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China Is Making Domain Name History
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pearjuice 11y agoSo domain squatting is investing now? Good to know.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jrcii 11y agoCybersquatting is not a legitimate business and anyone who participates in it should feel bad.
- jjaredsimpson 11y agoWhy
- oldmanjay 11y agoDo you feel that buying property as an investment is a strikingly new business technique?
- justaman 11y agoI feel like the trend in domain name "investing" is a fad. I find myself googling for websites more than actually typing them out if they are not populated by recent history anyway.
- CyrusL 11y agoDirect navigation is definitely becoming less common. The browser search bar, the awesome bar, and App Stores are increasingly becoming the ways that internet users reach their destinations. Still, .com domain names continue their march up in value. It's been a ~20 year fad at this point.
- cpplinuxdude 11y agoYup. And right now, people above a certain age raise an eyebrow when a domain is not a .com, or .co.uk, or .[something familiar]. But the more time goes on, the more we'll have users who just don't care if it's a .io, .xyz or .whatever.
- martinni 11y agoIf I recall correctly, the term "google" and "youtube" were among the most "googled" terms. People are too lazy to type out the URL anyway.
- frandroid 11y agoThey're not just lazy; many people don't _understand_ what URLs are. They just navigate the web by googling for site names or whatever content they want.
- reddotX 11y agoha. like my dad
- samstave 11y agoAnd some are stuck in this way... I have attempted to train/show/explain how the URL bar is also the same as the search field on google.com.... even once they understood, the response was often - "Well, I don't care - this is how I do it and this is how I like to do it" /pulls out hair
- mikeash 11y agoIf it works, no matter how ridiculous, it's best just to let it be. https://xkcd.com/763/ https://xkcd.com/763/
- _fizz_buzz_ 11y agoHa! I know very well what a URL is, but I still navigate the web by googling.
- Consultant32452 11y agoI do too, but that's mostly because my address bar googles every string I type as I'm typing it.
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- bagosm 11y agoI suspect the china market is shifting away from having younger people "invest" in the real estate bubble and towards "investing" in domain names.. Oh the poor guys don't know the pour down of all the new TLDs probably... Maybe that's why they are starting to open up the great firewall. Just to steal all that money once more.
- rhpistole 11y agoMy 3 letter .org turned 17 years old last week. Not that I'm interested in selling, but nobody's ever tried to buy it from me for more than the registration fees. I feel left out.
- dangerpowpow 11y agocare to tell us?
- knd775 11y agoI guessed, and it turns out I was right! rhp.org
- kelukelugames 11y agoA Chinese company is why I'm kelukelu.me instead of kelu.me :(
- ctstover 11y agoMore anecdotes for future economics courses to point to for explaining what happens when you try to tightly restrict what people are aloud to invest in. Just like the dozens of empty megalopolises of high end condos over there.
- ufo 11y agoOne of the reasons the Chinese like these short numeric domain names is that they have a complex system of homophones where each number represents a word and a sequence of number can represent a whole sentence.
- danieltillett 11y agoIt apparent is not only that, it is also the way they use qwerty keyboards where short combinations of letters expand out to Chinese characters.
- jwcacces 11y agoAren't there 1369 (37^2) 2 letter domain names? A-Z (case insensitive) 0-9, hyphen? Even if you restrict it to start with letter, no hyphen in last, that's still 936 two letter domain names.
- ilurk 11y agoI'm a bit confused about the whole DNS thing. Namely when I buy a domain name from who exactly am I buying it from? Put in other words, what's the best way to buy a domain name and avoid the middleman fees? In terms of renewal, does it make a difference if you buy it from the root TLD authority (not sure if saying something silly here) or some squatter/middle-man/domain-park? Who decides on the price hike for the next year? I find the whole DNS management quite broken. The new TLDs is a good example. .dev got owned by Google and a bunch of other TLDs got acquired by some VC backed digital-estate company.
- joedavison 11y agoThe hierarchy of Internet domain names goes something like this: ICANN -> TLD operator (registry) -> registrar -> reseller (optional) -> registrant (you)
- jessriedel 11y agoHistorically, who in this chain collected the seigniorage for domain names worth much more than the transaction cost, i.e., email.com? Just whoever snatched it up first, usually a reseller? I always wondered domain names weren't auctioned off like other scarce resources whose initial distribution is controlled by the government, such as wireless spectrum.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago> Just whoever snatched it up first Yes.
- ilurk 11y agoSo I found this article [1] about domain name transfer. Which clarified one doubt that I had. As I was under the impression that you were hopelessly stuck at paying rent for life middleman (to a reseller or in this case a registrar). This raises another question. Is it worth starting you own registrar? Or it is fee prohibitive? [1] http://lifehacker.com/5794507/how-to-jump-ship-from-godaddy-to-a-better-web-host http://lifehacker.com/5794507/how-to-jump-ship-from-godaddy-...
- ben174 11y agoI wonder if this is specific to .com or if short domains in other TLDs are becoming of value. I bought bo.gg a while back just because it was so short and easy to remember, I figured it would be useful. And just yesterday I got an email from what seemed to be a very serious Chinese buyer offering $800.
- FarhadG 11y agowhere would be a good place to sell some of these domains?
- danieltillett 11y agoI own a bunch of short domain names that I picked up back in 2007 when they were dropped. It was a fun hobby at the time looking through the list of new available names trying to find useful ones. In the process I picked up a bunch of short names like nzdk.com which I use for various projects. In the last few month I have been getting around 20 offers a week for these. The prices have become crazy.
- tonyedgecombe 11y agoI can't help feeling domain names are too cheap, just raising the prices a little would wipe out many of the squatters.
- hackuser 11y agoWhat happened to the new TLDs? Is there not interest or not user understanding? I remember explaining them years ago to some end users who objected to the idea; they wanted to hold onto the familiar ".com", even though it did nothing for them. I thought they would greatly increase supply of popular second-level domains. Also, I thought large organizations who could afford it would setup their own TLDs and leave behind registrars and the associated issues. For example, why doesn't IBM use .ibm instead of ibm.com? But it looks like the vast majority still want only .com.
- dingaling 11y agoMany of the new TLDs are prohibitively expensive for individuals or SMEs. For example .club is nearly €6000 per year through Gandi versus €20 for a .org or €7 for .org.uk The prices may drop in future to try to stimulate demand but right now they're mostly hilarious.