I'm not really well informed about the politics of DNS at the top, but I've always had the impression ICANN has been grossly negligent / corrupted over the last twenty years.<p>At the end of the day there is profound capital interest in making name records unfair and noncompetitive in order to rent seek fortunes off the Internet and I see no indication ICANN is anything but compromised by those interests in the way they hand out TLDs and enable registrars to operate as for profit corporations. Nothing about a database translating human readable strings to IP addresses should be a damn profit center.<p>I'm surprised the EFF, FSF, etc haven't ever shown interest in replacing ICANN's registrar model with something that enables registration without squatting, doesn't let anyone rent seek a fortune off of naming things, or create profit incentives that leads to the mess where some things are named strangely because someone is trying to extort money for it.<p>There are some edge technologies like namecoin and IPNS that seem to be trying to approach this problem in novel ways but its a shame we don't have a fair consensus model on naming things that actually works.
Can a domain name registrar register a domain name <i>for themselves</i> for free or for a minimal fee? What about Verisign -- if they registered ".com" domain names <i>for themselves</i>, who would they even pay since there is no one above them? Seriously, does anyone know the answer to this? I've never found an authoritative answer.<p>I've wondered if domain name registrars are speculating in the domain name market themselves. Perhaps even insidiously grabbing domain names that you've shown an interest in. Maybe millions of domain names are reserved by the registrars themselves!
Just because a domain has ads on it or no webserver, does not mean it is unused.<p>I have quite a few domains I use for email and such that I park with ads. They make me $20-$30 a month and I still get full use of the domain for what I need it for.<p>Edit: People are asking what I use. DomainAdvertising.com. When I originally signed up with them you had to have thousands of domains (which I have sold off), I have no idea what the requirements are now.
I'm surprised that such a large percentage of domains are registered with GoDaddy. What leads people to pick them? They're such a shitty registrar, every time I have to deal with them it's awful.
On <a href="https://dofo.com" rel="nofollow">https://dofo.com</a> we have all this data and more, you can check it freely.<p>By using dozens of filters, you can refine the results and see whatever you want.<p>For example, 66,237 .com domain names contain "coin" and are listed for sale on marketplaces: <a href="https://dofo.com/search/?contains=coin&on_sale=y&extension=com" rel="nofollow">https://dofo.com/search/?contains=coin&on_sale=y&extension=c...</a><p>You can also check the popularity of any keyword on the trends page: <a href="https://dofo.com/trends/keyword/coin" rel="nofollow">https://dofo.com/trends/keyword/coin</a>
It says, how popular is the keyword, how many registered domain names exist with that keyword, what percentage of these domain names are used actively as a website and more.<p>As for the registrars; yes Godaddy is the first one with about ~70 million domain names under management and Namecheap and Tucows are following it: <a href="https://dofo.com/registrars" rel="nofollow">https://dofo.com/registrars</a><p>Disclaimer: I'm the co-founder of dofo.com
We've got to the stage now where if you've got a handful of .coms sharing a server, they'd have to be pretty substantial sites before your hosting costs would exceed your domain renewal fees. That's one hell of a market failure.
I'd be curious how many domain names are used, but not for the web or email. No idea how to measure this, and I'm sure it's tiny.<p>For instance, I have a .io domain I use as my own little personal dynamic dns service since dyndns turned evil. The TLD doesn't do anything interesting, and any web pages served by the subdomains are done on nonstandard ports, so if this study scanned .io domains, they'd classify my domain as not in use, when it very much is.
Excellent research! Finding available and meaningful domain names is a big problem. One solution is to chose a non-.com TLD. There are many but it's still an unpopular choice. I believe this is changing and other TLD will become more popular as .com names become more limited. With all the TLDs out there it becomes cost prohibitive to buy them all.<p>List of TLDs: <a href="http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt" rel="nofollow">http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt</a>
Aside from anything else, there is a lot of work out into this - it's a pretty robust piece of research, and is (I assume) a fairly good calling card as there are many business questions that can only be answered with this sort of skill set / stubbornness
I was hoping to see there a block with unregistered domain names.<p>One could do it by, for example, training a Markov chain/neural network to spew out (sample) domains, and then see how many are currently registered, to compute the general XXXX.com space utilization fraction.<p>This approach would be powered by a more sensible, IMHO, probability distribution than, say, taking all domain names with up to 30 {a-z0-9} characters with uniform probabilities.
