Yeah, it's frustrating. There's a domain that I wanted, and the guy who's got it has been squatting on it for years and years. So I contacted him about it about 3 years ago and he said:

"Thank you for your interest. The web site is under extensive development and is not for sale. Only a (1) public company or (2) private company with sales in excess of $5B would be considered."

First of all, that website looks the same now as it did 10 years ago. So I'm not sure what "extensive development" means. And second of all, why would it be any of his concern whether my company is public or makes $5B in sales?

That really rubbed me the wrong way. I'd rather just get back a ridiculous number that I'm obviously not going to pay.

If it's a good domain, you're certainly not the only one who contacted him about the domain just out of curiosity. He's getting a lot of emails about it.

If he did what you suggest and replied to everyone with a ridiculous price -- "Hi, USD 20 million, ok?" -- then he'd just get a second wave of emails from people trying to haggle:

"That's outrageous! The domain is worth $100k maximum. I'll pay you $2k and give you 0.1% equity in my awesome startup. Deal?"

And if he doesn't reply to that, then the person will send another email with the worthless offer slightly tweaked, and so on... So he's better off setting a precondition that prevents the pointless replies, basically "I'll talk to you only if you have a legal department with more than 20 people."

It's honestly not that good of a domain though. I don't think it's worth $100k. Maybe $10k, although I'm not about to spend that much on a domain (but maybe someone will).

Anyway, good luck to him. I hope when he is ready to sell his domain there is someone looking to buy it for the kind of money he's expecting.

Why be bitter about something you missed because you weren't around back then? Manhattan was acquired by some Dutch guys for a handful of guilders back in 1626... That wasn't the end of real estate business.

Every era has its own opportunities. You should look around for stuff that's happening now, instead of looking back to what you might have done in 1993.

Real property isn't quite the same. With real property the owners have to pay taxes based on the land value which incentivizes owners to make use of the land.

With a short domain name, the owners waste the short name for the cheap price of domain registration ($20 max?).

That $20 is still a tax, albeit small.

The problem with the idea of charging parked domains is that defining what is "parked" is hard, and can easily be gamed.

I often have the opposite experience: there is a surprisingly large number of available good domains out there. With the proliferation of relaxed TLDs (.tv, .io, .ly etc, and now even more with the new arbitrary TLDs) domain squatting looks like a much less profitable activity than it was in the 90s.