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The “.ro” Gold Rush (2018)

viorel.me

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Re: The “.ro” Gold Rush (2018)

#61

Post by yesenadam »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #57

You'd think by now that people would have learned the only TLD with real value is .com, and to avoid "gold rush" mentality on country codes or newly minted TLDs. And if they didn't learn that, at least learn not to trust an entity that was willing to break contracts or change the terms whenever it was in their financial interest to do so. What's even attractive about the letters .ro? That's not a common suffix for En…

Well, -ero is an extremely common word ending in Spanish, for one, corresponding to the -er in Hacker. Portuguese has -eiro. (Even in English a lot of businesses/products are called "[something] Hero".)

Re: The “.ro” Gold Rush (2018)

#62

Post by mirceal »

StavrosK wrote: post #40
charlesdm wrote: post #25

3,000 EUR to potentially get access to a ton of good domains doesn't seem like a big deal? If I knew I could register 100 interesting domains, I would totally be willing to pay that price.

Was it total, or per domain? The article doesn't clarify. 3000 total sounds super duper cheap.

depends. 3000 is a lot of money in Romania

Re: The “.ro” Gold Rush (2018)

#63

Post by eridius »

mistercow wrote: post #52
rhizome wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a poorly designed system that was already in place to create a market for something So...an economic landscape?

Yes, but not one they manipulated for this end, at least as far as the we can tell from the information in the article.

They bought a reseller license for the purpose of snapping up and auctioning off high-value domains rather than acting like a traditional reseller.

Re: The “.ro” Gold Rush (2018)

#64

Post by benmmurphy »

Traster wrote: post #21
tantalor wrote: post #3

It's "unfair" to pay auction rates? How?

Why should the auction site get the domain to sell in the first place? A Romanian public asset is being basically dumped for 6 euros to a select group of private companies who then reap the rewards. It's not unfair between you and the other auction bidders, it's unfair between you and the auctioneer and the Romanian tax payer.

It is possible that there is enough auction sites created that the expected profit to the auction site is 0.

Re: The “.ro” Gold Rush (2018)

#65

Post by Tepix »

jchw wrote: post #44

It's amazing how weirdly managed some TLDs are. There was the controversy with .io, but my favorite experience was .pn (Pitcairn Islands apparently.) I had a .pn domain for a year, that I bought directly from their nic. The trouble is, it's practically all managed manually. Luckily I didn't really need to, but I was not sure at all how to renew a .pn domain because I purchased it from a form that let me specify names…

Dot TM (Turkmenistan) is also a weird one. They started taking registrations and I managed to get a really short one, paid for it with my credit card and was happy.

Shortly afterwards I got an email notifying me that they stopped all new domain registrations, apparently because there were some obscene names that got registered.

All existing domains continued to work for free for years.

Then, almost 10 years later they sent another email notifying the new pricing: $1000 per 10 years. At that point I dropped the domain - it was just used for fun anyway.

Re: The “.ro” Gold Rush (2018)

#66

Post by mistercow »

eridius wrote: post #63
mistercow wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but not one they manipulated for this end, at least as far as the we can tell from the information in the article.

They bought a reseller license for the purpose of snapping up and auctioning off high-value domains rather than acting like a traditional reseller.

Did they? Or did they do the same thing domain resellers have been doing for decades, with the only notable thing about this being that a bunch of more desirable domains came up for sale recently?

Re: The “.ro” Gold Rush (2018)

#67

Post by eridius »

mistercow wrote: post #66
eridius wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They bought a reseller license for the purpose of snapping up and auctioning off high-value domains rather than acting like a traditional reseller.

Did they? Or did they do the same thing domain resellers have been doing for decades, with the only notable thing about this being that a bunch of more desirable domains came up for sale recently?

Domain resellers that have been caught doing this sort of thing in the past have also been criticized. In particular I remember a lot of criticism some time ago about the practice of watching for WHOIS queries to see what domains people are interested in, then buying the domain and trying to sell it back to the original searcher for more.

Re: The “.ro” Gold Rush (2018)

#68

Post by mistercow »

eridius wrote: post #67
mistercow wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they? Or did they do the same thing domain resellers have been doing for decades, with the only notable thing about this being that a bunch of more desirable domains came up for sale recently?

Domain resellers that have been caught doing this sort of thing in the past have also been criticized. In particular I remember a lot of criticism some time ago about the practice of watching for WHOIS queries to see what domains people are interested in, then buying the domain and trying to sell it back to the original searcher for more.

They have been criticized for that, yes, but I think undeservedly so. Fundamentally, I just think it's pretty dumb how we allocate domains in the first place, and that this sort of thing should be seen as the natural consequence of allocating resources stupidly.

As for the other thing, I think front-running is a pretty different situation, and is bad for reasons that don't apply here. Although I believe most of the legend of that came in part from a misunderstanding of what was happening. Some registrars would put a hold on the domain you searched for, which would automatically be released after a day or two. Their rationale was that it was a bad experience to search for a domain, and then have it snapped out from under you during checkout. Of course, it also conveniently prevented you from buying the domain from a competitor, and I have no doubt that that was part of the motivation for doing it. I agree that that's a bad practice, but true front-running is much worse.

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