18 ms·

The .blog Bait and Switch

305 points by cschidle 10y ago

ensiferum 10y ago
I've never understood why some random company is allowed to arbitrate the domain registration and make $$$ out of it. Feels like it's kinda not in the spirit of the internet.
- kyriakos 10y ago
  It's not much different from people hoarding dictionary domains and selling them for insane amounts. But I understand your point and the whole system is rotten. First come first served is no longer viable.
  - prawn 10y ago
    What is viable though? First come, first served enables domainers. Jacking up annual domain prices can be harsh on businesses in poorer countries. Public auctions for each new and released domain might have merit, but will still attract domainers and preclude many fresh companies.
    - kyriakos 10y ago
      I never said I have a solution I just know that the current situation is not good either.
- lmm 10y ago
  Anyone can run their own DNS root, but good luck getting people to use it. And ICANN has a history of deliberately colliding with TLDs used by competing services.
  - Senji 10y ago
    Browser vendors and OS makers should do an end run around ISPs and ICANN. Just agree between themselves ( what are they like 10? tops) and fork the current registries. Then issue domains themselves. What are the plebs gonna do? Go the the non existent alternative?
    - allendoerfer 10y ago
      Google already controls chunks of every platform involved, some of them are very large, (network, domain registry, OS, browser, search engine, web hosting/content delivery) and eats away the importance of domains bite by bite. Non-tech people do not type in domains anymore, they search for them. URLs are getting hidden away further and further.
    - hueving 10y ago
      The DNS resolver is configurable, not hard coded. Forcing a switch would require OS vendors to ignore the resolver issued via DHCP, which would not work on many corporate networks that block outbound DNS not via their resolver.
      - bagosm 10y ago
        Maybe then just prefer if reachable? Soon enough it's the new standard.
        ygaels_armpit 10y ago
        Yes I think any new system would have to see the old one grandfathered (give the current incumbents time to find something useful to do instead of jetting off to conferences all year). Browsers/OS would be reasonably easy in most circumstances, but there are embedded devices, load-balancing configurations, other esoteric uses for DNS (text records, mail etc) that'd have to be considered as well.
        Senji 10y ago
        An attack surface is ISPs and Governments strongarming them to use their own DNS roots which can then be plugged into the "new" root servers conforming with the theoretical browser vendor, os vendor alliance.
        __jal 10y ago
        Pick your favorite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root There are others. But no, they don't become the new standard.
- jklinger410 10y ago
  It is a complete state-sponsored racket. There's no way around it. You pay an upfront fee to ICANN and probably some kind of recurring tax and you get to create a TLD. You then sell this TLD for higher prices than ICANN and run a very simple service that processes the transactions. You then take anything lower than a 5 or 6 letter domain that is a word in the english language and define it as a "premium" domain and charge obscene prices for those domains. The fee you charge for the domain based on this system is recurring. So instead of buying milk.com for $10k and selling it for $12k you already own milk.blog by default and if someone wants to register it you charge $500 a year. NOT TO MENTION this whole system is like a slap in the face to a certain kind of "domainers." People who buy domains based on their perceived value, park them, and then try and resell them for more money. There are many millions of dollars wrapped up in this other, also stupid racket. These companies got so bold as to get their domains "valued" and then bet on the value of their company based on their holdings like some type of stock filled with mortgages. This new system is like cutting directly into that strategy but I guess ICANN gets some of the money this way.
  - nommm-nommm 10y ago
    I have a last name that's extremely uncommon. MyLastName.com was available for many, many years. I thought about buying it a few times in the last 20 or so years but I don't have any use for it so I didn't. Two years ago it was bought by a domain squatter who was probably iterating through the white pages. Now that I can't have it I want it (I guess human nature) but they are asking like $2k for it. It seems somehow "unfair" that "my" last name is being "held hostage" by some faceless company that's just trying to make a quick buck.
    - jeremymcanally 10y ago
      Start a business with your name, trademark it in a certain domain, file a claim with ICANN. Long process, but might be cheaper. :)
      - eximius 10y ago
        This is, in general, about as sleazy as the squatter.
- gambler 10y ago
  DNS is a rotten system. From censorship, to ddos attacks, to squatting, to privacy issues with whois, to messed up financial incentives. It's a shame that DNS is a critical part of the internet infrastructure. We should work on getting rid of it.
  - dasil003 10y ago
    what's the alternative?
    - achr2 10y ago
      A Blockchain.
      - jff 10y ago
        Poe's Law, Bitcoin sub-clause, strikes again
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
        pessimizer 10y ago
        It is a distributed ledger; calling blockchain here is certainly not crazy-talk.
      - achr2 10y ago
        I mean, I was being a bit facetious, but there are actual proposals for blockchain backed DNS. [1] https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain
        __jal 10y ago
        Yes, this is an application where the blockchain wouldn't necessarily be stupid. I don't see it as necessary, to be honest, and given the frequency with which people lose access to their wallets/have them stolen, I'm not entirely sure the bulk of domain owners would want bearer instruments to be the sole way to manage (or lose) their domain.
- charonn0 10y ago
  Because running a global TLD is a non-trivial and costly public service to provide, so the TLD sponsor is allowed to monetize it.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    It really isn't that hard (source: designed and ran the development team that built the initial .name platform, before we outsourced it to Verisign; Verisign now owns it outright), and you can contract any number of operators to do it for you. There certainly is the issue that most of these TLDs aren't very interesting to most people, though. With low demand, I certainly understand why they want to be able to milk the few names that people find attractive.
- criddell 10y ago
  Say you owned ensiferum.com. Should you be allowed to sell subdomains and make money out of it? That's really all they are doing.
coldcode 10y ago
I signed up too and then saw the ridiculous prices and policies. Happy to stick with .com for 10 bucks.
- jamchris 10y ago
  Like the author I would also have no problem in paying a few of several hundred dollars as an initial registration one time fee, for a domain like chris.blog. I would really prefer using chris.blog instead of buying a .com domain like this-is-chriss-development-blog.com, just because any shorter .com domain is already taken.
  - cdubzzz 10y ago
    It's still possible to come up with vanity domains using common TLDs. You just need to have some wiggle room (: I replaced a single letter in the shortened version of my own name and got a .net for it just a few months ago.
  - cschidle 10y ago
    Right on. While I said "I appreciate a good name", I'm truly a sucker for a good name. Branding is huge, even when it's a personal brand. So yes, a one-time fee of $250-$1,000 feels ok to me, especially considering what Automattic paid for the TLD.
overcast 10y ago
They are doing this a lot with more and more of the new TLDs. Defeats the purpose of even bothering with them. Create more, to open up the domain space, make it cost prohibitive, so we're back to where we started.
- rlpb 10y ago
  > Create more, to open up the domain space... Adding TLDs doesn't open up the domain space; it closes it. The domain name system was designed to expand downwards, by adding more hierarchies. Downwards is where the space is. Expanding upwards is limited. The racket ran out of space selling keywords inside .com, where this was originally meant to be confined. Once they finish selling keywords at the root, that'll be it.
  - taftster 10y ago
    I don't know. I don't think nested hierarchies is a thing. I mean, I guess you have the "Go Network" go.com example (disney.go.com). But I think the ship has sailed for deeper hierarchies. I really don't want an email address that is: taftster@foo.bar.baz.example.com
    - rlpb 10y ago
      I didn't make any judgement on whether it is a good or bad thing. The fact remains: don't delude yourself into thinking that adding a TLD free-for-all opens up the space. It doesn't. It closes it. The current "problem" stems from the fact that .coms are full. Once the TLD space is full, the same problem will remain. Everyone who wants one cannot have a memorable name in a flat namespace. There are too many people and there is too little room.
      - Whitestrake 10y ago
        When that happens, I fully expect that as the value of available domain names go up, people will invest in expensive domains (blah.com) in order to treat them as "2LD"s and sell its 3LDs (xyz.blah.com). But it won't happen while there are 2LDs available for the exact reasons stated above (nobody wants a subdomain when they can have an actual domain).
octasimo 10y ago
I've also got stood up with fashion.blog. Full refund and no invitation to auction. I haven't even bothered to ask for details, because that was their way of assessing and freezing the domain names that people would be interested in buying.
