I feel like we need a chance in policy that makes this practice not worth the trouble. I see no value that he gives the internet. I may be bias though, I can't grab the .com variant of a non profit school I work for because someone like him owns it and wont accept offers for less then $600 bucks.
The prices on his website are rediculous.<p>thesearchservice.com - 2 million!<p>You don't even get searchservice.com with this domain. Simarly .org and .net are not even registered meaning after buying this you could be facing competition from similar names.<p>I find squatters are the bane of the internet. My little brother had a small gaming message board where he and his friends would prepare for games. No seo value.. long domain name. Parents credit card expired and we didn't notice. Domain name expired briefly. Tried to register it again as soon as we noticed. Someone else pinched it. Offered to sell it back to us for $1000. It has been for sale for the past 2 years with no interest..<p>The squatter has got nothing from it. My kid brother lost his domain name.. I think the majority of squatters are scum tbh.
Has anyone ever actually bought one of these domain names?<p>I tried to once. I had a good idea one day and wanted the domain name for it. It was a somewhat out-of-the-blue idea, so I wasn't really expecting it to be taken, but it was and all the names somewhat close to it were taken as well. I went back to the original name I wanted and e-mailed the squatter asking how much he wanted, hoping it would only be in the low hundreds of dollars. He e-mailed me back asking for $6600. When I said that it was too high and I wasn't interested, I got a much less professional e-mail:<p>"LAST 5.5 K<p>Keep or find other domain name<p>Bye"<p>I said it was still too expensive, and got<p>"LOL ...<p>Bye"<p>I went to the website that the e-mail was sent from and it was all Lorem Ipsum. When I went back to the domain name I wanted when I was writing this, it had a startup-y logo, a promise of something cool being built, and an invitation to follow the developers (a tech blog I had never heard of) on facebook or twitter. It was all sounding legitimate, and I was upset that someone else apparently had an idea that was probably similar to mine, until I started clicking the really random assortment of "sponsor" links (to medical and legal sites, which pay a lot for ads but which had no obvious connection to any idea that would be associated with the domain name) and some of them took me to more lorem ipsum sites.<p>Very mysterious, and tremendously irritating.
I bought a domain today, and I ended up having to come up with a bunch of synonyms for what I wanted and using a script to see if any of them were available.<p>I guess I support the entrepreneurial spirit, but at the same time I kind of hope that guy gets hit by a truck.
I think we should institute a Homesteading Law (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_principle" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_principle</a>) for domains. You can claim a domain as long as you use it for a legitimate purpose instead of just parking on it. There would be details to hash out for sure, but in the end I think we would have a much better system in place.
At the risk of seeming spammy, please check out my service Lean Domain Search [1] before buying a premium domain name. It pairs your search term with more than 2,000 other keywords and instantly shows you which are available, making it really, really easy to find great available domain names.<p>Guys like this depend on scarcity to drive up the cost of domains. One of my goals with Lean Domain Search is to show people that there actually are lots of great available domain names left for whatever you're working on. The problem until now has been that there haven't been any tools that make it easy to find them. Over time, if enough people gravitate away from domain squatters, the value of their portfolios will fall, they'll stop renewing their holdings, and it can change the face of the domain name industry.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.leandomainsearch.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.leandomainsearch.com</a>
This gave me an idea. Write a program that generates random melodies. Then upload them somewhere public and timestamped like YouTube.<p>Then write another program that detects new songs with a high degree of similarity in the melody. Then sue for copyright violation.<p>Call it melody squatting.
Vaguely related, a lot of people seem to jump to the conclusion that a domain that is registered and is not in use is automatically someone that bought it and wants to sell it to you at an extortionate rate to "steal" money from hard working "real" entrepreneurs, but how many people here have 1 or more domain that they don't use but did register with honest intentions? I bet most people do. I bet there are people who want your domains. Assuming someone is a squatter and not someone who registered a domain but never used it is silly.
The link in the article to "The Man Who Owns the Internet" (<a href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/06/01/100050989/index.htm" rel="nofollow">http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...</a>) is far more interesting than the article itself.<p>It almost makes Mann look like a rank amateur by comparison...
Simple solution, just need to make the wholesale cost of domains >$100/yr then it won't be viable for the squatters to sit on "really speculative" names like the ones in this story would be.. and for a real business/service with 1 or 2 domain names, that extra cost means nothing.
I dont know what to say ! i get angry when i see a domain name that i want being parked on and going to absolute waste, but on the other hand the business this guy has created and the money he has made could be viewed as a smart hack in some perverse way. He has basically seen a market where no one else did in the early days (or only few did) and has managed to capitalize of it very sweetly (all of which he did skillfully and legally).
I've only once been able to snag a domain on the drop (everymentor.com). Though I've tried dozens of times for various domains, I <i>always</i> get beaten to the punch.<p>What kind of resources do these guys have? Hundreds of EC2 instances pounding registrars for good domains? I'm surprised registrars allow it.
How important is it to have the .com name, is there any research available on this topic? I known that common sense says that mydomain.com is better than mydomain.cc, mydomain.io, mydomain.to or whatever, but is this really the case and how big are the differences? (For example how much more likely users remember a .com vs .io name)
I tried snatching up newmogul.com (it was a developed community like HN for business news at one point) when it expired, but was beat to the punch, presumably by someone like this guy (as it currently seems to have some fake blog parked on it now).<p>The original owner and operator of New Mogul just shut the site down out of the blue, and I got a replacement site setup at <a href="http://forlue.com" rel="nofollow">http://forlue.com</a> and wanted to direct NM to forlue.<p>I sure miss NM.
it's one thing to buy good domains, but this guys main motivation is "greed" and he literally doesn't care about how anything he is doing affects anyone or anything. Makes me sick.
I stopped paying for a 6 letter .cn domain, and the Chinese got in touch with me, they snatched it up, thinking I was going to pay them some money for it.<p>I once asked how much a .com domain name was worth. They replied by email, it was about $ 3,000 and I didn't email them back. They had my phone number so they made an international phonecall asking me what I was willing to pay. A few hundred bucks, tops. They didn't sell it to me.
The article says he claims that he sometimes buys domains via GoDaddy. Why would he use GoDaddy since he can get them from cheaper (and more-ethical) domain name registrars than GoDaddy?