The Toll-Keepers of the Invisible Bridge

There is a specific type of person who believes that “getting there first” is a substitute for actually having an idea. On the internet, they just buy up every combination of the alphabet and wait for someone with a pulse and a project to come along.

When I started Feature Creeps, I naturally went to see if the domain was available. It was… sort of.

Someone had “captured” featurecreeps.com. They weren’t using it to host a manifesto or even a gallery of cat photos. It was just sitting there, a digital parking lot with a “For Sale” sign that read: $3,500.

Now, $3,500 is a lot of money for twelve letters. It’s the price of a decent computer, or a wheel of really good cheese. To ask that much for a URL you didn’t even bother to put a website on is a special kind of audacity. It’s the business model of a barnacle: you don’t actually help the ship move; you just cling to the hull and hope the captain pays you to go away.

The punchline, of course, is the hyphen.

By the simple, revolutionary act of hitting the - key, I secured feature-creeps.com for about $15.

I saved over three thousand dollars by acknowledging the existence of punctuation. The squatter is still sitting on their “premium” digital dirt, waiting for a payday that will likely never come, while I have a place to write.

Look, I know this is nothing new. Domain squatting is as old as the web itself, and in the grand scheme of tech industry sins, it’s probably somewhere near the bottom of the list. It’s fine, really. The world keeps turning. But it is a small, persistent reminder that even the simplest corners of our industry are cluttered with people trying to extract a tax on things they didn’t actually build and they detract instead of contribute.