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Hi, just wanted to say how absolutely horrid this entire idea is. Domain name squatting and auctioning is already bad enough, and you're telling me we should gi

Hi, just wanted to say how absolutely horrid this entire idea is. Domain name squatting and auctioning is already bad enough, and you're telling me we should give one of the richest companies in the world thousands of dollars for a domain name for development. This is completely counter to the spirit of the internet, and spits in the face of open source and passionate hobby developers who don't have silicon valley stock vesting every quarter. Instead of trying to get these domain names into the hands of real developers at a reasonable price, you're going to sell them to the highest bidders, squatters looking for new investments, and corporations. Really not at all impressed by this, and it only serves as a stark reminder of the failed state of TLDs.

jpatokal 8y ago
I don't understand the bile here, nor the alternative. Today there are no .dev domains, so anything is an improvement: today you can't use them, tomorrow you can choose to if you think it makes sense. Re: price, say the .dev registrar decides to offer domains for a hobby-dev-friendly $1 flat fee, first come first served. Wouldn't that just immediately lead to a resale market where predatory squatters register all the domains and extract the market price from anybody who wants one?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- prepend 8y ago
  I think it’s not cool to offer “early bird” registration for thousands of dollars. So Google is endorsing that rich developers should get the best domain names? How are they reserving for themself? I think it would be cooler to have programming challenges or something neat. But a cash grab just seems kind of, lame I guess. I wouldn’t say I have bile, but I went from “this might be cool” reading the headline to “this is really stupid.”
  - Klathmon 8y ago
    But if you don't think the dutch auction style is a good one, what would your alternative be? Because the problem of resellers buying up TONS of domain names is a real one, and thus far a dutch auction style seems to be one good way to combat that (since buying 10000 names and selling 10% of them for an overall profit is a LOT more risky when getting them first means shelling out a LOT more money). A challenge or something would probably drive costs up across the board, and it would still exclude those who want to use the domains that might not be able to complete the challenge (IMO a worse situation), and other methods of "verification" would either be gameable or would exclude many devs. I don't know of any more "fair" way of allowing people to buy domains. Why should a hobbyist be able to buy "paypal.dev" when potentially thousands of devs could use that domain at paypal, and similarly "klathmon.dev" would be awesome to have for me, and it's pretty unlikely that someone will buy that out from under me with this scheme. Not to mention that the timeline here is literally half a month. After Feb 28th, there is no additional charge. So we are talking about 2 weeks of waiting.
  - boyobo 8y ago
    In an idealized economic model, "rich developers" will get their desired domain names anyway as they can offer a large sum of money to the "poor developers" to give up their domain name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem
18pfsmt 8y ago
I can't tell if your argument is that we should artificially limit TLDs to increase competition? Is that the point you are making? Literally: "We will create monopolies and increase competition." Unbelievable.

jpatokal 8y ago

I don't understand the bile here, nor the alternative. Today there are no .dev domains, so anything is an improvement: today you can't use them, tomorrow you can choose to if you think it makes sense. Re: price, say the .dev registrar decides to offer domains for a hobby-dev-friendly $1 flat fee, first come first served. Wouldn't that just immediately lead to a resale market where predatory squatters register all the domains and extract the market price from anybody who wants one?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
prepend 8y ago
I think it’s not cool to offer “early bird” registration for thousands of dollars. So Google is endorsing that rich developers should get the best domain names? How are they reserving for themself? I think it would be cooler to have programming challenges or something neat. But a cash grab just seems kind of, lame I guess. I wouldn’t say I have bile, but I went from “this might be cool” reading the headline to “this is really stupid.”
- Klathmon 8y ago
  But if you don't think the dutch auction style is a good one, what would your alternative be? Because the problem of resellers buying up TONS of domain names is a real one, and thus far a dutch auction style seems to be one good way to combat that (since buying 10000 names and selling 10% of them for an overall profit is a LOT more risky when getting them first means shelling out a LOT more money). A challenge or something would probably drive costs up across the board, and it would still exclude those who want to use the domains that might not be able to complete the challenge (IMO a worse situation), and other methods of "verification" would either be gameable or would exclude many devs. I don't know of any more "fair" way of allowing people to buy domains. Why should a hobbyist be able to buy "paypal.dev" when potentially thousands of devs could use that domain at paypal, and similarly "klathmon.dev" would be awesome to have for me, and it's pretty unlikely that someone will buy that out from under me with this scheme. Not to mention that the timeline here is literally half a month. After Feb 28th, there is no additional charge. So we are talking about 2 weeks of waiting.
- boyobo 8y ago
  In an idealized economic model, "rich developers" will get their desired domain names anyway as they can offer a large sum of money to the "poor developers" to give up their domain name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem

18pfsmt 8y ago

I can't tell if your argument is that we should artificially limit TLDs to increase competition? Is that the point you are making? Literally: "We will create monopolies and increase competition." Unbelievable.