- SamBam 10y ago
  > because that was their way of assessing and freezing the domain names that people would be interested in buying. Indeed. Seems like it would be easy for them to use the auction to automatically see "300 people tried to claim this domain, it must be a good one, let's make it premium." They wouldn't need to spend a penny doing market research to select the premium names themselves.
  - brazzledazzle 10y ago
    That's the feeling I got as well. The answers were really dodgy too. But such an ethically challenged practice would reflect poorly on the WordPress brand and you wouldn't want your low level employees to know about it since they could easily leak it. So maybe the CS reps weren't dodgy so much as trying to keep customers happy with very little information available to them. Maybe one way you could do it is create a tiny subsidiary to manage the reservations/registration. The subsidiary can be created under the pretenses of shielding the parent company from legal liability so you can both limit the team size, the scope of their purpose and isolate them from the parent company. Build the backend to provide information on reservations but accessible only to subsidiary financial management/officers and parent company employees whose wealth is tied to the success of shares in the company. Officially only share the total number of reservations and financials with the parent company via something documented like email. Then the backend reporting is decoupled from the reservations that come in for early access. If you setup a distinct founder program and establish enough time between the reservation announcement and when you give normal employees early access you don't even have to worry about your employees snatching up the most profitable ones. The first the CS reps hear about it is when a reply/complaint comes in from one of the cancellations. When asked their supervisor only knows that the name came over as one of the early access reservations from the parent company. The CS reps don't have enough information to draw conclusions because they don't get access to numbers and an early access employee program provides plausible deniability if the reps start asking questions. That was kind of a fun mental exercise. I've seen some real cloak and dagger stuff from people but those were always at small companies. I have no idea how plausible any of that would be, especially in companies this big. But it would be interesting to see what would happen if we had a fairly unique but uninteresting domain that wasn't obviously gibberish and a a lot of us put in a reservation for it at random intervals to create a perception of interest and popularity.
dmm 10y ago
When the .beer tld came out I tried to buy "california.beer" as soon as domains were available to the public. The site wouldn't let me buy even though it was listed as available. It was finally registered by a squatter months later. I wouldn't be surprised if the good names were kept in reserve and sold through special channels.
echelon 10y ago
This seems to have become the de facto pattern with the new gTLD system. A company swoops in and buys a namespace for $200k (or more if there is a competitive bid), and they effectively turn into the cartel equivalent of the domain squatter. You can register your new gTLD for anywhere between $1 and $100, depending on what I suppose they expect their target demographic to be willing to pay. Dot horse is more expensive than dot webcam, for instance, and I imagine dot lawyer is more expensive than dot lol. However, if your domain name uses a word or phrase that happens to be in their "premium domain" dictionary, then they'll charge an elevated price based on heuristics similar to what yesteryear's domain squatters used. Some simple and concise domains can run hundreds of thousands of dollars. cheap.horse is $25/yr tiny.horse is $100/yr internet.horse is $1000/yr free.horse is "ask us" Controlling the TLD is the ultimate form of domain squatting. I wonder what will happen when some of these companies go under because they can no longer afford to pay off their debts? Will those that registered domain names lose them outright? Can someone else buy the gTLD and take them all over?
- stephenr 10y ago
  I wonder how much to buy "my.horse". Then I can setup a sole mailbox "look", and have it auto respond to any messages with "my horse is amazing". I wonder how may will get the joke.
  - problems 10y ago
    This is worth it at any price.
  - AndrewStephens 10y ago
    I have a .horse domain - I tried every permutation horse puns and in-jokes (my.lovely.horse, etc) but they were all taken by squatters or reserved for stupid prices. Eventually I settled for sheep.horse, which is easy to remember but not much else.
    - echelon 10y ago
      Nice! I bought jungle.horse and put my Donald Trump text to speech engine there. These domains are so ridiculous.
jeremymcanally 10y ago
This is very common with these new TLD's. At least they didn't give it to you for a year then jack up the price. I had jacki.party as a fun domain for my wife that she didn't end up using, but after a year the price went from like $29/yr to $2,495/yr. because they decided it was "premium." There was nothing my registrar could do because it was the domain registry who decided that, so I just let it lapse. Why is a very specific spelling (note the lack of "e") of a not terribly common name so expensive? No clue, but I'm guessing the same forces are at work (i.e., $$$).
- pc86 10y ago
  The problem is that it only takes a few hits at $2500/yr to make it worth it to screw a bunch of people out of an already overpriced domain. So if you serve 15,000 people with .party domains at $29/yr each, you only need 175 people to pay $2,495 and you've already made more money. I don't mind paying more for a domain, I might even pay a measurable amount of money every month for the right one, but trying to insist that jacki.party is worth $210/mo is bananas.
- nkrisc 10y ago
  I suspect that any domain that gets used becomes "premium."
- duskwuff 10y ago
  What registry was this? That's not supposed to be possible -- registries are only supposed to be able to designate domains as "premium" if they aren't registered yet.
- btym 10y ago
  Yikes. Just extended my lastn.ame domain hack to 2026.
- shavingspiders 10y ago
  That makes me feel very good that I locked in .party for 10 years and $3/year with Gandi.
- TheGrumpyBrit 10y ago
TheGrumpyBrit 10y ago
I was keeping a close eye on .family for quite a while - I'm getting married next year, so mysurname.family would have been a good domain to have both for wedding planning and personal email accounts. When it finally came out, I eagerly went to my favourite registrar to try and buy it, and found that it's listed at over £1000. It's not a particularly common name either. Out of interest, I tried a few other surnames off the top of my head, and it seems that pretty much any domain that could be somebody's surname has been bumped up massively. Of course, they have every right to do that, but the people buying these domains are individuals - very few of these domains are ever going to have a business use. To me, it looks like they've done nothing more than price themselves out of the whole point of their TLD. Instead, I'm going to wait out the expiry of the .com, which isn't being squatted as such, but it is owned by a company for a single software product of theirs which looks like it was written in the 90s and requires you to send a cheque if you want to buy it. The last update was helpfully reminding visitors that the app wouldn't be compatible with the upcoming OS X Lion. One day, they'll stop renewing that domain...my time will come.
- vxNsr 10y ago
  My family name is $20/year!! Now I need to decide if it's worth supporting this cartel...
AndrewStephens 10y ago
As a fellow very-common-name sufferer, I long ago gave up any hope of getting a vanity domain name (how I wish I had paid the $25 back in 1996). Most of the new TLD seem pretty scammy to me, the costs in obtaining and running most obscure TLDs far outweigh what could be got by paying customers actually waiting to run sites off them. I suspect that a lot of them are just hoping that enough large companies buy up kfc.blog, walmart.porn, etc to make a return on investment. Fleecing people who actually want the domains is just icing on the cake. I am somewhat of a hypocrite, I run my blog off https://sheep.horse/ https://sheep.horse/, but only because I thought that the .horse TLD was silly enough to be worth supporting.
- TheGrumpyBrit 10y ago
  That's exactly it. Brand protection companies like MarkMonitor will buy these up as a matter of course to protect their clients, and they'll do so at the inflated Early Access rates to boot. By the time the domains are released to the public, these companies have already made their profit.
  - usrusr 10y ago
    At one point even their clients will realize that the value of owning {name}.{everything} is more finite than the number of possible values for {everything}. When this happens, TLD racketeers will be sitting on a well oiled money burning machine, because only few of those who are attracted by that kind of business are good at keeping expenses low in times of plenty. The end game for many squatting-TLDs will be an existential pricing standoff between the dying registrar and the very low number of users that were foolish enough to build a long term identity in one of its namespaces.
- iampims 10y ago
  At a USD200,000 price for a new TLD, it takes 2,000 domains at $100/year to break even. Of course there are other costs associated to running a TLD, but they probably don't scale linearly. So on a 5 year term, it might even be a small profitable business.
- cdubzzz 10y ago
legohead 10y ago
