DOMAIN and NAME ownership

I must admit, I am seriously disturbed by some of the practices, both past and present, of most domain companies when it comes to quality .COMs with the word "NAME' or "DOMAIN" in the phrase. For instance, on a recent search I attempted to gain results for the following seemingly innocuous domain prefixes:

nickel, 5, five, 10, ten, dime, 20, twenty, quarter, cheap, hundred, thousand, 101, 15, fifteen, one, 1, two, 2, three, 3, four, 4, six, 6, seven, 7, eight, 8, 9, nine, eleven, 11 (etc etc), low, less, save

often interjecting in the middle of the phrase: buck, dollar, price, cost or number,

before concluding with: name or domain


I came up with 0 available results.



I can surely accept that about 175,000 clowns as stupid as I am went out and bought these domains and did nothing with them over the past 10 years, but I wish it was the case! The reality is that all these domains belong to...
Sedo, Enom, Afternic and WildWest
Now why isn't that surprising?

Of course things are not so obvious as they seem. Many of these names were picked up by minor speculators over the years and then purchased or kept by the domain companies themselves. Or in the case of WildWest they are simply resellers hawking their wares. Some have even been resold back a forth a few times. But what I noticed as being somewhat illogical is that if you want to start your own "cheap" domain website, let's say 10buckdomains, you'll have to go first to the high-priced domain sellers, and shell out a few thousand for these pretty little gems. Everyone knows that one of the strongest elements in ranking is a name (though easily proven wrong by recent BLOG spammers, more in an upcoming series).


Now I don't want to be a goon and call this the cat standing by the mousehole, but how else are we to interpret this data? Irregardless of how all these companies acquired these domains, their goal is now to keep them at bay. This is quite advantageous because each of these domain names indicate that one can pay less than Sedo or Afternic prices for domains - which is bad competition for those guys!


So who do I get to yell at? Anyone I guess. All I know is that if all the competitive domain names are owned by the four biggest domain resellers, that's unreasonable. The reality is the only way to clear it up is

1) no domain parking allowed for "domain" or "name"
2) no speculating or resale permitted
3) no ownership beyond a small percentage of "premium" names for the large domain houses

4) forced expiration rules with no allowance for registries to renew or hold

Unlikely that anything will happen but I have posted and thus it is so.