- Local time
- 23:32
- Joined
- Sep 24, 2019
- Messages
- 1,259
- Pronouns
- he/him
I have been at it again, searching high and low for an unregistered .COM domain name for a project (aimed at non-techies which is one reason I avoided the new domains among other concerns).
The result: absolutely nothing. Seriously nothing. Even after lowering my standards and going again. I used scripts to mash dictionary words together testing over 10,000 with nothing satisfactory. What were all my favourite names doing? Either parked doing nothing, with no DNS at all or for sale for thousands of dollars.
You may have seen my rant on this very forum about the price caps being removed from .ORG domains but this is different.
Out of about 100 million .COM registrations, only around 35% are actually serving legitimate websites. Of course .ORG does not have the same congestion with 'only' 10 million registrations. I can't find any data on how many of these are used but I would wager that most are.
A .COM only costs around $15 a year to cling on to.
There have been lots of ideas thrown around about on how to combat this including forcing people to show that they are using or plan to use it but this just seems impossible to enforce. The new gTLDs go someway to alleviating the problem but we will find out in a few more years I imagine what happens when one becomes unprofitable or fails.
I feel like personally, I would pay double or triple the .com price if it meant more were available and there was less incentive to squat on them. Having said that, Verisign definitely do not deserve the money for no extra work when domain registries are fairly low maintenance as it is. I thought it would be nice if the money went to good causes decided by individual registrars so that customers had a choice of who they went with and what causes they wanted to support.
Of course this is all hypothetical I can't imagine anything ever being done about it until a better DNS comes along but still, thought it would make an interesting discussion! 😋
