I don't like the way domains work in general. It's really quite expensive if you are wise enough to buy everything that looks to much like your website.
Short-term, it might seem like it would make sense for domain registrations to be permanent, but long-term, it introduces at least two insurmountable problems:
1. Unless some other cleanup mechanism is in place, eventually (like, hundreds of years into the future) domains will need to get longer and longer as people who owned old ones disappear and new people need new ones.
2. The infrastructure costs (while nominal) to keep existing domains functioning would not be sustainable in perpetuity without relying on the assumption of more and more domains always being sold.
1) that has to be the worse case of premature optimization.
2) just solve the puzzle? The existing domain name system was wonderful when it was introduced.
I'll do a crude solution that shouldn't make it to the short list of goodness: Just make the commercial part into a web directory with all registered businesses. Have some of those filters we are now all familiar with. It might even smoothly transition into a product catalog. Sell placement rather than some random name no one will accidentally bump into.
Let's also do a nice tag based web directory for personal websites. Extra points if there is opml
You're also never going to register e.g. xcombinator.* nor is that necessarily a domain which should never be sold on the basis it's similar to ycombinator.*. Rather than buy everything, buy the ones most likely to be accidentally entered for only the most common tlds so you can set up redirects or the like and then enforce and protect your trademark like you have to in any other situation.
Did buy https://ycombinator.us
Didn't buy https://ycombinator.co.uk
https://ycombinator.de
What useful functionality is there in selling these domains?
Expiring domains is bad for the web and selling them to someone else is as terrible as the article makes it out to be.