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I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

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Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#41
post #2

Enormous discussion at the time (2021)[0](1683 points, 626 comments) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26422799

I find it amusing thar about a sixth of the comments are on how couples should handle their finances. Nobody could have guessed that.

Also found a comment from myself warning of using this anywhere near Germany (tldr kz stands for concentration camp).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26423117

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#42
post #35
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have more information on this? If you can link to it, that would be great. How much would it cost this time around?

https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/next-round

Thanks for that link, and to (not-)answer GP's question on price:

> "While the application fee has not been determined, it will be set on a cost-recovery basis. The fee will ensure that the next round of the New gTLD Program is fully funded and does not require funds from ICANN's operating budget. As a point of reference, the application fee for the 2012 round of the New gTLD Program was US$185,000."

From the FAQ page for the next round of gTLD sales, via the link shared above: https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and-media/announ...

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#43
post #29
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because like most things blockchains (cl)aim to solve (primarily money and its transfer, but in this case ownership of domain names), those things do not really really have a centralization problem. 99.999% of the people do not, and do not need to worry about getting their domain name seized. cryptobros like to pose centralization as a huge problem where it really isn't so that they can peddle you scamcoins to pump a…

See, this is just dogma that gets repeated on HN. It's obvious to any person who honestly thinks about it, that having a third party in control of your DNS (i.e. what IP addresses it resolves to) means that your entire site can be rugpulled from under you. If it becomes big enough. For example: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/is-njalla-still-legit.1521... Now, you can say, "most people don't care, they just have a…

Your domain name and the site it points to is not the end goal, what the site represents is.

Your domain name is one of the means to get more people to know about you or to deliver your product. Decreasingly relevant, note, as no one types domain names usually (people search).

As more people know about you via various channels (most centralized one way or the other: curated lists, social platforms, search), takeover of your domain name (or any other channel) becomes less of a risk. If you take Coca-Cola’s or Apple’s or Basecamp’s domain, they will barely feel it. Perhaps Basecamp could feel it, as it probably plays a bigger role in delivery, but I am sure they would have a procedure specifically to manage that risk.

99% of the time, if you run an ordinary %product%, should you worry that it will be you vs. the world and all of your channels are taken over? Currently, I’d say not. I could be wrong.

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"claiming you have to obey Libyan laws and regulations" I always smile when bosses want everything to be GDPR compliant. I am not sure why these laws are more important than the laws from the Chilean Navy. Why are we clicking on cookie popups? We think the EU is smarter than the PII laws from Cameroon? Elitism I say. My websites follow strict guidelines set by proper Constitution of Cameroon doctrines. Every fourth v…

> GDPR compliant. I am not sure why these laws are more important than the laws from the Chilean Navy. Purely market size. Europe is a large market. Same reason that just about every product is labelled with 'known to the state of California to cause cancer' - California is a large market.

Not purely market size, though it's a very important part for sure.

The other part is how likely a country is to try to enforce their laws, and what ability they will have to do so.

Even if a hypothetical US company had an equal number of customers & revenue in Chile as in the EU, if either the Chilean law being broken is one that Chile never bothers to prosecute, or if the worst thing they could do should they find out about the law breaking is to block the service at a national firewall level but not levy any punishments (say, if the US company has no staff or assets in Chile, and the crime has no possibility for extradition or other international collaboration to punish) then the company would be a lot less likely to comply than they are with GDPR. Because most US companies aren't able/willing to serve EU customers without having servers, employees, and revenue, physically in the EU; therefore the worst case for getting caught breaking GDPR is considerably more worth avoiding than if it would just be the EU blocking access to your servers.

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#45
post #7

I would not trust Kazakhstan to honor the TLD registrations if this took off and made some noise. Reminds me of Libya taking ownership of all those trendy .ly domains claiming you have to obey Libyan laws and regulations to operate them. Still a fun idea taken quite far!

"claiming you have to obey Libyan laws and regulations" I always smile when bosses want everything to be GDPR compliant. I am not sure why these laws are more important than the laws from the Chilean Navy. Why are we clicking on cookie popups? We think the EU is smarter than the PII laws from Cameroon? Elitism I say. My websites follow strict guidelines set by proper Constitution of Cameroon doctrines. Every fourth v…

> Why are we clicking on cookie popups? Because people want to track us to make money from invading our privacy? You don't need a cookie consent banner if your cookies are needed to serve the client with your service. You can do analytics without cookies. So to answer your question - Why are we clicking on cookie popups? Because website owners don't want to stop selling your privacy and now have to inform you about it.

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#46
post #18

I find it a little disingenuous that the author keeps dropping the TLD and describing the emails as cool@ , when the TLD is still part of the email address. Interesting experiment, anyway. I'm surprised that it worked well enough to get a functioning email service working with it. A lot of systems must assume that an email address or domain name wouldn't include emojis.

I was wondering how „bob@[rocket]“ works… Thank you for clarifying.

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#47
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, this is just dogma that gets repeated on HN. It's obvious to any person who honestly thinks about it, that having a third party in control of your DNS (i.e. what IP addresses it resolves to) means that your entire site can be rugpulled from under you. If it becomes big enough. For example: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/is-njalla-still-legit.1521... Now, you can say, "most people don't care, they just have a…

Your domain name and the site it points to is not the end goal, what the site represents is. Your domain name is one of the means to get more people to know about you or to deliver your product. Decreasingly relevant, note, as no one types domain names usually (people search). As more people know about you via various channels (most centralized one way or the other: curated lists, social platforms, search), takeover…

You have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to justify why web3 is not needed. Here you literally argue that one’s brand name recognition is irrelevant, and you can be constantly moving domain names with no impact to your bottom line or your community.

That requires more than just an assertion. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#48

I bought xn--mn8h9e.ws a couple years ago just for fun. I think it's fun to own an emoji domain, but what I can say definitely say is that it's still a bad idea to own one if you want to get emails to it. Popular thick email clients still struggle with utf8 domains and I've fiddled around with several email providers that just have complete failures trying to send as well. I tried pasting the email address in a bunch…

HN's emoji stripper is intentional. some are supported, eg; ↖↙↗↘

but others are not, so we're reduced to using things like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ to communicate

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#49
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many users does he have now :-)

On the front page he says: 2k addresses registered If you take that as a live counter of the number of subscribers that's 2k a year, and pretty good! If you take that lifetime registrations that's not so good. Also assuming that that copy is accurate.

2000 * $10 = $20,000, over 3 years that’s $6,666 a year. Doesn’t seem that bad

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#50

I bought xn--mn8h9e.ws a couple years ago just for fun. I think it's fun to own an emoji domain, but what I can say definitely say is that it's still a bad idea to own one if you want to get emails to it. Popular thick email clients still struggle with utf8 domains and I've fiddled around with several email providers that just have complete failures trying to send as well. I tried pasting the email address in a bunch…

I was playing around with this about a decade ago and discovered one of the dark patterns of the interwebs -- the emoji domain name would first show as 'available' and if I didn't immediately pounce on it I'd go back and it would show up as 'available for auction' or some bullshit.

Pretty sure I ended up buying a turtle and did absolutely nothing with it. Almost had the hammer and sickle for some quality trolling...

--edit--

This just reminded me of reading about Milka (the euro brand) taking away the domain name of a woman named Milka and, being drunk at the time, immediately buying milka.eu.com (or something very similar) and just setting up a webpage with a picture of a statue of Stalin I'd taken while in Hungary. Not too sure why they didn't go after my obvious trademark infringement?

-- edit II because I'd mixed Stella with Milka, my bad Stella.

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