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The “.ro” Gold Rush (2018)
- lixtra 8y ago> If you want a really good domain, you can end up paying 500EUR per year for it. Can't you transfer it to a different reseller in the first year? You should be able to switch resellers with your domain. In worst case, you can start your own reseller.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Eek 8y agoyeah, you can switch resellers, so the info in the article is not corect.
- w1nst0nsm1th 8y agoCorect is not correct. (Sorry.)
- ilogik 8y agoI'm from Romania, and my firstname.ro was available late last year, but someone else bought it...I don't have a problem with that...I was willing to pay 50 euros, since it's a common name, I assume it went for a lot more. I don't understand why it would be 500 euros/year. Once you bought it, it's yours, you can renew it for 9/year.
- charlesdm 8y agoI got firstname.be a while back, and I did pay more for it than 50 euros. Guess it depends on how much you want it -- I'd been waiting nearly 16 years until the domain finally expired. Didn't really feel like waiting another 16 years... :)
- hycaria 8y agoAll this and not even a drop of css!
- charlesdm 8y agoHey, it's in development !
- stevekemp 8y agoI've had steve.org.uk for a good few years. Then I moved to Finland, and saw that steve.fi was due to expire in about four months. Believe me I hammered their registrar the day the domain expired, looking to purchase it. Of course it then went into a redemption-state. But eventually, it became mine. Thankfully the previous-owner was willing to let it go.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tantalor 8y agoIt's "unfair" to pay auction rates? How?
- brohee 8y agoIt's a private entity that reaps the benefits of what is a public good presumably...
- oftenwrong 8y agoA domain name is a private good, not a public good.
- idle_zealot 8y agoCan you clarify what you mean by that? Would you say that ICANN "owns" all domain names, then sells them in bundles, making them private goods?
- hexane360 8y agoIt's an excludible good in the economic sense, but the value wasn't created by the private company, but by the public WWW itself. This is classic rent seeking.
- eugeniub 8y agoA domain isn't a private good until it's actually owned by a private party.
- tlholaday 8y agoThe exclusivity of the domain name is a public good. The right to use the domain name is a private, transferable good. Were the auction site operated by Romania, the value of courses.ro would be determined by auction, paid by a willing buyer, and received by the Romanian polity. Instead, the Romanian polity receives 300EUR as an entrance fee to a race-track where luck is significant in determining the winner. There is nothing in the linked article suggesting that the number of entrants is limited.
- 8y ago
- gruez 8y agoisn't this the case for other tlds as well? pool.com does the same for all of the "main" tlds (.com, .net, .org, etc.)
- ohashi 8y agoThis just sounds like the old drop days, companies like snapnames, pool, namejet, godaddy have had backorders and snapping up as fast possible over APIs for ages. Only interesting bit is the policy change that caused it.
- charlesdm 8y ago3,000 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.
- StavrosK 8y agoWas it total, or per domain? The article doesn't clarify. 3000 total sounds super duper cheap.
- i_cant_speel 8y agoIt sounds like the license to be a reseller was just a single 3000 EUR upfront cost.
- mirceal 8y agodepends. 3000 is a lot of money in Romania
- valugi 8y agoI had an .ro domain and I let it die, since "for life" means only 15 years for nic.ro. thieves!
- pete23 8y agoI’d go for Moloch rather than Hanlon. This kind of zero-value race for the bottom feeders is too wasteful and tragic.
- RankingMember 8y ago> Because that’s not quite sustainable (hindsight is 20/20), they decided to switch all the domains they already sold for life to yearly subscriptions. What? At least in the U.S., if you sell something with a lifetime ownership term, you can't just renege and change the terms after the fact (well you can try, but you're asking to be sued).
- petre 8y agoIt was more along the lines of "it's yours for a one time fee, but we reserve the right to modify the registration agreement and the applicable fees at any time". In 2017 the government has decided to charge a yearly fee. It was never a lifetime subscription, but everyone assumed it was, since they weren't charged. https://web.archive.org/web/20160401102809/http://rotld.ro/portal/pages/en/1/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160401102809/http://rotld.ro/p...
- gweinberg 8y agoYou can if you're the government.
- kokokokoko 8y agoAlmost everything at this level of consumer has a TOS that allows the larger company/organization to basically change anything. And if it didn't most customers still wouldn't have the legal resources to challenge it. One of those interesting quirks of consumer free markets.
- Florin_Andrei 8y ago> most customers still wouldn't have the legal resources to challenge it The weaponization of the legal process. Those with the biggest armies win.
- benologist 8y agoFacebook liked to call it "Friendly Fraud" when they were stealing from children, the phrase suits a lot of shitty company behavior. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002596
- willsr 8y agoThis has been happening in the .au for years. One example: https://www.drop.com.au/ https://www.drop.com.au/ Registrars that run drop catch auction sites increase their odds by acquiring more connections to the Registry.
- sadris 8y agoI remember getting a .store domain one time. But I couldn't sign up for Alibaba with that tld. So I decided that only .com/net will be acceptable from now on.
- grepthisab 8y agoI had a .io for a project. Ended up getting internet from some corporate/government entities. Went in to demo, and *.io was blocked on their enterprise network! Will still with .com or .net as well.
- NowHiringYou 8y agoI would just be like, "oh you don't have Internet?" I thought you had a connection to the Internet. Then I might lookup the IP using my phone's connection and use that as the URL... And work into my speech the fact that they don't actually have the Internet :)
- jchw 8y agoIt'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 nameservers and a domain - that's it. Some registars support it but generally only with business subscriptions like Gandi's - so it's actually cheaper to buy it directly. But I still find it fascinating how not-automated it all was.
- Scarblac 8y agoPitcairn only has 50 inhabitants according to Wikipedia! Apparently there was a conflict between the islander who had management of the domain and the island's Council (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.pn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.pn).
- ethbro 8y agoThis should be posted anytime someone asks about using a non-standard TLD. Do you really want it badly enough to take on the extra risk?
- Rebelgecko 8y agoPitcairn Island is (was?) a bit of a mess. It probably sets records for the ISO region with: * most people with wikipedia articles per capita * the most sex offenders per capita * least variety of last names (something like half the people there have the last name Christian) Tom Christian, the previous .pn administrator, and his wife were apparently both shunned by the community when they spoke out against the sexual abuse of children and the claims of some of the men on the island that it was part of their traditional way of life. Most of the men convicted got off with slaps on the wrist because the island doesn't have the resources to support locking up a substantial part of its adult population.
- Tepix 8y agoDot 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.
- lgeorget 8y agoI wonder if domain names are not overvalued... I know your domain name is part of a brand but isn't it better to pick an original name than a common name to have people remember you? Especially now that the URL bar is also a search bar in most browsers. How many books a year are sold books.com? How many requests does search.com serves daily?
- pryelluw 8y ago.com domains are in a similar space as 1-800 numbers in terms of branding.
- jaysonelliot 8y agoYou'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 English words, and it's not particularly memorable.
- yesenadam 8y agoWell, -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".)