I'll tell my TLD story. I was following .family for a long time, since my current "primary domain" is horrible and hard to say. <family name>.family sounded pretty awesome. There was that whole pre-registration BS but it is so convoluted and expensive I just waited till it went live. It did, and when I checked on my last name, it was set at $1200/year for a normally $30/year domain. This was when I was introduced to the idea of reserved domains in this new TLD system. So I emailed them and put forth my argument, that this TLD in particular is a bit unfair, considering I don't control what name I'm born with. I didn't think it would have any impact, because $$$. One day I got an email and they offered me to buy it for a one-time price of $1200 and then the renewal would be set at $30. I said no. There are so many TLDs now that it's easy to get a common-word, easy-to-say one.
- Cpoll 10y ago
  > that this TLD in particular is a bit unfair, considering I don't control what name I'm born with To be fair, it would also have been a bit unfair to the next guy with your last name if you had taken it.
Magicstatic 10y ago
Here is a message I received from Gandi.net regarding the .blog domain: ----------------- Hello, You are getting this email because you have performed a pre-order with your handle {redacted} for the domain name {redacted}. Unfortunately, this order is currently in error, because the domain name in question has been defined as Premium by the registry. This decision is of course beyond our control and frequently corresponds to a list of common and/or connotative words that allow registered to apply special rates to them. This means that in your case, we have placed the order in error, because the price that you initially paid is no longer the price that the registry is charging for it. If you would like to know the price, in order to eventually purchase it, then reply to this email, so that our support team can obtain that for you from the registry. As long as you are considering this, do not cancel your order, since this will cause you to lose your place in the waiting list. If, however, you no longer wish to register the domain, you can cancel it from the link provided below, and your prepaid account will be refunded for the order:
- nfrmatk 10y ago
  Good on Gandi for providing a straightforward response. Living up to their motto.
mikegedelman 10y ago
> Perhaps it's not fair to call this bait & switch. Really it was bait & refund The title of this article was a bait & switch.
- cschidle 10y ago
  I was being generous when I wrote that line. But I maintain that clearly stating it will go to auction then pulling the auction is a "switch".
chriswwweb 10y ago
The ICANN whois also does not give any information, there is just a copyright message from Nominet UK https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=chris.blog https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=chris.blog Maybe the domain got bought during the sunrise period by a copyright holder!? https://my.blog/launch-plan/ https://my.blog/launch-plan/
- cschidle 10y ago
  The reply I received from get.blog support (last image in the post) stated that "chris.blog ended up being part of the list of reserved domains that are not available for registration". So I imagine they'll either keep it internal or sell it as a premium domain.
  - chriswwweb 10y ago
    Yeah right, you had mentioned in your P.S. two other names dave and matt, I did a whois for those two and got some information: https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=matt.blog https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=matt.blog https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=dave.blog https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=dave.blog So yes it seems it got reserved. I wonder why too. P.S. I'm a chris too ;) that's why im so interested in this, I own chris.lu but as it is a country tld this is not so good from a SEO point of view. I want to change if I find a better one, but haven't found one yet. Have fun with your new chris.lol :)
Terr_ 10y ago
I've long felt the only sane approach is to define country-level TLDs (via the UN or something) transition everything under them, and then let each legal jurisdiction handle (or mishandle) their own shit. While it's far less-convenient for global companies and "ignoring borders", it decentralizes the system. Compartmentalizing failure and allowing some kinds of competition.
- tracker1 10y ago
  You mean, like .co.uk, or .us???
  - Terr_ 10y ago
    Basically, it'd mean the (virtually impossible) task of deprecating the non-country TLDs with X years before they stop working, and saying: "Okay, .us is managed by whatever infrastructure the USA sets up, and .uk is managed by whatever the UK sets up, etc." So the US might choose to allow cocacola.us, while the UK might have on a grouping scheme like cocacola.co.uk, and meanwhile North Korea refuses outright or insists on cocacoala.obeys.dear.leader.nk, whatever.
    - SapphireSun 10y ago
      Countries can break up, dissolve, or form too. I'm not sure that making all domains depend on things that exist in the real world is a good idea. They should depend on abstract ideas that are less liable to change and can be resold easily to different operators.
      - neoromantique 10y ago
        There is .su (Soviet Union) gTLD.
        type0 10y ago
        As SapphireSun said, it's because .su is based on "abstract ideas that are less liable to change"!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
intrasight 10y ago
I fail to understand the purpose of these non-standard TLDs. Nobody is going to remember or type in such a domain, so you stuff is only going to be found by a web search - where a standard domain would be better. So why not just register a .com - which are also cheaper?
- jamchris 10y ago
  > So why not just register a .com Because the name you wish to register is not available as .com domain. > Nobody is going to remember or type in such a domain I don't think this is true, I live in Europe and we have tons of country tlds, people use and remember them. Also is chris.blog really so much longer to type then chris.com or a lot harder to remember? I don't agree. At first it might feel strange to type something else then .com but as I said in europe we have country tlds and it works well.
  - pc86 10y ago
    > Also is chris.blog really so much longer to type then chris.com or a lot harder to remember? I don't agree. It depends on the audience. If you have a non-technical audience or you are e-commerce a .com is basically a necessity still.
    - Symbiote 10y ago
      Also in Europe, but I've seen adverts using .travel domains (which are a bit older than most), like egypt.travel and ecuador.travel. City domains, like sadiq.london. Admittedly, I can't remember any publicity of the weirder ones, like .lol or .xyz.
  - eonw 10y ago
    I may be wrong and just speaking from experience, but Americans were really trapped in the .com/net/org for a long time. I think, because that's all we were exposed to... I didn't realize the depth and usage of CCTLDs until I moved to Europe, and saw them everywhere. When I gave my mom my first work email she added a .com after the .at at the end, and wondered why it never got to me.
charlesafinley 10y ago
I had this happen to me as well. I registered a domain directly with get.blog on the day that they first started accepting pre-registrations. I got an email a couple of days ago saying that I would be getting my money back, nothing about an auction. I asked for details because I too was expecting an auction. My response also came from the same guy ("Ran") who said that it wasn't available when my "application" was processed. The twist in this case? The domain I applied for is now pointing directly towards WordPress.com. So get.blog, owned by parent company Automattic, took the domain which had been made available for the public, and gave it to WordPress.com. I wonder what ICANN will have to say? SHADY AF.
smegel 10y ago
Don't give these scum your money, moral of the story is.
codebook 10y ago
In my case, my surname TLD exists like XXX.{surname}. So I bought it w/ my first name ==> firstname.surname . It's cool and I will keep it as long as I can. I agree with the OP. They seems to gather the popularity info by accepting pre-register requests. Is there any policy to ban this behavior? Shouldn't the TLD be publicly opened?
- eonw 10y ago
  technically its their property and theirs to do with as they please. though i disagree with the behavior. nothing is stopping you from reselling *.whatever.com and so forth. i wish i had my whole name as a domain, thats pretty awesome for you!
_Codemonkeyism 10y ago
"Perhaps it's not fair to call this bait & switch. Really it was bait & refund"
- savanaly 10y ago
  The article title was a bait and switch! Honestly, I don't know much about the domain registration business but I had always imagined it worked even suckier than the way he describes it working in this case.
  - cschidle 10y ago
    When you hand over $250 and they hold it for 3 months with the promise of giving you a shot at an auction, then they cancel the auction... I still call that a "switch". Still haven't received the refund, by the way.
henvic 10y ago
In 2011 I paid for and registered o1.io (I really wanted 01.io, but back then it was not available to register domains containing only numbers on .io). The .io NIC web interface is really horrible and I ended up in an inconsistent state after making the "horrible" mistake of clicking the back button. Even though my Paypal account got charged, I received an email confirming I was the owner of the domain, and so on, I couldn't access my account. Next step I took was contacting them. I got ignored and after 7 days later they made a transaction reversal on Paypal and I never heard a word back from them, even though I have tried to contact. Some time later they made the o1.io domain a reserved one and so if I wanted it now I would have to pay thousands. What a shame.
logfromblammo 10y ago
