I was just poking around looking at some domains today, and checked in on the .com version of this site. I know it’s been squatted on for some time, and I’m always shocked at how much money they’re asking for it. Who else is going to want that domain but me, and who do they really expect is going to pay $7088 for it? That’s crazy.
Is there no way we can fairly determine who is squatting on a domain and make them stop? There’s this whole (I’ll call it) black market of people selling domains that they’re not going to use for anything except to extort money from people who could put them to good use. Apart from BuyDomains.com, there’s that awful site Sedo.com, that encourages regular people to do the same thing. It’s horrible. I have a very low opinion of people that make money this way.
There should be an alternate registrar that disallows this behavior. You should be able to point their DNS servers, and it’ll serve you the address that better applies to that domain. For example, if I’ve registered asymptomatic.net with the regular servers, and my site is deemed to be neither squatter or spammer, then you’d see my site. If I then register asymptomatic.com with this alternate service, they would evaluate the best use of the .com domain - whether it be the existing squatting site or a mirror of my .net content - and then serve the IP address of the server they deem best.
The service could be entirely opt-in. You’d have to change your DNS settings on your computer to use the alternate service. It wouldn’t be like the nasty stuff that Network solutions or Verizon foisted on people to be “helpful” in finding results for typed domains that don’t exist. It would be specifically targeted at dealing with these spammers and squatters. Perhaps the service could even offer some level of configurability so that you could override its choices for specific domains or domains with certain qualities.
Anyway, it’s both amusing and annoying that they’re asking $7k for asymptomatic.com. I’m surely not going to pay for it. Since I’m likely to be their only target buyer, maybe they should put it at a price I would find reasonable. Or maybe I should create a legal entity for my domain name and sue, since I’ve been using this domain far longer than they’ve had asymptomatic.com registered. I think maybe I don’t care quite that much.
