I posted a similar question a couple of days ago here:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058437" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058437</a><p>I'm curious how much it really matters.  I can see it being a big deal for email, but for organic traffic I'm not convinced.  Most domain squatters don't have anything up on the site, have a adsense landing page or something extremely outdated.  Assuming your site has even mild success, your search engine ranking will be much, much higher.  Sadly, the email issue is probably a show-stopper.<p>Also, I don't think a lot of people actually type the domain in the address bar.  They're either clicking a link or searching.<p>The real question here is, can you pull a dropbox?  Trademark the name, launch your site, get popular, then just take away the .com if the owner somehow infringes on your mark.  Is this a valid precedent or do you have to have boat-loads of cash to actually make this work?<p>In any case, it's probably just easier to choose a different name.  I just emailed someone yesterday about a .com domain name and he wanted $20k.  Seems like the dropbox method might be easier.