At this point, this looks ever more akin to charging people to have their phone numbers listed in a phone book. If you don't know what a phone book is, it was the DNS-equivalent of the 1960s. You know those plastic-wrapped bricks of yellow paper that sometimes appear on your doorstep, that you just drop right into the recycling bin? Those things are actually phone books. The phone book is rather simple. Your individual given name or your business dba name is the dictionary key, and the phone number is the dictionary value. Your dictionary entry is automatically included, unless you paid to be "unlisted". That would keep your phone service provider from printing your name-number pair in their phone books. This approach is still viable. Every state has a database of corporate names and dba registrations. The secretary of state for Illinois, as an example, could make aaa-plumbing.corp.il.us resolve to the server address for "AAA Plumbing, Inc.", if that business chose to disclose it, or to a landing page otherwise. Likewise, zzz-towing.llc.il.us could resolve to the address for "ZZZ Towing, LLC". The US Patent and Trademark Office could do the same. Let lego.028.tm.us (and lego.009.tm.us, lego.041.tm.us, etc.) resolve to LEGO Juris A/S Corp's servers, so you can see a site about plastic building blocks, and let lego.005.tm.us resolve to American Lego Group Inc's server, so you can see a site about soy protein supplements. If you are Foobar LLC, you really shouldn't have to register "foobar.com" and "foobar.net" and "foobar.cc" and "foobar.co.uk" and "foobar.biz" and "foobar.info" and "foobar.sucks" and "foobar.pooky" and "foobar.booger". It isn't really elucidative, and does not help discoverability to have so many TLDs. The problem is that all the simple names have been mined out of the original TLDs, and there is no mechanism to resolve name collisions between Foobar LLC out of the US and Foobar GmbH in Germany. Whoever grabs "foobar.com" first gets to keep it, and the other is stuck trying to make some DNS entry that somehow relates to the company name. Adding a bunch of niche TLDs helps a bit, but not if the registrar can charge $1k/year for names. That's just ridiculous. You're not going to end up with all the Johns on the Internet getting their own john.something domain name that way. You just let the richest John on the Internet to have all the john.anything domain names.
- mcguire 10y ago
  "If you don't know what a phone book is, it was the DNS-equivalent of the 1960s. You know those plastic-wrapped bricks of yellow paper that sometimes appear on your doorstep, that you just drop right into the recycling bin?" You mean monitor stands?
ctingom 10y ago
I thought about buying coffee.blog but the fee was 100k per year! Insane!
andrewvijay 10y ago
I exclaimed 'wow 30 bucks?' when I saw 30. But then was shocked at 250. Fainted at the auction.
xchaotic 10y ago
Fwiw I snagged lech.blog at list price (so $30 + 220), I wouldn't pay a cent more, but my main problem is that I still have no access to the domain and, unless I am provoven (or refunded) otherwise, my domain registartion runs from 28th of October. Some email were sent from an unverified, unencrypted, unrelated domain - I nearly sent them to spam. They really need to sort out their internal processes.
yoodenvranx 10y ago
What is the long-term security/availability of those new tlds? If I register a .de domain today I am pretty sure that it will last a long time. But some of the new ones have a pretty sketchy vibe to it and I am not sure if I'd trust them enough to build a business on top of a .fancy domain
tobltobs 10y ago
I believe this new gTLD registries will manage it to finally sink their own boat. They are behaving so greedy that this new gTLD will never become popular. But then it wont take long until the first registries will close shop and this will be the end of this whole ngTLD scam. Because nobody will invest money to market a domain which might not exist anymore in a few years. There are some proposed safeguards built into the rules to prevent this meltdown caused by failing registries. But looking at how the industry currently behaves I don't think the will to stand to the rules and grab as much money as they can and leave the sinking ship asap.
smpetrey 10y ago
Who wants to help me create an .arse TLD? Who's with me!
ygaels_armpit 10y ago
This seems like it has gotten out of control - it is a basic key/value lookup, and we've created a rent-seeking, global series of registries to further suck good money from people. I worked briefly at a registry - it is money for jam. I don't know if the DNS protocol and all the related ones are fundamentally broken or need fixing, but it seems to me the problem is ICANN and the web that spreads out from under it. Why can't we just create an alternate ... distributed naming system, except without the rent-seeking/government ownership attached? I mean, this focus on how important the last bit is is ridiculous, the namespace doesn't have to be artificially restricted, beyond what the protocol might require. I guess I have a simplistic view and probably lack a bit of history, and there must be something preventing it. Do the top-level servers collude, and help to create something like ICANN, or was it taken out of people's hands etc?
- robalfonso 10y ago
  Legal/Govermental/Regulatory issues, someone has to deal with it. No single organization is going to deal with every country and their various legal issues. Registries and Registrars help abstract a lot of that (ICANN definitely doesn't want to deal with it). I don't disagree with the ease of storing a few million records or more. That is not the real overhead and is in reality only a fraction of whats involved.
  - ygaels_armpit 10y ago
    Yes the added verification etc on top of the key/value lookup is the meat of it I guess. A complicated problem, I guess it'd be nice to somehow remove the money factor from a critical function of the net.
- toyg 10y ago
  > except without the rent-seeking/government ownership attached? Because people like money. This TLD business literally invented a new economic activity, and one with great margins. It doesn't really hurt anyone, has little to no cost, and makes a pretty penny. People With Money love stuff like this; if tomorrow they could invent a marketable TLD system for physical addresses, phone numbers or anything else, they'd jump at the chance. This is just how the capitalist world works: stuff exists to make money, everything else is a bonus.
0898 10y ago
I wanted a domain for a tax industry blog. I really wanted digital.tax, but it was held back as premium. Then, one day I was browsing 123reg and noticed it was available. I quickly looked at other registrars and it was still labeled as either taken or reserved. I placed my order and got the domain! I'm not sure how common these discrepancies are but I guess they do occur, so perhaps all hope is not lost.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
otterley 10y ago
The Registrar's policy language makes so many exceptions for themselves that you'd have better odds playing roulette: https://knockknockwhoisthere.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/dotblog-launch-and-registration-policy-2-0.pdf https://knockknockwhoisthere.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/dot... "We are not bound to select a winner among RFP respondents and may hold the Domain Name for future allocation." "We may activate and allocate to ourselves or third parties certain Domain Names (plus their IDN variants, where applicable) deemed necessary for the operation or the promotion of TLD." "the Registry makes no guarantees or warranties as to whether any applicant will be successful in registering any Registry Domain Name."
milesf 10y ago
Can someone think of a better way to do DNS? I remember when the internet was just a hosts file you had a copy of on your computer, so it is not outside the realm of possibilities to come up with something different. Something better.
Mao_Zedang 10y ago
What are the rules around changing annual registration fees for gTLDs?
- ayh 10y ago
  The new domain companies can raise them whenever they want and however much they want.
beardog 10y ago
Are gTLDs like this even worth it as a primary domain? In my limited experience, these kinds of domains tend to confuse people who are not technically oriented.
- broodbucket 10y ago
  For people who aren't technically oriented, anything that isn't .com/.net/.org (and regional variants like .com.au) are confusing, but there's no good domain names left there. If you're starting a website you're stuck with the choice of a terrible .com domain with shudder hyphens or something, or you can get something like yourbusiness.shopping or yourhandle.blog. It's gonna be a case-by-case thing whether one option is better than the other, but them's the breaks.
rubbingalcohol 10y ago
No one cares.
nikolay 10y ago
Same happened to me. They should expect a class action lawsuit as even though the list was not finalized, they should have said something. I had something like this happened before with WordPress.com - I have nikolay.wordpress.com, and then an employee took it way from me. After making a long discussion on TechChrunch about it, the employee decided to give it back to me. So, my point is, there's nothing new under the sun here - obviously Matt is the old Matt having double standards, and not knowing what's acceptable and what is not in the digital world. Also, he's going against his investor's interested, because some of these domains could've brought in millions of dollars, but he wants to do his buddies favors, and not honor what was promised. Edit: Maybe if there are several of us, we should try to see if we can have a class action lawsuit. Our hundreds of dollars were used by the Automattic for 3 months, that's a lot of money collectively, and they should not get away - there was no mentioning of any Founders when they took our money!

