In recent months, I have made a few comments now and again about how I hate domain name squatters. These are the people that purchase a domain name and then park it indefinitely. They don’t do anything with it, and rarely do they even have web hosting for it. If I had to guess, I would say that 75% of registered domain names aren’t being used in any sort of regular, useful way.

I know that many squatters have intentions of doing something great with their domain names some day, and just never get around to it. Others purchase them because they believe the foolish doctrine that all you have to do is buy a domain name and people will come running to you with huge amounts of cash to buy it. The odds of this happening are less than the odds of winning the lottery.

The Incorrect Categorization of Virtual Real Estate

I have made comments in the past that squatting should be regulated, and that there be requirements that you do something with a domain in order to keep it. Many snap back saying that this is anti-capitalistic and that domain real estate should be treated like physical real estate. They say that domain name value should be driven by the economic laws of supply and demand, and that if something is scarce, it becomes more valuable.

I don’t agree with this. Domain real estate is virtual. It is silly to think that domain space should be treated like real estate. The only way that comparison would be realistic is if there were an international committee who created land and sold it. That doesn’t happen on this planet. The real estate system exists because land is real, physical, and established. The supply of domain space is effectively infinite. Anyone who works with virtual hosts knows this is true. You can create new hosts indefinitely and use all kinds of names.

The Solution to Squatting

So this brings me to what I believe is the solution to domain name squatting. Domain names should always be cheap and there should be no limits in their creation. ICANN recently took a step forward by making it so a business could spend a couple hundred grand to have their own domain extension. For example, Apple could go buy .apple as an extension, and instead of using apple.com they could be www.apple or just apple. Then, as subdomains, they could create store.apple instead of store.apple.com. The only trouble with this move by ICANN is that it’s cost prohibitive to get your own extension. Only the rich can do it.

But if it were cheap, this opens up a huge number of possibilities for domains. If a squatter knows that people have millions of attractive domain name alternates, there will be less value in what they’re hoarding. The same rule of regulation I mentioned above would apply. If you bought the .labrum extension and didn’t do anything with it, then within a short period of time, ICANN should let me buy clifton.labrum as a subdomain. If you don’t use .labrum within a longer period of time, then I could buy .labrum outright.

Certainly there must be a lot of things I’m not thinking of here, and there are a lot of reasons to have the domain name system the way it is, but my basic point is that there should be a surplus of name space since its creation is cheap and limitless. Once this is the case, those millions of unused domain names would float back into availability and might actually get used.