Just here to say that owning a domain name and not doing anything with it only to hold it hostage and sell it for an exorbitant amount should be illegal. It’s a bullshit practice that hurts business.
Paul Graham wrote “Change Your Name” years ago and it wasn’t controversial then either: if you’re a US startup called X and you don’t own x.com, renaming is the cheap fix and waiting is the expensive one. A name you don’t own is a subscription you pay in leaked traffic, in spelling out your domain on every call, and in looking like the knockoff of whoever got there first.
There is always someone who says nobody types domains anymore, and it’s usually someone under 30. True in the same way nobody reads terms of service. It doesn’t mean the document has no consequences. It means they show up later and land on you specifically. The person who has watched their .io get mistaken for the .com next door tends to be quieter in these conversations.
The trust argument also got stronger, not weaker. Anyone can ship anything now, and anyone does, hourly. Someone clicking your link is deciding in about one second whether you’ll exist in six months. A .com is one of the few signals left that costs something to acquire, so it still reads as a real company while a fresh .xyz reads as somebody’s weekend. Not fair, not sophisticated, completely real. You’re declining a free credibility shortcut in the most crowded launch environment ever.
Standard rebuttal: brand beats TLD, distribution lives in app stores, look at all the .ai companies doing fine. Survivorship bias with a great haircut. Most of them bought the .com the moment they could afford it, for a number with commas in it, to fix a problem that cost ten dollars at incorporation.
And the line everyone repeats that isn’t true: “all the good .coms are gone.” About a third of registered .com names have a real site behind them. The rest is parked pages, for-sale placeholders, and squatter inventory nobody has loved in a decade. Tens of thousands drop daily and go back to normal $10 registration. Short, brandable names are in there. They’re just not in auction listings, which is where everyone looks, and auctions are by definition where names already have a price tag. “They’re all taken” usually means “I checked one site.”
Tell me where I’m wrong. Especially interested in anyone who stayed off .com on purpose and can say with a straight face it cost them nothing.
Just here to say that owning a domain name and not doing anything with it only to hold it hostage and sell it for an exorbitant amount should be illegal. It’s a bullshit practice that hurts business.
We were Scirra.com for years, and rebranded to Construct with Construct.net - com not available. It’s been absolutely fine and honestly can’t point to any downsides at all I’m aware of.
Have you tried starting a business and brainstorming the name, checking there's no Delaware corp name nor trademark conflicts, and getting the .com? It's really difficult.