305 points by cschidle 10y ago

I've never understood why some random company is allowed to arbitrate the domain registration and make $$$ out of it. Feels like it's kinda not in the spirit of the internet.

kyriakos 10y ago
It's not much different from people hoarding dictionary domains and selling them for insane amounts. But I understand your point and the whole system is rotten. First come first served is no longer viable.
- prawn 10y ago
  What is viable though? First come, first served enables domainers. Jacking up annual domain prices can be harsh on businesses in poorer countries. Public auctions for each new and released domain might have merit, but will still attract domainers and preclude many fresh companies.
  - kyriakos 10y ago
    I never said I have a solution I just know that the current situation is not good either.
lmm 10y ago
Anyone can run their own DNS root, but good luck getting people to use it. And ICANN has a history of deliberately colliding with TLDs used by competing services.
- Senji 10y ago
  Browser vendors and OS makers should do an end run around ISPs and ICANN. Just agree between themselves ( what are they like 10? tops) and fork the current registries. Then issue domains themselves. What are the plebs gonna do? Go the the non existent alternative?
  - allendoerfer 10y ago
    Google already controls chunks of every platform involved, some of them are very large, (network, domain registry, OS, browser, search engine, web hosting/content delivery) and eats away the importance of domains bite by bite. Non-tech people do not type in domains anymore, they search for them. URLs are getting hidden away further and further.
  - hueving 10y ago
    The DNS resolver is configurable, not hard coded. Forcing a switch would require OS vendors to ignore the resolver issued via DHCP, which would not work on many corporate networks that block outbound DNS not via their resolver.
    - bagosm 10y ago
      Maybe then just prefer if reachable? Soon enough it's the new standard.
      - ygaels_armpit 10y ago
        Yes I think any new system would have to see the old one grandfathered (give the current incumbents time to find something useful to do instead of jetting off to conferences all year). Browsers/OS would be reasonably easy in most circumstances, but there are embedded devices, load-balancing configurations, other esoteric uses for DNS (text records, mail etc) that'd have to be considered as well.
        Senji 10y ago
        An attack surface is ISPs and Governments strongarming them to use their own DNS roots which can then be plugged into the "new" root servers conforming with the theoretical browser vendor, os vendor alliance.
      - __jal 10y ago
        Pick your favorite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root There are others. But no, they don't become the new standard.
jklinger410 10y ago
It is a complete state-sponsored racket. There's no way around it. You pay an upfront fee to ICANN and probably some kind of recurring tax and you get to create a TLD. You then sell this TLD for higher prices than ICANN and run a very simple service that processes the transactions. You then take anything lower than a 5 or 6 letter domain that is a word in the english language and define it as a "premium" domain and charge obscene prices for those domains. The fee you charge for the domain based on this system is recurring. So instead of buying milk.com for $10k and selling it for $12k you already own milk.blog by default and if someone wants to register it you charge $500 a year. NOT TO MENTION this whole system is like a slap in the face to a certain kind of "domainers." People who buy domains based on their perceived value, park them, and then try and resell them for more money. There are many millions of dollars wrapped up in this other, also stupid racket. These companies got so bold as to get their domains "valued" and then bet on the value of their company based on their holdings like some type of stock filled with mortgages. This new system is like cutting directly into that strategy but I guess ICANN gets some of the money this way.
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  I have a last name that's extremely uncommon. MyLastName.com was available for many, many years. I thought about buying it a few times in the last 20 or so years but I don't have any use for it so I didn't. Two years ago it was bought by a domain squatter who was probably iterating through the white pages. Now that I can't have it I want it (I guess human nature) but they are asking like $2k for it. It seems somehow "unfair" that "my" last name is being "held hostage" by some faceless company that's just trying to make a quick buck.
  - jeremymcanally 10y ago
    Start a business with your name, trademark it in a certain domain, file a claim with ICANN. Long process, but might be cheaper. :)
    - eximius 10y ago
      This is, in general, about as sleazy as the squatter.
gambler 10y ago
DNS is a rotten system. From censorship, to ddos attacks, to squatting, to privacy issues with whois, to messed up financial incentives. It's a shame that DNS is a critical part of the internet infrastructure. We should work on getting rid of it.
- dasil003 10y ago
  what's the alternative?
  - achr2 10y ago
    A Blockchain.
    - jff 10y ago
      Poe's Law, Bitcoin sub-clause, strikes again
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - pessimizer 10y ago
        It is a distributed ledger; calling blockchain here is certainly not crazy-talk.
    - achr2 10y ago
      I mean, I was being a bit facetious, but there are actual proposals for blockchain backed DNS. [1] https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain
      - __jal 10y ago
        Yes, this is an application where the blockchain wouldn't necessarily be stupid. I don't see it as necessary, to be honest, and given the frequency with which people lose access to their wallets/have them stolen, I'm not entirely sure the bulk of domain owners would want bearer instruments to be the sole way to manage (or lose) their domain.
charonn0 10y ago
Because running a global TLD is a non-trivial and costly public service to provide, so the TLD sponsor is allowed to monetize it.
- vidarh 10y ago
  It really isn't that hard (source: designed and ran the development team that built the initial .name platform, before we outsourced it to Verisign; Verisign now owns it outright), and you can contract any number of operators to do it for you. There certainly is the issue that most of these TLDs aren't very interesting to most people, though. With low demand, I certainly understand why they want to be able to milk the few names that people find attractive.
criddell 10y ago
Say you owned ensiferum.com. Should you be allowed to sell subdomains and make money out of it? That's really all they are doing.

coldcode 10y ago

I signed up too and then saw the ridiculous prices and policies. Happy to stick with .com for 10 bucks.

jamchris 10y ago
Like the author I would also have no problem in paying a few of several hundred dollars as an initial registration one time fee, for a domain like chris.blog. I would really prefer using chris.blog instead of buying a .com domain like this-is-chriss-development-blog.com, just because any shorter .com domain is already taken.
- cdubzzz 10y ago
  It's still possible to come up with vanity domains using common TLDs. You just need to have some wiggle room (: I replaced a single letter in the shortened version of my own name and got a .net for it just a few months ago.
- cschidle 10y ago
  Right on. While I said "I appreciate a good name", I'm truly a sucker for a good name. Branding is huge, even when it's a personal brand. So yes, a one-time fee of $250-$1,000 feels ok to me, especially considering what Automattic paid for the TLD.

overcast 10y ago

They are doing this a lot with more and more of the new TLDs. Defeats the purpose of even bothering with them. Create more, to open up the domain space, make it cost prohibitive, so we're back to where we started.

rlpb 10y ago
> Create more, to open up the domain space... Adding TLDs doesn't open up the domain space; it closes it. The domain name system was designed to expand downwards, by adding more hierarchies. Downwards is where the space is. Expanding upwards is limited. The racket ran out of space selling keywords inside .com, where this was originally meant to be confined. Once they finish selling keywords at the root, that'll be it.
- taftster 10y ago
  I don't know. I don't think nested hierarchies is a thing. I mean, I guess you have the "Go Network" go.com example (disney.go.com). But I think the ship has sailed for deeper hierarchies. I really don't want an email address that is: taftster@foo.bar.baz.example.com
  - rlpb 10y ago
    I didn't make any judgement on whether it is a good or bad thing. The fact remains: don't delude yourself into thinking that adding a TLD free-for-all opens up the space. It doesn't. It closes it. The current "problem" stems from the fact that .coms are full. Once the TLD space is full, the same problem will remain. Everyone who wants one cannot have a memorable name in a flat namespace. There are too many people and there is too little room.
    - Whitestrake 10y ago
      When that happens, I fully expect that as the value of available domain names go up, people will invest in expensive domains (blah.com) in order to treat them as "2LD"s and sell its 3LDs (xyz.blah.com). But it won't happen while there are 2LDs available for the exact reasons stated above (nobody wants a subdomain when they can have an actual domain).

octasimo 10y ago

I've also got stood up with fashion.blog. Full refund and no invitation to auction. I haven't even bothered to ask for details, because that was their way of assessing and freezing the domain names that people would be interested in buying.