One intriguing proposal to limit domain name squatting is "Harberger Taxation"[1]<p>Under this scheme, every owner of a domain would declare a value for the domains they own, and pay a percentage of that value as a tax (replacing the current annual registration fees).<p>Owners are incentivized to post an accurate value for their domain because they must sell their domain for the price they list if anyone offers to buy at that price.<p>While it makes sense in theory, I think there are some practical problems that would have to be addressed before such a system could be put into use. For example, what stops a company with a large bankroll from squashing competitors by purchasing their domain?<p>[1] - <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2818494" rel="nofollow">https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2818494</a>
I own nibble.com and rolled my own very simple static "parked" page using Bootstrap and an Escrow.com button.<p>In my opinion the parking services like Sedo etc. aren't worth it just for capturing sales leads...the commission is too high.
"4. Not all records in the zone file are valid domains. Some do not have a WHOIS record and may act as honeypots to catch people distributing and using zone files without permission."<p>It has been a while since I looked at the com zone file access ageement but as I recall the most substantial restriction was on redistribution.<p>A wee bit of web searching shows there are still plenty of non-official sources selling zone files.<p>Perhaps it's just me but sometimes I think the number is increasing.<p>Are the honeypots designed to catch these sellers and stop them from selling?<p>Does Verisign enforce the ZFA agreement?<p>Maybe all Verisign can do is revoke the access of the licensee who breached their agreement?
Domain registration is one of the most perfect use scenarios for a blockchain type system. It would be entirely decentralized meaning no party has any unfair advantage which leads to these sort of systems where players obtain massive amounts of domains for non-market prices and then sit on them indefinitely relying on the occasional way over market price sale to justify the business model. And while views may vary here, I think it would also generally be a positive for governments to no longer be able to strip individuals or companies of their domains, such as for instance SciHub.<p>One practical problem in the early stages is that various domains could be snagged and used to extort the companies/individuals who 'rightfully' own them for unreasonably large sums of money if they wanted access to their domains. This issue could be resolved by premining and mirroring the current domain system before public launch with domains transferred to their rightful owners upon proof of ownership akin to the systems used by Let's Encrypt.<p>Probably the most challenging problem would be in determining how many domain registration coins would be generated per unit time. Too few and prices inflate too high and destroy the system. Too many and prices deflate and the coins become worthless - destroying motivation to keep mining, in turn again destroying the system. Lots of possible solutions though. Fun problem!
"There are currently 137 million .com domain names registered."<p>But how many is regularly visited today by most of the population? A good 10k max?
Domain names are incredibly underpriced (I'm referring to the "good" ones). With the evolution of the internet, where startups are now willing to spend 10k-100k on a domain, it makes no sense that its original cost was 10$, and that insentivises speculators.<p>If prime domains would cost 100$ or even 1000$ per year it wouldn't affect a running business much, but would almost completely eliminate the viablilty of domain squatting. And if you're an individual you'll still have many other options.<p>This could be applied to the entire COM TLD (it does stand for commercial after all) or only for parts of it under some criteria (like length etc).
Just because a domain may appear to be unused, it doesn't necessarily mean it is unused.<p>For instance, I have a domain I use as a file hosting which I can link to when I want to share something (I used to use Imgur for this purpose before, but frankly I don't trust any image host at this point, so I set up nginx to host a single directory). As you need to know the file names to download them, the domain would appear to be unused.<p>Although now that I look at I suppose I do explain its purpose, so here is that: <a href="https://i.xfix.pw/" rel="nofollow">https://i.xfix.pw/</a>.
Anybody who is interested by the economics of domain names should read Henry George who laid all this out over one hundred years ago in Progress and Poverty. Domains are just the new frontier since we discovered and claimed all physical land. The 1990's were a land grab and now we are entering the period of calcification.
It seems like it has been this way for a long time. I remember back in the dialup days in college sitting around trying out random urls and even then many of them were ad sites that were for sale.