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There are many obstacles when you start up a business. When you start up an online-business your domain name is crucial. Imagine starting a store in some distant industrial area far away from downtown. Sure, you will probably get a couple of customers, but you’ll have to work hard on promoting yourself. You cannot really expect people to just walk into you store because they see you from the sidewalk.

The same thing goes with a domain name. If you have a really long and hard-to-spell domain name, you cannot expect people to just stumble into your website. Sure, some people might know about it through advertisement, and bookmark it, but your customers will be quite limited. In addition to this, it is not very likely that people will remember you address, and promote it by word of mouth.

So what is the catch? Why is it so hard for an Internet-startup to just get a really short and catchy domain name like google.com, myspace.com or facebook.com? Is it really that hard to come up with a catchy name like that?

The answer is no. Coming up with a name is the easy part. A half year ago when Alex and I were starting to make plans for starting up a company we started to brainstorm for a cool and catchy name. This was when we discovered the real catch – finding an available domain name.

I don’t know how many hours we spent on instantdomainsearch to find a both available and catchy domain name. This is when we realized something: the biggest parasites on the Internet are the domain-traders. Sure, you can probably find an available .org, .us or something like that, but if you’re a company you want both the .com and .net.

Why? It’s simple. What these companies do for a living is just to buy up random domain names that someone or some company will be desperate enough to buy for the insane price they are asking for. Sure, this doesn’t sound like a big problem, but I can assure you that it is. Just go to instantdomainsearch and try to type in any letter combination of less than 5 characters, it doesn’t even need to be a word. Is it taken? Sure. Just try to come up with some catchy name of less than 10 characters, and I can almost guarantee you that it is taken.

Well, you might think, maybe it is just some company that bought this domain, because the were about to launch a product by that name. Not very likely. If you look at most of the results you are likely to find either an empty page, a page full with banners or a redirection to a domain-trader.

This is the reason why I argue the domain-traders as the biggest parasites on the Internet. I would not say that they’re worse than pedophiles and that kind of parasites, but from a business point of view, these are the worst. Imagine how more useful these domains could be used if it wasn’t for the domain-traders. Personally I think that the domain-registration should be more conservative.

I know until a few years ago, you needed to have a company or product connected to the domain you applied for in order to get a .se-domain. I still don’t know why they took this limitation away. I think .com should have been restricted for companies, and nothing else. However, that’s a bit too late to change now.

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