>That's an improvement. Adding $2 to $5 to the cost of a squatted domain will start to dissuade people who squat on tens of thousands of domains
There's no way static site hosting and a email service costs $2-$5 per year per domain, especially for bulk users. Even if we take that price at face value, a .com domain already costs around $10/year. A 20%-50% increase will only change behavior at the margins. It won't make chat.com magically become available, and at best will make some D tier domains available. Ironically the introduction of gTLDs probably had the same effect. Squatting harrisonburgrealty.com is suddenly going to be less profitable when there's harrisonburg.{realty,realestate,realtor,homes,house,place,properties,rent,apartments} available as well.
To be clear, when I said make it cost more, I was thinking more like taxes. Similar to how we should be taxing vacant homes to raise the cost of keeping empty properties and lower the rents in turn.
There's no way static site hosting and a email service costs $2-$5 per year per domain, especially for bulk users. Even if we take that price at face value, a .com domain already costs around $10/year. A 20%-50% increase will only change behavior at the margins. It won't make chat.com magically become available, and at best will make some D tier domains available. Ironically the introduction of gTLDs probably had the same effect. Squatting harrisonburgrealty.com is suddenly going to be less profitable when there's harrisonburg.{realty,realestate,realtor,homes,house,place,properties,rent,apartments} available as well.