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Price increase on .com domain names starting September 1, 2021

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Re: Price increase on .com domain names starting September 1, 2021

#31

Post by mulmen »

vecinu wrote: post #17
mulmen wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Namesquatting has the effect of increasing prices so, no, there is no price at which namesquatting would be disincentivized. In fact the higher the prices the more appealing it becomes to our friends on wall street. > Is there a price level at which the nerds say "fuck this" and create new domain roots without ICANN? One without ICANN but what about namesquatting?

> becomes to our friends on wall street. Perhaps I'm misremembering but domain squatting was an issue for the last 20 years. Before "wall street" got a hold, I'm sure regular people like you and me just bought domains and sat on them for a while. I know I used to try and guess which domains to buy and hold for some time but by the time I figured it out, those domains were already reserved. It was also us engineers th…

I invoked Wall Street because the capital involved right now probably isn’t worth their time. When domains cost 4+ figures from the registrar then maybe it’s worth paying attention to.

This is all a response to the question of what point squatting is too expensive to continue. I submit that it can’t be.

Re: Price increase on .com domain names starting September 1, 2021

#32

Post by mdonahoe »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #30

Two of the websites I use everyday do not even require a domain name. I just use the IP address. With the rise of shared hosting especially driven by added costs of https, it's not possible to use IP address with most sites today but it's sure nice to be free from the ICANN DNS cartel and to not have to run DNS software. Before long, I have the addresses memorised. I never try to memorise them, it just happens automa…

Are you using https?

Re: Price increase on .com domain names starting September 1, 2021

#33

Post by Kye »

sleavey wrote: post #28
ericd wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the huge amount of domain camping implies that .com could stand to be a whole lot more expensive to hold and do nothing with. If you're using it for something important, $20/yr probably isn't going to break the bank. If anything, I think it should be much more.

> $20/yr probably isn't going to break the bank 13 year old me would disagree. A .co.uk domain at the time was if I recall correctly about £5/year, equivalent to a week's wages from my paper round. A .com was around £12-15/year which I found too expensive. I learned a lot hacking around with DNS, subdomains, etc. and I wouldn't want to price today's kids out of doing the same. Saying that, back then there were only a…

I'm surprised no one has given Namezero's concept another try.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/namezero

There's probably ways to monetize now that aren't trivially bypassed with a line of JavaScript. Think CloudFlare and their app injections. New Namezero could require you to use their ad-injecting/enforcing nameserver.

Re: Price increase on .com domain names starting September 1, 2021

#34

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

mdonahoe wrote: post #32
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #30

Two of the websites I use everyday do not even require a domain name. I just use the IP address. With the rise of shared hosting especially driven by added costs of https, it's not possible to use IP address with most sites today but it's sure nice to be free from the ICANN DNS cartel and to not have to run DNS software. Before long, I have the addresses memorised. I never try to memorise them, it just happens automa…

Are you using https?

Yes.

Re: Price increase on .com domain names starting September 1, 2021

#35

Post by NathanielWest »

ryantgtg wrote: post #15
mulmen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the fact that the practice continues suggests to me that someone is spending the money. But I don't know of any examples.

It could also indicate that it’s relatively cheap to sit on domains for 20 years, patiently waiting for someone to pony up. It’s not like valuable domains are more expensive to renew.

then maybe it should be forbidden to renew domain if you haven't use it for a year instead of increasing prices for everyone, how convenient for domain registrars

Re: Price increase on .com domain names starting September 1, 2021

#36

Post by nostrademons »

mulmen wrote: post #9
ohazi wrote: post #4

Is there a price level that would noticably reduce the prevalence of namesquatting? Maybe at $100 or $1000? Is there a price level at which the nerds say "fuck this" and create new domain roots without ICANN?

Namesquatting has the effect of increasing prices so, no, there is no price at which namesquatting would be disincentivized. In fact the higher the prices the more appealing it becomes to our friends on wall street. > Is there a price level at which the nerds say "fuck this" and create new domain roots without ICANN? One without ICANN but what about namesquatting?

Doesn't follow.

Namesquatting, ticket scalping, house flipping, Amazon book reselling, quant trading, etc. are all forms of arbitrage. There exist buyers who are willing to pay significantly more than sellers are willing to accept. Somebody gets to the seller first, buys the good, sits on it, and waits for one of these high-demand buyers to show up, then charges them the maximum that they're willing to pay.

If the seller just raised their prices, there would be no profit for the arbitrager. They would capture all the consumer surplus and deal directly with the buyer. If Gandi charged $1B for a .com domain, nobody's going to namesquat - they'd lose too much on the common English words to make it up from the major corporations.

I suspect a lot of the problem is the extreme power law in how much people are willing to pay for domains. Dropbox.com or Facebook.com is a bargain at $1M for DropBox and Facebook, but nobody is going to pay $1M for their personal homepage, and few local businesses are going to shell out more than a grand for a restaurant domain name. That indicates that perhaps some better pricing system (auctions?) is required. $16.99 is way low for a business domain name though.

Re: Price increase on .com domain names starting September 1, 2021

#37

Post by gen3 »

ericd wrote: post #8
orra wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's incredibly fucked up. The .com contract needs to go out to tender.

I think the huge amount of domain camping implies that .com could stand to be a whole lot more expensive to hold and do nothing with. If you're using it for something important, $20/yr probably isn't going to break the bank. If anything, I think it should be much more.

It currently costs me 3x$8.18 a year to renew my personal domain, my parents, and a hobby site. It will cost me $409ea over the next 50 years. $1200 vs $3000 isn’t nothing to me.

Re: Price increase on .com domain names starting September 1, 2021

#38

Post by charlus »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #30

Two of the websites I use everyday do not even require a domain name. I just use the IP address. With the rise of shared hosting especially driven by added costs of https, it's not possible to use IP address with most sites today but it's sure nice to be free from the ICANN DNS cartel and to not have to run DNS software. Before long, I have the addresses memorised. I never try to memorise them, it just happens automa…

That's remarkable to me - I feel like my internet life hasn't been so sheltered not to come across this before, but it also feels so obvious in retrospect. Do share some examples if you don't mind.

Re: Price increase on .com domain names starting September 1, 2021

#39

Post by Someone1234 »

marto1 wrote: post #14
mot2ba wrote: post #3

It's not going to end. Verisign was allowed to increase the wholesale price to registrars for .COM domains by 7% each year in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. Edited: in more detail from thread[0] last year: [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22292348

So are we going to see a raise of alternative DNS roots ? Do modern browsers have integrations for something like that ?

Because DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is browser based instead of OS bound, it is actually much easier to have browser instances that point to a different DNS root (or multiple DNS root services).

A lot of people have been very negative about browsers adding DoH but they're missing the big picture: We now have a real opportunity to create competitive roots/new DNS.

Browsers really need to look at allowing multiple DoH connections concurrently that resolve different namespaces. I'm legitimately surprised this hasn't happened already.

Re: Price increase on .com domain names starting September 1, 2021

#40

Post by CarVac »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #7

Honest question, are people outside the domain squatter economy (squatters and their customers) actually paying for .com domains? I’ve never been able to secure a .com for a project, they are all squatted and being sold at a massive (like 1000x+) markup.

I have both the .com and .org domains for my project Filmulator, though I have .com redirect to .org.

They were not expensive at all.

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