Domain names don’t expire in a year. They last forever.
I’ve got a “portfolio” of around 50 domains myself, with only about a quarter of them in active use. The rest? Seemingly good ideas, possibly purchased while drinking, each representing something I had every intention of turning into the Next Big Thing. For at least an hour, anyway.
The problem is, I can’t just let them expire and let someone else have a shot. That’s because when they expire, odds are that they’ll get snapped up into someone else’s portfolio, except in this case it’s more of a traditional portfolio where people believe they’ll make money off it through a more proven model of camping and reselling.
And I don’t really have a problem with the practice. After all, most of the parked domains out there are still available, just at a higher price than you’d get them for at a registrar, and domains that are purchased that way might have a better chance of becoming actual products and services, since the buy-in commitment is higher. It just bums me out a bit that it’s getting harder to fuel my crack-like addiction to off the cuff registrations.
I know I’m not alone, so I’m proposing two developments to help deal with the problem.
The first: a drunk dial plugin. OK, nothing to do with drunk dialing, but inspired by the Gmail option that made you do math questions before sending messages late at night as a secondary “are you sure” mechanism.
This plugin would simply interrupt the registration process with a popup, remind you that by registering the domain, it’s forever, and ask you to make a commitment to actually do something with the idea. This commitment could actually be posted to a public registry where concerned members of the community could check in and audit your progress.
The second: the domain adoption service. There are real-world organizations that you can deed your land to so that when you die, it’s managed by a conservation agency (usually through a conservation easement) and won’t get turned into a mega mall. And of course, there are also real-world adoption agencies for humans. This would blend the two.
If you found yourself with a domain name that you can no longer take proper care of but really wanted someone to take it over who’d make it into something worthwhile, you could pay a small fee to have it transferred to the adoption agency – enough to keep it registered for a few years. Once there, prospective domainers would submit an application for what they want to do with it, certify that they won’t just park it with ads, and then they’d have a set amount of time to actually make good on their proposal before ownership reverts back to the agency.
Funding would come from the transfer fees, “adoption” fees, and probably sponsorship from some of the registrars out there.
Anyway, those are just some ideas I had after the tenth domain idea I looked up in a row came up parked. And realistically, I probably wouldn’t have done much with any of them anyway, which is why I didn’t go out and get domainadoptionservices.com just now (available as of Aug 26 2011.)
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