Would you support a .COM price increase?

[Adam]

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! 😋

 

[Mike Rees]

It's certainly an idea. There was a post on Reddit the other day that was on a similar subject, and I went against the grain there as I'm going to disagree with you here. Domain names are fundamentally cheap. Domains that are squatted on also aren't just the domain name but the history associated with it. They also rarely sell for 10% or more of what the drop catcher is asking for so if you think the domain is worth it you could probably snag it for a few hundred quid or whatever.

As an aside, drop catchers and domain squatters are rich people. Doubling or tripling the price isn't going to stop them snapping up domains that expire left, right and centre because that'll actually barely eat into their profit margins. $45 is still typically less than the lowest bounty to catch a domain.

 

[James]

Support this, too many domain hoarders.

 

[Adam]

Well this is a spooky coincidence. I received this email from Namecheap just now about .COM potentially going up 70% or more. I should be more careful about what I wish for.

Full email text:

Namecheap

Namecheap Blog Post:

ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money - Namecheap Blog

ICANN has announced significant changes to the contract it has with Verisign, Inc. to operate the top-level domain .COM, including .COM price increases.

www.namecheap.com

Seems like a similar situation to the .ORG debacle. Kind of a bummer that our entire internet revolves around a possibly corrupt DNS system eh?

Private equity is going to ruin the .ORG domain system and screw nonprofits

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59nvjd/private-equity-is-going-to-ruin-the-org-domain-system-and-screw-nonprofits?utm_source=reddit.com In June, despite 3,252 opposing comments and just 6 for, historic price caps were removed from the .ORG TLD by ICANN (price caps that are in force across...

webwide.io

 

[UnitPrice.org]

I think domain squatters would still pay 70% more. Maybe they’d let a few expire, but an increase won’t release squatters’ grip on the truly good domain names. They just happen to be squatting on a lot of junk domains right now, too.

Domain squatters are the worst.

 

[Jordan]

I feel like there's a lot of hate on domain investors here xD

 

[anghelvalentin9]

.COM domain is very cheap compare to the .IO domain for example. I think a fair price is around $30 each year.