6 ms·

> Verisign controls the registries for .com and .net, two of the internet’s most popular. All it does is administer a database and collect small sums from websi

by iameli 7y ago

> Verisign controls the registries for .com and .net, two of the internet’s most popular. All it does is administer a database and collect small sums from website owners, but with computing power rising and practically no marginal cost to adding another website to the database, the entire enterprise is a license to print money. In the third quarter of 2019, Verisign showed operating income of $205.6 million on $308.4 million in revenues, a profitability margin of 66.67 percent. This makes Verisign one of the most profitable companies in the world. I wish we lived in a world where a company being kinda monopolistic to make a 67% profit margin was enough to get me angry. If I hadn't read this, I'd have assumed they were making a lot more than $100 million a year profit. I see the real answer to this as the gTLD program: radically expand the number of domain-issuing entities and normalize companies operating on something other than .com.

byuu 7y ago
The problem is you can't move a domain once you've established it. I'm stuck on byuu.org for life. There's 15 years worth of links to it scattered across the web that would all go dark. Or more precisely, that would all suddenly point at spam. I could never get most of them updated. Even my subdomain from my previous host from 15 years ago is squatted to this day to serve up advertising. It's even aware of the software that I used to host there. One answer in my view is to remove the maximum length of prepayment for domains. Let us buy a domain for 100 years. Sure, that's $1,000. Maybe throw in a discount. But now we never have to worry about it again, as long as we live. Or at least, as long as the registry lives. It would never be squattable.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  What if a signed version of the content was always accessible, content addressable, in the Internet Archive? Does it matter than what the current namespace is?
  - toyg 7y ago
    > in the Internet Archive I would wager that 95% of web users do not even know that IA exists, let alone that they can use it. > Does it matter than what the current namespace is? As long as it's the only thing a browser will consider to retrieve information, yes. Which is why cool URIs don't change.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - markdown 7y ago
      > I would wager that 95% of web users do not even know that IA exist You are far too optimistic. It's probably more like 99.999999%
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - CrazyStat 7y ago
        > 99.999999% That would mean only 80-odd people know about IA, which seems a tad low :P
        markdown 7y ago
        LOL you're right. 99.9%
        m_eiman 7y ago
        > 99.999999% That would mean only 80-odd people know about IA, which seems a tad low :P I suppose that means that for most people, 99.9999% of the world's population don't know they exist. Interesting thought. I wonder which living person is known of by the largest percentage, and what that percentage is?
      - dehrmann 7y ago
        Hipsters are going to start measuring themselves in nines of obscurity.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    That's helpful. But branding, let alone domain names, is proof that namespaces matter. And have immense market value.
- ehmish 7y ago
  I'd be worried that whatever new tld I switched to would just as easily do the same thing (start charging stupid money for it), with a big enough tld at least then you'd have enough critical mass to stage a protest (e.g the .org thing here)
- pdimitar 7y ago
  There are many examples that I am currently too lazy to point at that clearly prove that "lifetime license" or "lifetime guarantee" are promises that are basically never kept. Your idea would turn into yet another way to extract even more money from customers without actually bringing additional value (or guarantees) to the table. :(
  - Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
    > "lifetime license" or "lifetime guarantee" are promises that are basically never kept. Not in the parachute selling business...
- Psyladine 7y ago
  Or separate the entity from the address. If you move, the post office forwards correspondence for 6 months and you are free to communicate an updated address to people who send you things and visit you. Whether this should be done and on what level will definitely be interesting. How sure am I that I want my old email address to be telling spammers where I 'live' now?
