Adventures in Domain Name Registration
The Domain Squatting Queen
Okay, so here comes the first rant for this brand new blog – so hold on to your hats dear readers (yes, both of you).
When I was trying to register an appropriate domain name for this blog, I encountered the same samba dance of annoying issues I always have when registering a new domain name:
1) Type in the name I came up with – after having one of those light bulb moments – at my favorite registrar. One obvious thing to try for this blog in particular was MichaelHawkins.com.
2) See that the domain in questions was of course already taken, so out of pure curiosity I wanted to see who might have registered it…
3)…ended up looking at a generic webpage loaded with various ads and link suggestions for what “I might want to have a look at” when searching for something Hawkins-related – Grrr! And after leaving that abomination of a page I am greeted by at least one annoying popup with even more ads – double GRRRR!
4) Encountered the same three steps mentioned above with a handful of other good domain names I could think of at the time.
In a least a few of the cases, there was also some kind of offer somewhere on the page I ended up checking out, asking if I perhaps wanted to buy this domain. Presumably at a much higher price point than I pay with my ordinary domain registrar.
I normally won’t criticize other people’s ways of making a living, but this practice annoys me to the point of thinking that this kind of trade with domain names should be outlawed right now. If you don’t actually need a domain for a website now in or at least in the foreseeable future, why should you be allowed to register it? I believe some people have aptly named this as “domain squatting”.
On a side note: the same cute girl in the photo used in this post appear on some of the typical squatted domains you will come across. It is just a stock photo, so I certainly would not hold it against her. 
If you want to go ahead and register companyname.com as well as companyname.net, companyname.co,uk and all the others and redirect all of them to your company’s website – fine. I completely understand why someone would do that.
But figuring out domain names that people will probably want in the future, buying up a large stock of those and then selling them expensively is more or less conning people out of their money. Some domain names like sex.com and america.com can be worth an absolutely insane amount of money. If you don’t believe me check out this article in The Boston Globe.
Trust me, I understand how someone might think that this kind of business practise is a really smart idea and I can see arguments drawing parallels to buying stock or real estate coming from a mile away.
But I still won’t budge – I plain don’t like this phenomenon.
OTR what…?!
On the lighter side of things I thought I would say a few words about the domain name i DID end up using for this blog. “Hawkins” is of course an obvious choice. But “otr”, was that really such a stellar choice?
I don’t know – what do you think?
According to the acronyms section of The Free Online Dictionary, OTR can stand for quite many different things. For example:
Old Time Radio
On The Road
Over The Rainbow
On the Rag
One Touch Recording
Other Than Rock
etc.
Although I quite fancy that last one in the above list, my intended use of the OTR abbreviation is “Off The Record”. I chose this because, alongside the articles based on solid research, I intend to write some posts that will be based purely on my own opinions – like this one.
Photo Credit: RichieC under a CC licence.
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