On Fri, 28 Jun 2019 at 14:43, Karl Auerbach <karl@cavebear.com> wrote:

In other words, over a period of nearly 35 years of business we have not
found domain name speculators an impediment to our business.

Here's another, anecdotal datapoint: I have been involved in the Internet for nearly as long. But it's been helping family, friends, small businesses, colleges, religious institutions, and refugees in camps. I've worked with entrepreneurs both new and established, struggling to make a presence on the Internet and finding that their first 20 choices were only available at an aftermarket premium. The result is that they either had to:

change their brand name to suit the available names (this has happened more than once)
agonize over whether to settle for a domain name using hyphens
pay a lesser premium in a new TLD they don't know is fully reachable
resign themselves to having a non-memorable (ie, shitty) domain and using other strategies to lead people to them.

I have seen all four scenarios in play.

That's reality not faced 35-year insiders.

The "it works for me, therefore it's not a problem" attitude sucks when I call tech support and it's not very useful here either.

Do we really want to impose what is in essence a $Billion+ tax on the internet every year in the form of fiat registry fees above costs in order to fight some chimera of speculation?

Based on the scenario you described, heck yeah I'm fine with that. I'd prefer that the proceeds went towards public education (ie, the diff between a gTLD and ccTLD) and abuse prevention, but that's a nit. It's like asking me if I have a problem with increased tax on cigarettes, ammunition, or carbon.

- Evan