I read about them this morning and there are basically two shapes. The keepers of .info or other new-as-of-the-new-millennium top level domains can subjectively price up never registered names they think are special. The other, more interesting shape is simply a domain name that someone already owns having a fat price tag. This squatter-controlled variant is interesting to me because I just realized this week that its shape has changed a little bit. It used to be that when you went to register.com or Network Solutions or GoDaddy or wherever to try to buy decanet.com that you would just be told that someone already owns it and then you could use the whois lookup stuff to figure out who owned it. Also, you might be able to just go to decanet.com and see a ceremonial web page advertising for how one might buy the domain name. Anyhow, the ceremonial web page is still there, but the registry stuff behaves differently. Instead of being told at the registry that "it's taken" you are told "it's available" and when you hit their shopping cart to try to checkout your socks are blown off (forgive the cliché (who came up with "socks are blown off" anyways?)) by the price tag. How is that possible? Apparently there are now tools that facilitate this for domain name squatters that registries honor. Arguably this is just greasing the wheels of capitalism. It probably helps average Joe by just dropping the price tag to an acceptable floor in lieu of there being some bidding and negotiations back-and-forth.
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