Verisign, the Mountain View Company that controls, the top level domain name servers for .com and .net announced a small hike in the fees for registering a .com domain. Fees will go up 7% from $6.86 per year to $7.34 per year to register a domain name. While I believe in the open-ness of the Internet and that the playing field gets somewhat leveled for entrepreneurs by making it easy and low cost to create a web site, I think the price of domains should go up to prevent the ridiculous squatting that goes on. I’m not suggesting thousands or even hundreds but how about $25 per year with the proceeds going to groups like the W3C and other bodies to promote the growth of new technologies that we all benefit from. At $25 or even $20 per year you would think a little harder about sitting on 20 domains and would clean your portfolio to the few key ones that you use. Domain’ers would have a hard time hanging on to unused domains for a long period of time and would be forced to send a bunch back to the pool for real entrepreneurs to use to create value.

I also think Google should lessen the importance of the domain name in its search results. Of course, Google doesn’t let anyone know their secret sauce but it does appear they value keywords in the domain name very highly. The content of the page should matter more than the domain.