SamBam 10y ago
> because that was their way of assessing and freezing the domain names that people would be interested in buying. Indeed. Seems like it would be easy for them to use the auction to automatically see "300 people tried to claim this domain, it must be a good one, let's make it premium." They wouldn't need to spend a penny doing market research to select the premium names themselves.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  That's the feeling I got as well. The answers were really dodgy too. But such an ethically challenged practice would reflect poorly on the WordPress brand and you wouldn't want your low level employees to know about it since they could easily leak it. So maybe the CS reps weren't dodgy so much as trying to keep customers happy with very little information available to them. Maybe one way you could do it is create a tiny subsidiary to manage the reservations/registration. The subsidiary can be created under the pretenses of shielding the parent company from legal liability so you can both limit the team size, the scope of their purpose and isolate them from the parent company. Build the backend to provide information on reservations but accessible only to subsidiary financial management/officers and parent company employees whose wealth is tied to the success of shares in the company. Officially only share the total number of reservations and financials with the parent company via something documented like email. Then the backend reporting is decoupled from the reservations that come in for early access. If you setup a distinct founder program and establish enough time between the reservation announcement and when you give normal employees early access you don't even have to worry about your employees snatching up the most profitable ones. The first the CS reps hear about it is when a reply/complaint comes in from one of the cancellations. When asked their supervisor only knows that the name came over as one of the early access reservations from the parent company. The CS reps don't have enough information to draw conclusions because they don't get access to numbers and an early access employee program provides plausible deniability if the reps start asking questions. That was kind of a fun mental exercise. I've seen some real cloak and dagger stuff from people but those were always at small companies. I have no idea how plausible any of that would be, especially in companies this big. But it would be interesting to see what would happen if we had a fairly unique but uninteresting domain that wasn't obviously gibberish and a a lot of us put in a reservation for it at random intervals to create a perception of interest and popularity.

dmm 10y ago

When the .beer tld came out I tried to buy "california.beer" as soon as domains were available to the public. The site wouldn't let me buy even though it was listed as available. It was finally registered by a squatter months later. I wouldn't be surprised if the good names were kept in reserve and sold through special channels.

echelon 10y ago

This seems to have become the de facto pattern with the new gTLD system. A company swoops in and buys a namespace for $200k (or more if there is a competitive bid), and they effectively turn into the cartel equivalent of the domain squatter. You can register your new gTLD for anywhere between $1 and $100, depending on what I suppose they expect their target demographic to be willing to pay. Dot horse is more expensive than dot webcam, for instance, and I imagine dot lawyer is more expensive than dot lol. However, if your domain name uses a word or phrase that happens to be in their "premium domain" dictionary, then they'll charge an elevated price based on heuristics similar to what yesteryear's domain squatters used. Some simple and concise domains can run hundreds of thousands of dollars. cheap.horse is $25/yr tiny.horse is $100/yr internet.horse is $1000/yr free.horse is "ask us" Controlling the TLD is the ultimate form of domain squatting. I wonder what will happen when some of these companies go under because they can no longer afford to pay off their debts? Will those that registered domain names lose them outright? Can someone else buy the gTLD and take them all over?

stephenr 10y ago
I wonder how much to buy "my.horse". Then I can setup a sole mailbox "look", and have it auto respond to any messages with "my horse is amazing". I wonder how may will get the joke.
- problems 10y ago
  This is worth it at any price.
- AndrewStephens 10y ago
  I have a .horse domain - I tried every permutation horse puns and in-jokes (my.lovely.horse, etc) but they were all taken by squatters or reserved for stupid prices. Eventually I settled for sheep.horse, which is easy to remember but not much else.
  - echelon 10y ago
    Nice! I bought jungle.horse and put my Donald Trump text to speech engine there. These domains are so ridiculous.

jeremymcanally 10y ago

This is very common with these new TLD's. At least they didn't give it to you for a year then jack up the price. I had jacki.party as a fun domain for my wife that she didn't end up using, but after a year the price went from like $29/yr to $2,495/yr. because they decided it was "premium." There was nothing my registrar could do because it was the domain registry who decided that, so I just let it lapse. Why is a very specific spelling (note the lack of "e") of a not terribly common name so expensive? No clue, but I'm guessing the same forces are at work (i.e., $$$).

pc86 10y ago
The problem is that it only takes a few hits at $2500/yr to make it worth it to screw a bunch of people out of an already overpriced domain. So if you serve 15,000 people with .party domains at $29/yr each, you only need 175 people to pay $2,495 and you've already made more money. I don't mind paying more for a domain, I might even pay a measurable amount of money every month for the right one, but trying to insist that jacki.party is worth $210/mo is bananas.
nkrisc 10y ago
I suspect that any domain that gets used becomes "premium."
duskwuff 10y ago
What registry was this? That's not supposed to be possible -- registries are only supposed to be able to designate domains as "premium" if they aren't registered yet.
btym 10y ago
Yikes. Just extended my lastn.ame domain hack to 2026.
shavingspiders 10y ago
That makes me feel very good that I locked in .party for 10 years and $3/year with Gandi.
TheGrumpyBrit 10y ago

TheGrumpyBrit 10y ago

I was keeping a close eye on .family for quite a while - I'm getting married next year, so mysurname.family would have been a good domain to have both for wedding planning and personal email accounts. When it finally came out, I eagerly went to my favourite registrar to try and buy it, and found that it's listed at over £1000. It's not a particularly common name either. Out of interest, I tried a few other surnames off the top of my head, and it seems that pretty much any domain that could be somebody's surname has been bumped up massively. Of course, they have every right to do that, but the people buying these domains are individuals - very few of these domains are ever going to have a business use. To me, it looks like they've done nothing more than price themselves out of the whole point of their TLD. Instead, I'm going to wait out the expiry of the .com, which isn't being squatted as such, but it is owned by a company for a single software product of theirs which looks like it was written in the 90s and requires you to send a cheque if you want to buy it. The last update was helpfully reminding visitors that the app wouldn't be compatible with the upcoming OS X Lion. One day, they'll stop renewing that domain...my time will come.

vxNsr 10y ago
My family name is $20/year!! Now I need to decide if it's worth supporting this cartel...

AndrewStephens 10y ago

As a fellow very-common-name sufferer, I long ago gave up any hope of getting a vanity domain name (how I wish I had paid the $25 back in 1996). Most of the new TLD seem pretty scammy to me, the costs in obtaining and running most obscure TLDs far outweigh what could be got by paying customers actually waiting to run sites off them. I suspect that a lot of them are just hoping that enough large companies buy up kfc.blog, walmart.porn, etc to make a return on investment. Fleecing people who actually want the domains is just icing on the cake. I am somewhat of a hypocrite, I run my blog off https://sheep.horse/ https://sheep.horse/, but only because I thought that the .horse TLD was silly enough to be worth supporting.

TheGrumpyBrit 10y ago
That's exactly it. Brand protection companies like MarkMonitor will buy these up as a matter of course to protect their clients, and they'll do so at the inflated Early Access rates to boot. By the time the domains are released to the public, these companies have already made their profit.
- usrusr 10y ago
  At one point even their clients will realize that the value of owning {name}.{everything} is more finite than the number of possible values for {everything}. When this happens, TLD racketeers will be sitting on a well oiled money burning machine, because only few of those who are attracted by that kind of business are good at keeping expenses low in times of plenty. The end game for many squatting-TLDs will be an existential pricing standoff between the dying registrar and the very low number of users that were foolish enough to build a long term identity in one of its namespaces.
iampims 10y ago
At a USD200,000 price for a new TLD, it takes 2,000 domains at $100/year to break even. Of course there are other costs associated to running a TLD, but they probably don't scale linearly. So on a 5 year term, it might even be a small profitable business.
cdubzzz 10y ago

legohead 10y ago

I'll tell my TLD story. I was following .family for a long time, since my current "primary domain" is horrible and hard to say. <family name>.family sounded pretty awesome. There was that whole pre-registration BS but it is so convoluted and expensive I just waited till it went live. It did, and when I checked on my last name, it was set at $1200/year for a normally $30/year domain. This was when I was introduced to the idea of reserved domains in this new TLD system. So I emailed them and put forth my argument, that this TLD in particular is a bit unfair, considering I don't control what name I'm born with. I didn't think it would have any impact, because $$$. One day I got an email and they offered me to buy it for a one-time price of $1200 and then the renewal would be set at $30. I said no. There are so many TLDs now that it's easy to get a common-word, easy-to-say one.