- dangerface 7y ago
  If you want a new domain and to keep your backlinks you can 302 the old domain to the new. > One answer in my view is to remove the maximum length of prepayment for domains. Let us buy a domain for 100 years. Makes sense to me but I don't think I have seen anything more than 10 years.
  - account42 7y ago
    > If you want a new domain and to keep your backlinks you can 302 the old domain to the new. Which will only work as long as you keep paying for the old domain.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    This would actually be a legitimate use of 301 - except 301 is a flawed concept because if it actually worked as designed it'd allow creeping devastation of the URL space. Woops can't use `example.org/index.html` ever again - someone 301'd that to `example.org/index.php`
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  This is a case where incentives, in the way that HNers use the term "incentives", don't work. The cost of a domain name is supposed to dis-incentivize buying up domain names simply to squat and/or serve ads, but clearly the price isn't high enough to dis-incentivize that. And we can't raise prices, because then it dis-incentivizes legitimate users. The problem is that the cost of domain names is a larger dis-incentive to legitimate users than it is to domain squatters. If a domain is $10 and a squatter sells domains for $100, then they only have to sell 1 in 10 domains to break even, so risk is very low: they don't have to really be overly concerned with only buying domains that will sell. And that's a simplistic model: the reality is that squatters have much more sophisticated valuation models, and have therefore have much higher profit margins, keeping their risk even lower. Sometimes domains sell for tens of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, the risk is very high for a legitimate user. If you have a company or a nonprofit, you basically have to choose a name that's marketable, memorable, relevant to your business/nonprofit, and unique, on the first try. This can literally make or break a business. And once you have that name, there's basically only one ideal URL for that name: yourbusiness.com or yournonprofit.org. So you have a supply of one and a demand of this might make or break my organization so cost can be pretty much "what is the maximum you can pay?". As such, if the max you can pay isn't enough for the domain squatter to want to sell, you just don't get the domain, and your organization gets a sub-standard web presence. I don't think we can overestimate the impact of this problem. I've worked for a company which owns your-business.com rather than yourbusiness.com (these are examples obviously--it would be unprofessional to give out actual names). Their marketing is very explicit about the dash, and potential customers still end up at the squatted non-dashed domain, which is only getting more expensive as the company becomes more successful. Luckily their value proposition is large enough, and clients sophisticated enough, that the friction of actually getting to the site isn't as large enough barrier to prevent growth. But if your business is a lower-margin business with less sophisticated clients, that would be a big enough barrier to prevent success entirely.
dorfsmay 7y ago
And registrars not charging 20+ USD per year for non-dot:com gTLD domains!
- captncraig 7y ago
  This is a big problem for me. I will buy novelty domains on sale, then abandon them after a year because the renewal price is so much higher than the 1st year promotion. At least com and net are fairly consistent year to year.
m463 7y ago
comcast, at&t and verizon have ~60% gross profit
- iameli 7y ago
  right, exactly - I'm ~200 times angrier at Comcast for their $22.7 billion in profits than I am at Verisign for their $100 million.
- tryptophan 7y ago
  'gross profit' has a very specific meaning that is unintuitive. It doesn't include fixed costs or taxes. It's much better to look at profit margin, which is what they actually make. For Comcast's case, it's like 11.5%.
arkitaip 7y ago
I suspect what the new gTLD program has really done is to make com/org/net seem even more trustworthy and premium because people can no longer keep up with the influx of new gTLDs ( all 1200 of them!).
- iameli 7y ago
  That's fair. I'm hoping this'll become less true over time as folks get used to there being lots of TLDs.
  - stubish 7y ago
