Ownership costs of the domain names is certainly NOT the correct tool control the problem of domain squatting. Some players like rich individuals or big companies will still have enough wealth to squat as many domains as they like. Meanwhile, others with legitimate needs like citizens of low-income countries and small enterprises, will be priced out of the market.
Keep in mind that domain names aren't used just for naming web sites or services. It's a distributed metadata distribution system with several other uses like mail server config, numerous TXT record types, WKD etc. If you take the stance that only the affluent should be allowed to access those services, it will defeat the purpose of the entire system.
The real problem with the DNS is that its design makes it amenable to economic exploitation. It's true that the system takes economic resources to maintain. I'm fine with paying that cost and don't believe that it would make domain names unaffordable. But ICANN and the others are certainly demonstrating increasingly rent seeking behavior lately.
In my country's TLD there were a lot of domains that were parked when it was free to register and then they became available.
PoW is a great proven way to combat fraud also.
Right now attackers can create a new domain and a new identity for 10USD, whether a phishing domain or a malicious brand.
That said, there's a lot of TLDs nowadays, and arguably what made .com popular was this precise price combination, which should only be adjusted for inflation, and arguably to adjust for exhaustion of names.
If you want to experiment with TLDs with higher cost of entry, go ahead and find another TLD, or setup an LLC with your domain and distinguish yourself from your competitors.
You don't NEED to. If a TLD has a bad reputation, like TLDs that sell for less than .COM prices usually have, then you can just block users from those domains entirely.
"Sorry, please use another address".
Odds are you are not missing much from a [email protected] if they couldn't spend 10$ in a decent domain.
Wrong, with large userbases you're going to lose business doing that, many real businesses using novelty TLDs, at least in the industry I'm working in now. Plus I think it should be illegal from an net neutrality perspective to treat different TLDs differently and to outright deny service.
> Wrong, with large userbases you're going to lose business doing that, many real businesses using novelty TLDs
Yes, a security filtering system can have false positives. Can't get them all.
> "Plus I think it should be illegal from an net neutrality perspective "
This is what you would say if your only conception of law comes from reading stuff on the internet about the internet. I don't think you've had much legal training.
I think in the US they call it right to refuse service. It's not a law per-se but rather a right businesses have unless prohibited by other reasons. One such reason being discrimination of protected classes, like races, sexuality, gender. But they need to be one of the specific classes protected by law, you can discriminate against small businesses for example, that's just business.
