Registrars want to control waiting lists

Today, when a domain name expires and the original owner doesn't renew it within some reasonably small period of time, it goes up for grabs. This has created a frenzied and interesting after-market among people who have figured out how to monitor name expiration and capitalize on it. This has spawned a whole sub-culture of companies who will, for a fee, monitor the expirations of domains in which you are interested and use automated techniques to try to insure you grab them up the instant they're available.

Now, the folks who run the domain name business, who are called registrars, want to create waiting lists rather than having this lucrative business in the hands of entrepreneurial companies. There's been a bit of a hue and cry over this notion that "domain names will never expire." In point of fact, it's just not a big deal. The only real impact I can see is that the process will now end up in the hands of a smaller number of companies who have yet to prove that they're very good at much that they do. This may be disruptive and inefficient, but good domain names don't expire now, in effect, because of the crowd of speculators flocking around them in virtual space waiting for them to die.

Last update: 11/13/02; 2:12:29 PM.