This is very common with these new TLD's. At least they didn't give it to you for a year then jack up the price. I had jacki.party as a fun domain for my wife that she didn't end up using, but after a year the price went from like $29/yr to $2,495/yr. because they decided it was "premium." There was nothing my registrar could do because it was the domain registry who decided that, so I just let it lapse. Why is a ver…
What registry was this? That's not supposed to be possible -- registries are only supposed to be able to designate domains as "premium" if they aren't registered yet.
This is very common with these new TLD's. At least they didn't give it to you for a year then jack up the price. I had jacki.party as a fun domain for my wife that she didn't end up using, but after a year the price went from like $29/yr to $2,495/yr. because they decided it was "premium." There was nothing my registrar could do because it was the domain registry who decided that, so I just let it lapse. Why is a ver…
Yikes. Just extended my lastn.ame domain hack to 2026.
I've never understood why some random company is allowed to arbitrate the domain registration and make $$$ out of it. Feels like it's kinda not in the spirit of the internet.
Say you owned ensiferum.com. Should you be allowed to sell subdomains and make money out of it? That's really all they are doing.
"Perhaps it's not fair to call this bait & switch. Really it was bait & refund"
The article title was a bait and switch! Honestly, I don't know much about the domain registration business but I had always imagined it worked even suckier than the way he describes it working in this case.
As a fellow very-common-name sufferer, I long ago gave up any hope of getting a vanity domain name (how I wish I had paid the $25 back in 1996). Most of the new TLD seem pretty scammy to me, the costs in obtaining and running most obscure TLDs far outweigh what could be got by paying customers actually waiting to run sites off them. I suspect that a lot of them are just hoping that enough large companies buy up kfc.b…
That's exactly it. Brand protection companies like MarkMonitor will buy these up as a matter of course to protect their clients, and they'll do so at the inflated Early Access rates to boot. By the time the domains are released to the public, these companies have already made their profit.
At one point even their clients will realize that the value of owning {name}.{everything} is more finite than the number of possible values for {everything}. When this happens, TLD racketeers will be sitting on a well oiled money burning machine, because only few of those who are attracted by that kind of business are good at keeping expenses low in times of plenty. The end game for many squatting-TLDs will be an existential pricing standoff between the dying registrar and the very low number of users that were foolish enough to build a long term identity in one of its namespaces.
It is a complete state-sponsored racket. There's no way around it. You pay an upfront fee to ICANN and probably some kind of recurring tax and you get to create a TLD. You then sell this TLD for higher prices than ICANN and run a very simple service that processes the transactions. You then take anything lower than a 5 or 6 letter domain that is a word in the english language and define it as a "premium" domain and c…
I have a last name that's extremely uncommon. MyLastName.com was available for many, many years. I thought about buying it a few times in the last 20 or so years but I don't have any use for it so I didn't. Two years ago it was bought by a domain squatter who was probably iterating through the white pages. Now that I can't have it I want it (I guess human nature) but they are asking like $2k for it. It seems somehow…
mylastname.com was already gone in 1999, so I had to settle for mylastname.net. Too bad it didn't occur to me to secure it in 1996.
If Tucows is willing to sell they certainly aren't publicizing it.
DNS is a rotten system. From censorship, to ddos attacks, to squatting, to privacy issues with whois, to messed up financial incentives. It's a shame that DNS is a critical part of the internet infrastructure. We should work on getting rid of it.
Namecoin is probably the largest, and provides .bit. IPFS has IPNS, but that is just subdirectories of a user hash, there is no pretty naming there.
There is also tech like what is behind .onion, where you can generate names until you get one you like, where you can devote more resources to getting prettier names at the cost of electricity and hardware to do so.
What is the long-term security/availability of those new tlds?
If I register a .de domain today I am pretty sure that it will last a long time. But some of the new ones have a pretty sketchy vibe to it and I am not sure if I'd trust them enough to build a business on top of a .fancy domain