Cpoll 10y ago
> that this TLD in particular is a bit unfair, considering I don't control what name I'm born with To be fair, it would also have been a bit unfair to the next guy with your last name if you had taken it.

Magicstatic 10y ago

Here is a message I received from Gandi.net regarding the .blog domain: ----------------- Hello, You are getting this email because you have performed a pre-order with your handle {redacted} for the domain name {redacted}. Unfortunately, this order is currently in error, because the domain name in question has been defined as Premium by the registry. This decision is of course beyond our control and frequently corresponds to a list of common and/or connotative words that allow registered to apply special rates to them. This means that in your case, we have placed the order in error, because the price that you initially paid is no longer the price that the registry is charging for it. If you would like to know the price, in order to eventually purchase it, then reply to this email, so that our support team can obtain that for you from the registry. As long as you are considering this, do not cancel your order, since this will cause you to lose your place in the waiting list. If, however, you no longer wish to register the domain, you can cancel it from the link provided below, and your prepaid account will be refunded for the order:

nfrmatk 10y ago
Good on Gandi for providing a straightforward response. Living up to their motto.

mikegedelman 10y ago

> Perhaps it's not fair to call this bait & switch. Really it was bait & refund The title of this article was a bait & switch.

cschidle 10y ago
I was being generous when I wrote that line. But I maintain that clearly stating it will go to auction then pulling the auction is a "switch".

chriswwweb 10y ago

The ICANN whois also does not give any information, there is just a copyright message from Nominet UK https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=chris.blog https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=chris.blog Maybe the domain got bought during the sunrise period by a copyright holder!? https://my.blog/launch-plan/ https://my.blog/launch-plan/

cschidle 10y ago
The reply I received from get.blog support (last image in the post) stated that "chris.blog ended up being part of the list of reserved domains that are not available for registration". So I imagine they'll either keep it internal or sell it as a premium domain.
- chriswwweb 10y ago
  Yeah right, you had mentioned in your P.S. two other names dave and matt, I did a whois for those two and got some information: https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=matt.blog https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=matt.blog https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=dave.blog https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=dave.blog So yes it seems it got reserved. I wonder why too. P.S. I'm a chris too ;) that's why im so interested in this, I own chris.lu but as it is a country tld this is not so good from a SEO point of view. I want to change if I find a better one, but haven't found one yet. Have fun with your new chris.lol :)

Terr_ 10y ago

I've long felt the only sane approach is to define country-level TLDs (via the UN or something) transition everything under them, and then let each legal jurisdiction handle (or mishandle) their own shit. While it's far less-convenient for global companies and "ignoring borders", it decentralizes the system. Compartmentalizing failure and allowing some kinds of competition.

tracker1 10y ago
You mean, like .co.uk, or .us???
- Terr_ 10y ago
  Basically, it'd mean the (virtually impossible) task of deprecating the non-country TLDs with X years before they stop working, and saying: "Okay, .us is managed by whatever infrastructure the USA sets up, and .uk is managed by whatever the UK sets up, etc." So the US might choose to allow cocacola.us, while the UK might have on a grouping scheme like cocacola.co.uk, and meanwhile North Korea refuses outright or insists on cocacoala.obeys.dear.leader.nk, whatever.
  - SapphireSun 10y ago
    Countries can break up, dissolve, or form too. I'm not sure that making all domains depend on things that exist in the real world is a good idea. They should depend on abstract ideas that are less liable to change and can be resold easily to different operators.
    - neoromantique 10y ago
      There is .su (Soviet Union) gTLD.
      - type0 10y ago
        As SapphireSun said, it's because .su is based on "abstract ideas that are less liable to change"!

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intrasight 10y ago

I fail to understand the purpose of these non-standard TLDs. Nobody is going to remember or type in such a domain, so you stuff is only going to be found by a web search - where a standard domain would be better. So why not just register a .com - which are also cheaper?

jamchris 10y ago
> So why not just register a .com Because the name you wish to register is not available as .com domain. > Nobody is going to remember or type in such a domain I don't think this is true, I live in Europe and we have tons of country tlds, people use and remember them. Also is chris.blog really so much longer to type then chris.com or a lot harder to remember? I don't agree. At first it might feel strange to type something else then .com but as I said in europe we have country tlds and it works well.
- pc86 10y ago
  > Also is chris.blog really so much longer to type then chris.com or a lot harder to remember? I don't agree. It depends on the audience. If you have a non-technical audience or you are e-commerce a .com is basically a necessity still.
  - Symbiote 10y ago
    Also in Europe, but I've seen adverts using .travel domains (which are a bit older than most), like egypt.travel and ecuador.travel. City domains, like sadiq.london. Admittedly, I can't remember any publicity of the weirder ones, like .lol or .xyz.
- eonw 10y ago
  I may be wrong and just speaking from experience, but Americans were really trapped in the .com/net/org for a long time. I think, because that's all we were exposed to... I didn't realize the depth and usage of CCTLDs until I moved to Europe, and saw them everywhere. When I gave my mom my first work email she added a .com after the .at at the end, and wondered why it never got to me.

charlesafinley 10y ago

I had this happen to me as well. I registered a domain directly with get.blog on the day that they first started accepting pre-registrations. I got an email a couple of days ago saying that I would be getting my money back, nothing about an auction. I asked for details because I too was expecting an auction. My response also came from the same guy ("Ran") who said that it wasn't available when my "application" was processed. The twist in this case? The domain I applied for is now pointing directly towards WordPress.com. So get.blog, owned by parent company Automattic, took the domain which had been made available for the public, and gave it to WordPress.com. I wonder what ICANN will have to say? SHADY AF.

smegel 10y ago

Don't give these scum your money, moral of the story is.

codebook 10y ago

In my case, my surname TLD exists like XXX.{surname}. So I bought it w/ my first name ==> firstname.surname . It's cool and I will keep it as long as I can. I agree with the OP. They seems to gather the popularity info by accepting pre-register requests. Is there any policy to ban this behavior? Shouldn't the TLD be publicly opened?

eonw 10y ago
technically its their property and theirs to do with as they please. though i disagree with the behavior. nothing is stopping you from reselling *.whatever.com and so forth. i wish i had my whole name as a domain, thats pretty awesome for you!

_Codemonkeyism 10y ago

"Perhaps it's not fair to call this bait & switch. Really it was bait & refund"

savanaly 10y ago
The article title was a bait and switch! Honestly, I don't know much about the domain registration business but I had always imagined it worked even suckier than the way he describes it working in this case.
- cschidle 10y ago
  When you hand over $250 and they hold it for 3 months with the promise of giving you a shot at an auction, then they cancel the auction... I still call that a "switch". Still haven't received the refund, by the way.

henvic 10y ago

In 2011 I paid for and registered o1.io (I really wanted 01.io, but back then it was not available to register domains containing only numbers on .io). The .io NIC web interface is really horrible and I ended up in an inconsistent state after making the "horrible" mistake of clicking the back button. Even though my Paypal account got charged, I received an email confirming I was the owner of the domain, and so on, I couldn't access my account. Next step I took was contacting them. I got ignored and after 7 days later they made a transaction reversal on Paypal and I never heard a word back from them, even though I have tried to contact. Some time later they made the o1.io domain a reserved one and so if I wanted it now I would have to pay thousands. What a shame.

