My New Domain and Thoughts on Domain Squatters

I finally purchased http://www.cansar.com after a very long and extremely painful process but I’m excited to finally have it. It’s really my fault for not having done so years ago since I’ve been thinking about it since I started using the Internet and just never judged it to be important enough. By the time I did, it was already gone.

I want to keep this post short but do want to say that I find domain name squatting to be a HUGE and unnecessary barrier to operating on the Internet – there is already enough competition between people with legitimate claims to the same domain, and domain name squatters only make things worse and don’t help anyone. Yearly domain name fees were set low to make them affordable for almost anyone (generally around $10) but as a result they were also cheap enough for squatters to buy them by the hundreds or even thousands. The current domain name system favors those who entered very early, bought as much as they could grab at the beginning and could then forced everyone else to buy from them. Since they are the only seller of the product they can get extremely high prices if they find buyers who want a particular domain enough. Markets don’t work very well when there is little substitutability between products and the supply of each product is constant at 1.

To the person who sold me this domain, I hope you enjoy your money, and I hope you find someway to contribute to society in a more useful way instead of creating obstacles to the rest of us. I would have much rather donated that money to charity to see it go to waste on you.