    Is this happening? Actual question if there is someone here who measures this sort of thing. .io seems to have been accepted by the tech community, as the place to go when you can't get your .com or .net. Maybe .ai too. Are there any new gTLDs gaining acceptance in the wider community?
    - flxy 7y ago
      .gg has seen decent adoption in newer gaming related sites. But that's the only one I can think of right now.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - dingaling 7y ago
        Not only is .gg expensive but phonetically awkward on the telephone, something I didn't consider when registering my main domain years ago.
        philpem 7y ago
        Every time I see a ".gg" domain, I read it out as "gee-gee" -- a colloquial term for a horse...
    - 7y ago
swiley 7y ago
I have some familiarity with the .com/.net stuff Yes the registry is incredibly cheap to run, it’s the name servers themselves that are so expensive (from what I understand this is partially due to uptime requirements.)
- munk-a 7y ago
  Can you clarify a bit here? I believe most people, when executing a name look up, will usually just end up talking to one of a battery of ISP provided DNS servers. So while the registry's name servers need to feed those servers (and probably be heavily redundant and reliable) they wouldn't actually end up handling an insane amount of traffic. I'm actually a bit curious now if there are any sorts of requirements on how much traffic registrars need to be able to support or if everyone just over-resources and still makes enough money that the question has never been deeply investigated.
  - toast0 7y ago
    I don't know if there are stats available, but the requests per second has got to be huge. There are a ton of ISPs, and many of them run regional recursive servers. Each of those servers is going to see a ton of different domains that they need to query at the registry servers. Most registries are serving glue records with a 1-3 day TTL, but ISP caches may not have enough memory to keep the long tail names in cache for that long, and the long tail is long. There's millions of domain names to query the registry servers for.
  - amaranth 7y ago
    With a short TTL being standard to allow quick changes and such a wide range of domains you're going to get a lot of cache misses and have to go to the TLD to get the answer.
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    I worked for a Registry (.coop) and sat next to the lead, interestingly we (poptel) also bid for .org back in the day and lost to the shysters that are selling out Your right you have to have multiply redundant systems in four continents with everything running on HA kit with auto switch over diverse routing for power and data and I think hot standbys as well.
ardy42 7y ago
> I see the real answer to this as the gTLD program: radically expand the number of domain-issuing entities and normalize companies operating on something other than .com. However, that has another problem in that it increases the opportunity for fraud via. The benefit of a small number of tlds is that the most memorable part is typically the most unique and provides human-distinguishable identity, but that's out the window if you've normalized mybusiness.com, mybusiness.biz, mybusiness.business, mybustiness.bz, mybusiness.bus, etc. Typosquatting still exists with .com, but it's far more manageable that the above.
goodmachine 7y ago
> the entire enterprise is a license to print money Correct https://www.google.com/search?tbm=fin&q=NASDAQ:+QQQ&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgecRozi3w8sc9YSm9SWtOXmPU4OIKzsgvd80rySypFJLiYoOyBKT4uHj00_UNK8uTigyqsi14FrFy-zkGuzgGWikEBgYCAB-aW2VKAAAA&biw=1201&bih=835#scso=_WpQpXqv-E6Sl1fAP09ub4Ac9:0&smids=/m/07zlksb&wptab=COMPARE https://www.google.com/search?tbm=fin&q=NASDAQ:+QQQ&stick=H4...
baligad 7y ago
> the real answer to this Alternatively, I like the concept of Tor onion services, where the "domains" are acquired in a permissionless fashion. Names are just randomly generated ed25519 strings so there's no squatting and your address never expires. If you want a vanity domain, you just commit compute time to brute force something human-readable. [1] The obvious drawback is that you have to be a Tor client, but if you manage your own DNS, you could use Tor's DNSPort mode as a kind of forwarding target for non-Tor clients on your lan. [2] 1: https://www.jamieweb.net/blog/onionv3-vanity-address/ https://www.jamieweb.net/blog/onionv3-vanity-address/ 2: https://www.grepular.com/Transparent_Access_to_Tor_Hidden_Services https://www.grepular.com/Transparent_Access_to_Tor_Hidden_Se...

