domain squatting is evil.

wow i hate all of you people that purchase sites, put up stupid advertisement packages, and sit around waiting fo someone to purchase your domain. some examples of such detestable low-lifes: punk!, sucker! – does anyone else find this maddening?

and it so happens that our “do no evil” friends are pretty much enabling this little shady economy with AdSense for Domains.

i’m thinking about building this little travel site, and all of the domains i want are gone. all of them. i have spent like 2 hours trying to think of increasingly insane domain names and all of them are already registered.

having spent much of the past two years studying economics, i am reminded of the classic $10 bill story: economist and normal person walk down the street. normal person: hey look! $10! economist: that’s not really $10 or otherwise it would already be gone. hahahaha. sorta. point of the story: the principle of arbitrage means that efficient markets always correct themselves instantly. any good domain has already been registered. this is why so-called “web2.0″ have crazy nonsensical names like like trippr and zoho and buxfer and squidoo and yubnub that may well lead to the downfall (or maybe evolution, if you’re optimistic) of the english language when they good ones become verbs.

i’m trying to think about the analogy to the wild west. i mean i guess that people would move west and stake a claim and establish ownership. but you to do so would require putting your crap in a wagon and traveling for a year across rugged lands. (in economics one would call these “transaction costs”) now you plunk down $1.99 and you own it.