Let's say I run a town with shopping centers. Both are called Main Street Shopping but one is located on Main St and 1st and the other is located at Main St and 120th. When you show up at Main St and 1st, is it a bussling shopping center filled with stores of all kinds. When you GPS Main Street Shopping Center and accidentally arrive at the other location, you just find a parking lot with an empty field with a "coming soon" sign that's been up for 5 years. The site is undeveloped, commercially zoned and represents essentially a burden for the community from both the unrealized tax revenue as well as eye sore and lower local property values. Plus the brand confusion, misdirected out-of-towners, etc.<p>So take this analogy to the internet, admittedly the 'real' costs may be lower--transmitting a few billion bytes is cheaper than road maintenance, fire and police protection to the unused property--but the societal cost is the same. The property should be fully realized and transfered to someone who will use it. This is the whole 'eminent domain' debate in a nutshell. Just because you own something DOESN'T give you impunity to 'waste' it as you see fit. There is a public interest that is ethically sound. But at its heart, the people who cybersquat are a nuisance. They have no bona fide interest in the domain name and likely acquired it just to 'own' a property that they think they'll be able to flip one day.... it's the same sh*t as the real estate bubble, heck... bubble of ANY KIND. Fact is, I am glad this system of arbitration is in place because if I was Bill Gates and some guy named Joe Smith bought my name.com and didn't have a fan page or other relevant property, but just intended to sell it to me for a 10,000% return on his 'investment,' I would be pretty pissed off. I really don't see the other side of this debate. These are greedy people just speculatively buying stuff without any real interest. It has created all kinds of negative effects like shotgun domain bidding, poaching, pricing bubble, artificial scarcity, ID theft, the 4chan.org issues mentioned in this article.... need I go on?