It frustrates me that domain names were designed to be a rival good, and that this has attracted so much attention from speculators, and the negative externalit

It frustrates me that domain names were designed to be a rival good, and that this has attracted so much attention from speculators, and the negative externalities that come out of that. I'm not sure what would be a good solution here. The existing design of domain names does have one important property, though. When someone successfully registers a name, they're guaranteed that they can pay a renewal fee - small, all things considered - and keep the name as long as they want - perhaps modulo legal and ToS concerns. This gives them assurances that they can invest into the branding of the name and keep the benefits. Compare that with search engine results. I mentioned elsewhere in this thread that I watched numerous non-technical users treat their browser nav bar as a name resolution mechanism - effectively delegating name resolution to their default search engine. Search engine results should change over time. If someone starts a FooBar Inc. in one industry, and someone else starts a bigger FooBar Corp. in another, who gets the "foobar" name? A sort of "pin on first use" would save existing users of FooBar Inc. New users trying to find FooBar Inc. might get confused though. FooBar Inc. would understandably be hesitant to print the "foobar" petname on their business cards and billboards.