logfromblammo 10y ago

At this point, this looks ever more akin to charging people to have their phone numbers listed in a phone book. If you don't know what a phone book is, it was the DNS-equivalent of the 1960s. You know those plastic-wrapped bricks of yellow paper that sometimes appear on your doorstep, that you just drop right into the recycling bin? Those things are actually phone books. The phone book is rather simple. Your individual given name or your business dba name is the dictionary key, and the phone number is the dictionary value. Your dictionary entry is automatically included, unless you paid to be "unlisted". That would keep your phone service provider from printing your name-number pair in their phone books. This approach is still viable. Every state has a database of corporate names and dba registrations. The secretary of state for Illinois, as an example, could make aaa-plumbing.corp.il.us resolve to the server address for "AAA Plumbing, Inc.", if that business chose to disclose it, or to a landing page otherwise. Likewise, zzz-towing.llc.il.us could resolve to the address for "ZZZ Towing, LLC". The US Patent and Trademark Office could do the same. Let lego.028.tm.us (and lego.009.tm.us, lego.041.tm.us, etc.) resolve to LEGO Juris A/S Corp's servers, so you can see a site about plastic building blocks, and let lego.005.tm.us resolve to American Lego Group Inc's server, so you can see a site about soy protein supplements. If you are Foobar LLC, you really shouldn't have to register "foobar.com" and "foobar.net" and "foobar.cc" and "foobar.co.uk" and "foobar.biz" and "foobar.info" and "foobar.sucks" and "foobar.pooky" and "foobar.booger". It isn't really elucidative, and does not help discoverability to have so many TLDs. The problem is that all the simple names have been mined out of the original TLDs, and there is no mechanism to resolve name collisions between Foobar LLC out of the US and Foobar GmbH in Germany. Whoever grabs "foobar.com" first gets to keep it, and the other is stuck trying to make some DNS entry that somehow relates to the company name. Adding a bunch of niche TLDs helps a bit, but not if the registrar can charge $1k/year for names. That's just ridiculous. You're not going to end up with all the Johns on the Internet getting their own john.something domain name that way. You just let the richest John on the Internet to have all the john.anything domain names.

mcguire 10y ago
"If you don't know what a phone book is, it was the DNS-equivalent of the 1960s. You know those plastic-wrapped bricks of yellow paper that sometimes appear on your doorstep, that you just drop right into the recycling bin?" You mean monitor stands?

ctingom 10y ago

I thought about buying coffee.blog but the fee was 100k per year! Insane!

andrewvijay 10y ago

I exclaimed 'wow 30 bucks?' when I saw 30. But then was shocked at 250. Fainted at the auction.

xchaotic 10y ago

Fwiw I snagged lech.blog at list price (so $30 + 220), I wouldn't pay a cent more, but my main problem is that I still have no access to the domain and, unless I am provoven (or refunded) otherwise, my domain registartion runs from 28th of October. Some email were sent from an unverified, unencrypted, unrelated domain - I nearly sent them to spam. They really need to sort out their internal processes.

yoodenvranx 10y ago

What is the long-term security/availability of those new tlds? If I register a .de domain today I am pretty sure that it will last a long time. But some of the new ones have a pretty sketchy vibe to it and I am not sure if I'd trust them enough to build a business on top of a .fancy domain

tobltobs 10y ago

I believe this new gTLD registries will manage it to finally sink their own boat. They are behaving so greedy that this new gTLD will never become popular. But then it wont take long until the first registries will close shop and this will be the end of this whole ngTLD scam. Because nobody will invest money to market a domain which might not exist anymore in a few years. There are some proposed safeguards built into the rules to prevent this meltdown caused by failing registries. But looking at how the industry currently behaves I don't think the will to stand to the rules and grab as much money as they can and leave the sinking ship asap.

smpetrey 10y ago

Who wants to help me create an .arse TLD? Who's with me!

ygaels_armpit 10y ago

This seems like it has gotten out of control - it is a basic key/value lookup, and we've created a rent-seeking, global series of registries to further suck good money from people. I worked briefly at a registry - it is money for jam. I don't know if the DNS protocol and all the related ones are fundamentally broken or need fixing, but it seems to me the problem is ICANN and the web that spreads out from under it. Why can't we just create an alternate ... distributed naming system, except without the rent-seeking/government ownership attached? I mean, this focus on how important the last bit is is ridiculous, the namespace doesn't have to be artificially restricted, beyond what the protocol might require. I guess I have a simplistic view and probably lack a bit of history, and there must be something preventing it. Do the top-level servers collude, and help to create something like ICANN, or was it taken out of people's hands etc?

robalfonso 10y ago
Legal/Govermental/Regulatory issues, someone has to deal with it. No single organization is going to deal with every country and their various legal issues. Registries and Registrars help abstract a lot of that (ICANN definitely doesn't want to deal with it). I don't disagree with the ease of storing a few million records or more. That is not the real overhead and is in reality only a fraction of whats involved.
- ygaels_armpit 10y ago
  Yes the added verification etc on top of the key/value lookup is the meat of it I guess. A complicated problem, I guess it'd be nice to somehow remove the money factor from a critical function of the net.
toyg 10y ago
> except without the rent-seeking/government ownership attached? Because people like money. This TLD business literally invented a new economic activity, and one with great margins. It doesn't really hurt anyone, has little to no cost, and makes a pretty penny. People With Money love stuff like this; if tomorrow they could invent a marketable TLD system for physical addresses, phone numbers or anything else, they'd jump at the chance. This is just how the capitalist world works: stuff exists to make money, everything else is a bonus.

0898 10y ago

I wanted a domain for a tax industry blog. I really wanted digital.tax, but it was held back as premium. Then, one day I was browsing 123reg and noticed it was available. I quickly looked at other registrars and it was still labeled as either taken or reserved. I placed my order and got the domain! I'm not sure how common these discrepancies are but I guess they do occur, so perhaps all hope is not lost.

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otterley 10y ago

The Registrar's policy language makes so many exceptions for themselves that you'd have better odds playing roulette: https://knockknockwhoisthere.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/dotblog-launch-and-registration-policy-2-0.pdf https://knockknockwhoisthere.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/dot... "We are not bound to select a winner among RFP respondents and may hold the Domain Name for future allocation." "We may activate and allocate to ourselves or third parties certain Domain Names (plus their IDN variants, where applicable) deemed necessary for the operation or the promotion of TLD." "the Registry makes no guarantees or warranties as to whether any applicant will be successful in registering any Registry Domain Name."

milesf 10y ago

Can someone think of a better way to do DNS? I remember when the internet was just a hosts file you had a copy of on your computer, so it is not outside the realm of possibilities to come up with something different. Something better.

Mao_Zedang 10y ago

What are the rules around changing annual registration fees for gTLDs?

ayh 10y ago
The new domain companies can raise them whenever they want and however much they want.

beardog 10y ago

Are gTLDs like this even worth it as a primary domain? In my limited experience, these kinds of domains tend to confuse people who are not technically oriented.

broodbucket 10y ago
For people who aren't technically oriented, anything that isn't .com/.net/.org (and regional variants like .com.au) are confusing, but there's no good domain names left there. If you're starting a website you're stuck with the choice of a terrible .com domain with shudder hyphens or something, or you can get something like yourbusiness.shopping or yourhandle.blog. It's gonna be a case-by-case thing whether one option is better than the other, but them's the breaks.

rubbingalcohol 10y ago

No one cares.

nikolay 10y ago

Same happened to me. They should expect a class action lawsuit as even though the list was not finalized, they should have said something. I had something like this happened before with WordPress.com - I have nikolay.wordpress.com, and then an employee took it way from me. After making a long discussion on TechChrunch about it, the employee decided to give it back to me. So, my point is, there's nothing new under the sun here - obviously Matt is the old Matt having double standards, and not knowing what's acceptable and what is not in the digital world. Also, he's going against his investor's interested, because some of these domains could've brought in millions of dollars, but he wants to do his buddies favors, and not honor what was promised. Edit: Maybe if there are several of us, we should try to see if we can have a class action lawsuit. Our hundreds of dollars were used by the Automattic for 3 months, that's a lot of money collectively, and they should not get away - there was no mentioning of any Founders when they took our money!