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Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

gandi.net

181–190 of 309 posts

Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

#181
post #15

How do we create an incentive model that kills the “parked domain” industry without out pricing people who want to host a legitimate non-commercial personal site? At first glance I was happy to see the headline because it means it’ll be more expensive for squatters to profit, but then I do sympathize with people using these domains for legitimate non-commercial purposes.

An app, perhaps call it ParkSurfing@Home that does nothing but silently visit parked domains in the background to burn up all their ad revenue without ever clicking on any links, making them completely worthless for advertising purposes.

Wouldn't stop the main issue but it might kick in the rear.

Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one will care what the extension is Only on HN. In the real world, it matters quite a lot. I tried to get a healthcare company to pick up its .health equivalent. The marketing department included the possibility of using the domain in its annual customer survey. The result was that a very large number of patients believed it to be a spam or scam domain.

Even as a competent user myself, I still hesitate when I see a .biz or .info domain. I wouldn't say I trust .com's more, but it's certainly built into my mental checklist when evaluating if something is legitimate. For decades the unconventional cheaper domains were used for spam purposes.

Yep, for those of us who were around in the earlier days of the internet, .biz means low quality at best, spam, popups, and malware at worst.

Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

#183
post #15

How do we create an incentive model that kills the “parked domain” industry without out pricing people who want to host a legitimate non-commercial personal site? At first glance I was happy to see the headline because it means it’ll be more expensive for squatters to profit, but then I do sympathize with people using these domains for legitimate non-commercial purposes.

> How do we create an incentive model that kills the “parked domain” industry without out pricing people who want to host a legitimate non-commercial personal site? The simplest solution would be to revoke domains with domain parking pages on them. If the domain contains an offer to sell the domain, you lose the domain. That wouldn't solve 100% of the problem, but it would solve 80% of the problem, and that's better…

This will only result in more sophisticated parked domain sites. That's what happens to phone numbers - companies buy phone numbers and put whatever trash phone services they can on them just to say "see we're using it for business we've got some pre-recorded phonesex running there".

Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

#184
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think raising the price of TLDs is the only way to stop domain squaters That does not make any sense in any world. If a squatter successfully makes money on a single domain, for example, they can reinvest on dozens or hundreds of domains next and therefore squat as much as they like just the same. And early, lucky squatters always exist. This does not solve anything. You are just pricing out people with legitimat…

It makes sense in this world, you just dislike it. I can buy a domain that costs $50 a year and I can squat on that 40 years until I would be in the loss margin for a $2,000 resell value and $2,000 is minor money for resell values. You make it $200 and then it's only 10-years, 10-years is a long time but not that long if you look at how long some people have been squating on domains. You increase the risk of not maki…

> This talk of outpricing people, people are buying domains for thousands for their pet projects, so let's remain in the world of here and now.

The world of "here and now" would be acknowledging that "thousands of dollars" outprices a significant majority of the world. Even if you take a US-centric view, that's going to outprice the majority of the population.

If you're working at McDonalds for $12/hr with a pet project on the side, a $1,000 domain would take 83 hours of work to pay for. That's two weeks and change of full-time work. You're not going to be able to pay for that while also paying rent and other bills.

Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

#185
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thought is to require all domains be sold for the same set price (or at least constant for each TLD). If someone wants to register 1,000 domains let them, but don't allow them to profit off that. If someone breaks the rule, revoke the domain. I'd like to hear reasons why this is a bad idea so I can stop thinking about it every time I get priced out.

> I'd like to hear reasons why this is a bad idea 1. It is practically impossible to enforce. Maybe exactly the right amount of money changed hands in one transaction, but how do you know there were no other related transactions perhaps via anonymous crypto transfers or entirely off-net (the good 'ol brown envelope full of cash) or by non-monetary exchange (service rendered). 2. It punishes the final buyer, so the sc…

Or the simple method of having a company own the domain, and you sell the company.

Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

#186
Ted from Namecheap here. Donuts, who now operates the .io TLD, is only increasing the wholesale price by ~10%. We are still obviously not happy about this since it's always our goal to ensure that domain pricing is as accessible as possible to our customers.

It would appear that Gandi has just chosen to substantially increase their markup as part of this Donuts update. Our pricing will likely only increase a small amount, if at all.

Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

#187
post #175
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communism is embedded in the core Internet protocols. And "we've" been doing our best to build a capitalist system on top of it ever since. :)

> Communism is embedded in the core Internet protocols. Could you expand on that? People tend to use widely different definitions of "communism" so I'm not sure what you mean by that.

[deleted]

Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

#188

I used to work for a registrar and had the job of connecting up to the registries, who are the entities that ultimately allocate the domain names. (Yeah great naming choice, no chance of those words being confused with each other.) Registrars talk to registries via EPP, an xml based specification. While there is a spec, the registries variously mess it up in odd and interesting ways, all of which I got to discover as…

The .io infrastructure under ICB was indeed quite slow. Everything moved to Afilias (and now Donuts) many years ago though and EPP is quite performant now fortunately.

We deal with a few independent ccTLDs these days that are still horribly unreliable though. Not going to name any names but some of these are quite popular and still either don't run on EPP and/or run on an old outdated server in a local DC.

Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

#189
post #119

Long time buyer of random domains here. Over the years I've heard reports of people trying to get back their ccTLD because they weren't a citizen of that country and had to fight back-and-forth to reclaim their domain, oftentimes handing ownership of the domain over to a trusted citizen of that country so they can keep their domain. This is why I don't build important stuff on a ccTLD and go for generic ones like .cl…

I've been using a .io for several years for primary email and side projects. I'd have about two dozen critical emails to switch of I got booted of .io. I had no idea it was a ccTLD.

Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

#190

The .io TLD is owned by Ethos Capital. The same private equity company that tried to buy the .org TLD a while ago. Go figure...

I think it's pretty sad how the rights for this get sold around, but the territory to which it belongs gets little to no revenue from domain sales. There's an ongoing complaint seeking repatriation of the domain, and I really hope I'm wrong in speculating that nothing will be done about it.

I’m always mind-boggled at the level of acceptance in the industry of clear misuse of ccTLDs. Is having “input/output” in your domain really so cute that it’s worth tying your entire business to an incorrect ccTLD? Especially when we have so many new cute, built-for-purpose geek-cred gTLDs like .dev.
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