me looking for another registrar. That feels like it should be against ICANN rules.
I have a couple of nice domain hacks and I use them for email and random services I run so the root domain appeared to be abandoned. I received so many messages from people wanting to buy them I just started pointing them at other sites so they would stop hassling me. I’ve had one of these domains for nearly 20 years and it’s my main email address. I’m not selling because it would be a year long full time job just to update all my services 😅
I’m not an economics major, but maybe something like a blind auction every year, and if you owned the domain last year, you also have the option of matching the highest bidder to keep the domain.
The biggest flaw with a system like that is that it would still discourage trying to buy an already owned domain, since you could pay for it, but not actually get it if the owner exercises their matching right. But it would definitely discourage domain squatting since the more other people want your domain, the more you have to pay to keep it.
That sounds ripe for abuse. Say someone has a problem with me - if they wait long enough, they can now pay over the odds and effectively take over my website. Or get their friends to enter a bidding war and potentially cost me a lot of money.
This would turn the Internet into a hell scape if only because corporations could throw huge amounts of money around.
There would be incentive for the Pizza Huts and the Walmarts of the world to just assume control of the websites for any local competitors.
So your solution to capitalism running its dirty fingers into the domain name system is… enabling corporate style hostile domain takeovers? Good lord no.