Getting good domains gets harder and harder, for new companies it gets difficult to find a good domain and so to find a good name for their company (matching their domain name).
Almost every short domain name is already taken by big companies like godaddy, just to be sold by some thousands of dollars.<p>Why is this not illegal?
Why can investors buy land and leave it undeveloped until there is an opportunity for profit? It is the same concept. The land is unproductive until somebody wants to live on it, or build their business on it.<p>It is true that many communities in the US have property taxes, which has an interesting effect. It makes it so only wealthy people can own and hold un-used land, because most middle and lower income folks could not afford to pay property taxes on land just to hold it.
How much government control would you need to make you happy? Where is the line that determines who has right to the domain? I think if you add any level of enforcement it would lead to too much chaos.<p>In either case it would not help startups. Lets say you decide to open a company named "Banana". How do you envision taking ownership of banana.com? :)<p>New companies have a luxury of picking ANY name, and a name for which domain is not taken. There are lots of practices on name picking.
You could say the same about every single object you can purchase though, it's a business and a way for people to make money.<p>Why is it not illegal to sell diamonds for a unreasonably high price?
The whole economy works based on "scarcity."
Anything is scarce is valuable, like our time<p>So like gold, like domain names, like food, like workforce, ...<p>However, I can understand your feeling.
I waited for months to be able to register a domain which was taken
And it's about 8 months waited for another domain which has taken and should wait another 2 months again, and hope they don't be able to sell that domain