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Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase

namecheap.com

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Re: Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase

#211

Post by davewashere »

monetus wrote: post #60
CameronNemo wrote: post #2

How is this anything but rent seeking on the part of Verisign? Edit: not surprised how this got regulatory approval... https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/09/website-domain-more...

“I think calling them a monopoly at this point is an unfair comparison. Verisign is no more a monopoly than your Ford dealer is a monopoly,” Redl said. “It’s not the original days of the internet where that was the only top-level domain.” It is bothers me that the monopoly is excused this way.

"Companies that don’t want to pay Verisign’s price hikes can choose an address ending in .biz or .info, for example."

A real-life "we have TLDs at home" from someone who has probably never seen the related meme.

Re: Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase

#212

Post by willio58 »

CameronNemo wrote: post #2

How is this anything but rent seeking on the part of Verisign? Edit: not surprised how this got regulatory approval... https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/09/website-domain-more...

Yep, digital landlord that should be abolished from the system.

Re: Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase

#213

Post by donmcronald »

schemescape wrote: post #175
donmcronald wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say .com, .net, and .ca if you happen to live in Canada. > I’d also like to use a TLD that is unlikely to be bought by private equity (I vaguely recall this being attempted with a popular TLD). That was Ethos Capital and .org IIRC. They’ve managed to acquire two major registry operators [1]. A huge number of the new gTLDs are under that umbrella. The new gTLDs are a great idea, but (IMO) the poor management a…

Thanks! Why .net? It seems to be owned by Verisign but isn’t as critical as .com, so probably more likely to be exploited.

I don’t know this for sure without looking it up, but I include .net because I think .net and .com are both using a legacy registry agreement. Everything else uses a new agreement that has fewer protections for registrants. For example, there are no price caps on the new gTLDs IIRC.

Re: Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase

#214

Post by Ms-J »

CameronNemo wrote: post #172
Ms-J wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a problem with domain registration when I purchased a .com and they asked for all kinds of business licenses and asking what the purpose of the domain is. Obviously I was shocked as they have no right to ask for the purpose of the domain and I explained that this was not for a business but for a privately administered website. My registration was being denied again after back and forth with support, without…

Did you accidentally register as a business instead of an individual? I can't imagine why that happened, but I can say that my registrations have never been flagged and have always been straightforward.

No, not a business.

Re: Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase

#215

Post by zamadatix »

midasuni wrote: post #176
ivanhoe wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you run a successful restaurant paying for "protection" to mobsters is a negligible cost to keep your business running (and your kneecaps not broken), but that doesn't make the racketeering acceptable...

If you run a successful restaurant and the landlord hikes your rent you can hardly move town. Yes it’s rent seeking. It’s also the way capitalism works.

There are some differences in the regulation of DNS assignments and real estate that makes this comparison not as direct as it may have been intended. Namely who can own the assets and if they are transferable. In real estate both of these lean much more on the open side, creating market forces which allows capitalism to work. Even if you yourself don't own property in e.g. NYC there is more than one investment company looking to buy and sell in NYC. In DNS these assignments enforce a system of renting and registry lock in. There is little room for capitalism to do its thing when avenues for competition are removed in this way.

Even seeming outs such as "invest in a gTLD" don't provide the opportunity. Aside from being the virtual equivalent of "why don't you just go build your hair salon 50 miles out of town where nobody owns anything yet for 1,000x the cost of a building in town?" gTLDs require being a well established organization, among other eligibility requirements, which creates a bit of a chicken and egg problem.

Both do have a 3rd component of "group good overhead" but the IANA fees of ~18 cents don't seem to be the problem so there's no sense in comparing/contrasting these differences.

Re: Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase

#216

Post by PascalW »

echelon wrote: post #183
agwa wrote: post #161

Namecheap's current .com renewal price of $14.58 is broken down as: $0.18 ICANN fee $8.97 Verisign's current registry fee $5.43 Namecheap's markup Namecheap's new .com renewal price of $15.88 will be broken down as: $0.18 ICANN fee (no change) $9.59 Verisign's new registry fee (7% increase) $6.11 Namecheap's new markup (13% increase) So the price increase is not entirely "out of [Namecheap's] control". They are also…

Namecheap should use some of this new revenue to fix their UI. Owning more than 10 domains on Namecheap is a burden. Trying to manage more than 50 is an outright headache [1]. I'm nearly to the point where I'm going to transfer all of my domains just to escape the poor management console. I've been giving them this same complaint for awhile [2]. I'm no fan of Godaddy [3], but they really did a good job with bulk mana…

Have you considered managing DNS records with Terraform or Pulumi? That way you can easily automate (bulk) changes.

Edit: this is possible with Namecheap as well, see https://registry.terraform.io/providers/namecheap/namecheap/....

Re: Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase

#217

Post by donmcronald »

Vox_Leone wrote: post #130
kwanbix wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are mixing domain registration with shared hosting. Did you ever have a problem with domain registration?

>Did you ever have a problem with domain registration? Recently, I painstakingly created a five-letter domain name, and researched extensively to see if it was already taken [I don't use registrar lookup and advise you not to either]. I verified that it was totally free and unpublished. When using the namecheap control panel to register it, I was advised that it was a "premium" domain [why thanks!] and that, therefor…

> When using the namecheap control panel to register it, I was advised that it was a "premium" domain [why thanks!] and that, therefore, I would have to pay a corresponding amount.

The registry sets those premium prices, not the registrar (aka Namecheap).

Re: Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase

#218

Post by kristopolous »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #146
kristopolous wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the ideals. I'm entertaining the idea that there's a non-asshole way to do domain brokering that's more like a store and less like a hostage negotiation. Maybe that's not possible.

What is the point of domain brokering? A company shows up to squat on a domain nobody was using and then extort a premium when someone comes along who actually wants to use it. It's pure useless rent seeking. They add no value to anything, they merely tax the public in exchange for nothing.

that argument can be given to stock trading, art and stamp collecting, and basically any speculative investment. Are you suggesting there should be none of that?

Re: Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase

#219

Post by thayne »

scrollaway wrote: post #197
thayne wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the other TLDs are actually providing competition, and TLDs are fungible, wouldn't that drive the price down, not up?

But TLDs are not fungible. If Apple switched to apple.name or apple.hospital because "it's cheaper" you'd raise more eyebrows than you have.

That's part of my point. Since customers can't actually replace a ".com" domain with a domain from a "competitor" TLD, it isn't actually competition.

If .name was just as good as .com then if verisign increased the price, they would lose customers who would use .name instead. So the fact that verisign can increase the price when .com is _already_ more expensive than other TLDs is evidence that they do have a monopoly.

Re: Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase

#220

Post by schemescape »

donmcronald wrote: post #213
schemescape wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Why .net? It seems to be owned by Verisign but isn’t as critical as .com, so probably more likely to be exploited.

I don’t know this for sure without looking it up, but I include .net because I think .net and .com are both using a legacy registry agreement. Everything else uses a new agreement that has fewer protections for registrants. For example, there are no price caps on the new gTLDs IIRC.

Thank you!
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