Aggression surfacing.(change from petition to rant.)
October 20, 2007 –I feel webmasters and aspiring Internet start ups are being cut off at the knees by companies that buy up viable .COMs .NETs .ORGs and so on, only to hold them ransom. The price of a .COM from for example joker.com is easily overcome by most start ups. But when a “kid in a basement” has a good idea, the programming skills, and he has hosting for free or cheep, he only needs his domain. He thinks up for example http://www.freenlegal.com/ (I use this only as an example, it is one of my unfinished projects.) but when he gets to the domain he sees a price tag that is hundreds of times that of the generic domain registration services like Joker.com , or even worse he sees banners and pop-ups that have nothing to do with the domains name.
This is a loss for us all. He could have given us a fun and inspiring site with actual content that could bring the evolution of the Internet forward. (A couple of examples of that happening Google.com and Facebook.com) with the right, easy to remember domain his idea could have been big. Now he is forced to use a mangled domain name or a sub domain (ex. of sub domains http://freenlegal.wordpress.com or http://freenlegal.sier.no) if not a domain that is way off topic that could suit another project much better.
A good start up only needs a good idea and a good domain. These parking businesses are about as much help for the future community furthering as Jack Thompson and his “blame computer games first” movement, Ted Stevens and his series of tubes knowledge of the Internet in his less then trivial position ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes ) these sorts of people stop creativity, they stop YOU from doing your best, they stop YOU from exploring your potential to the fullest.
I’m afraid we can’t change the open market on how .COMs are distributed and I’m not sure that would be a good idea. With this petition I want to show these companies what they are doing and that they are a menace and a burden on the Internet, the creative process, and as earlier stated a burden on the future evolution of the Internet.
Want to read more ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_parking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_warehousing
It started when I wanted to buy this domain… BlogYourBook.com
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