Here's one, anecdotal, data point: My first internet company went online in the mid 1980's. And our present main company has been on the internet since around 1993. We have a three-letter name in .com. Over that span of time we have never once found that we had to "jump through hoops" to acquire a domain name that was being held by another for speculative purposes. I can't remember that we ever bought a name from a speculator. We have, however, found that our competitors have acquired names similar to our and have picked up names that we have dropped so that they can try to grab customers or, to a decreasing degree, get advertising revenue from residual or stray traffic. I think we once used the UDRP; and we have had recourse to international trademark law. But in the main, we just live with it. We have, of course, had the usual experience of coming up with a name idea and found that someone was already using it. But that's not speculation, that's just a normal course of affairs. In other words, over a period of nearly 35 years of business we have not found domain name speculators an impediment to our business. In fact we've even benefited by selling some of our names to speculators - these were names we obtained to pursue some 3-in-the-morning idea that we abandoned in the light of day. Sometimes these sales were for amounts big enough to buy a Tesla or two. I'm pretty sure that in the long run in most of those instances the speculator lost money. 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? --karl-- On 6/28/19 8:48 AM, John More via At-Large wrote:
+1
Domain name speculation is very destructive since it requires potential users who have real businesses or needs to jump through hoops and often be blocked from a reasonable domain name.