by iameli 7y ago

byuu 7y ago

The problem is you can't move a domain once you've established it. I'm stuck on byuu.org for life. There's 15 years worth of links to it scattered across the web that would all go dark. Or more precisely, that would all suddenly point at spam. I could never get most of them updated. Even my subdomain from my previous host from 15 years ago is squatted to this day to serve up advertising. It's even aware of the software that I used to host there. One answer in my view is to remove the maximum length of prepayment for domains. Let us buy a domain for 100 years. Sure, that's $1,000. Maybe throw in a discount. But now we never have to worry about it again, as long as we live. Or at least, as long as the registry lives. It would never be squattable.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
What if a signed version of the content was always accessible, content addressable, in the Internet Archive? Does it matter than what the current namespace is?
- toyg 7y ago
  > in the Internet Archive I would wager that 95% of web users do not even know that IA exists, let alone that they can use it. > Does it matter than what the current namespace is? As long as it's the only thing a browser will consider to retrieve information, yes. Which is why cool URIs don't change.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - markdown 7y ago
    > I would wager that 95% of web users do not even know that IA exist You are far too optimistic. It's probably more like 99.999999%
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - CrazyStat 7y ago
      > 99.999999% That would mean only 80-odd people know about IA, which seems a tad low :P
      - markdown 7y ago
        LOL you're right. 99.9%
      - m_eiman 7y ago
        > 99.999999% That would mean only 80-odd people know about IA, which seems a tad low :P I suppose that means that for most people, 99.9999% of the world's population don't know they exist. Interesting thought. I wonder which living person is known of by the largest percentage, and what that percentage is?
    - dehrmann 7y ago
      Hipsters are going to start measuring themselves in nines of obscurity.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  That's helpful. But branding, let alone domain names, is proof that namespaces matter. And have immense market value.
ehmish 7y ago
I'd be worried that whatever new tld I switched to would just as easily do the same thing (start charging stupid money for it), with a big enough tld at least then you'd have enough critical mass to stage a protest (e.g the .org thing here)
pdimitar 7y ago
There are many examples that I am currently too lazy to point at that clearly prove that "lifetime license" or "lifetime guarantee" are promises that are basically never kept. Your idea would turn into yet another way to extract even more money from customers without actually bringing additional value (or guarantees) to the table. :(
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
  > "lifetime license" or "lifetime guarantee" are promises that are basically never kept. Not in the parachute selling business...
Psyladine 7y ago
Or separate the entity from the address. If you move, the post office forwards correspondence for 6 months and you are free to communicate an updated address to people who send you things and visit you. Whether this should be done and on what level will definitely be interesting. How sure am I that I want my old email address to be telling spammers where I 'live' now?
dangerface 7y ago
If you want a new domain and to keep your backlinks you can 302 the old domain to the new. > One answer in my view is to remove the maximum length of prepayment for domains. Let us buy a domain for 100 years. Makes sense to me but I don't think I have seen anything more than 10 years.
- account42 7y ago
  > If you want a new domain and to keep your backlinks you can 302 the old domain to the new. Which will only work as long as you keep paying for the old domain.
- munk-a 7y ago
  This would actually be a legitimate use of 301 - except 301 is a flawed concept because if it actually worked as designed it'd allow creeping devastation of the URL space. Woops can't use `example.org/index.html` ever again - someone 301'd that to `example.org/index.php`
kerkeslager 7y ago
This is a case where incentives, in the way that HNers use the term "incentives", don't work. The cost of a domain name is supposed to dis-incentivize buying up domain names simply to squat and/or serve ads, but clearly the price isn't high enough to dis-incentivize that. And we can't raise prices, because then it dis-incentivizes legitimate users. The problem is that the cost of domain names is a larger dis-incentive to legitimate users than it is to domain squatters. If a domain is $10 and a squatter sells domains for $100, then they only have to sell 1 in 10 domains to break even, so risk is very low: they don't have to really be overly concerned with only buying domains that will sell. And that's a simplistic model: the reality is that squatters have much more sophisticated valuation models, and have therefore have much higher profit margins, keeping their risk even lower. Sometimes domains sell for tens of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, the risk is very high for a legitimate user. If you have a company or a nonprofit, you basically have to choose a name that's marketable, memorable, relevant to your business/nonprofit, and unique, on the first try. This can literally make or break a business. And once you have that name, there's basically only one ideal URL for that name: yourbusiness.com or yournonprofit.org. So you have a supply of one and a demand of this might make or break my organization so cost can be pretty much "what is the maximum you can pay?". As such, if the max you can pay isn't enough for the domain squatter to want to sell, you just don't get the domain, and your organization gets a sub-standard web presence. I don't think we can overestimate the impact of this problem. I've worked for a company which owns your-business.com rather than yourbusiness.com (these are examples obviously--it would be unprofessional to give out actual names). Their marketing is very explicit about the dash, and potential customers still end up at the squatted non-dashed domain, which is only getting more expensive as the company becomes more successful. Luckily their value proposition is large enough, and clients sophisticated enough, that the friction of actually getting to the site isn't as large enough barrier to prevent growth. But if your business is a lower-margin business with less sophisticated clients, that would be a big enough barrier to prevent success entirely.

dorfsmay 7y ago

And registrars not charging 20+ USD per year for non-dot:com gTLD domains!

captncraig 7y ago
This is a big problem for me. I will buy novelty domains on sale, then abandon them after a year because the renewal price is so much higher than the 1st year promotion. At least com and net are fairly consistent year to year.

m463 7y ago

comcast, at&t and verizon have ~60% gross profit

iameli 7y ago
right, exactly - I'm ~200 times angrier at Comcast for their $22.7 billion in profits than I am at Verisign for their $100 million.
tryptophan 7y ago
'gross profit' has a very specific meaning that is unintuitive. It doesn't include fixed costs or taxes. It's much better to look at profit margin, which is what they actually make. For Comcast's case, it's like 11.5%.

arkitaip 7y ago

I suspect what the new gTLD program has really done is to make com/org/net seem even more trustworthy and premium because people can no longer keep up with the influx of new gTLDs ( all 1200 of them!).

iameli 7y ago
That's fair. I'm hoping this'll become less true over time as folks get used to there being lots of TLDs.
- stubish 7y ago
  Is this happening? Actual question if there is someone here who measures this sort of thing. .io seems to have been accepted by the tech community, as the place to go when you can't get your .com or .net. Maybe .ai too. Are there any new gTLDs gaining acceptance in the wider community?
  - flxy 7y ago
    .gg has seen decent adoption in newer gaming related sites. But that's the only one I can think of right now.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - dingaling 7y ago
      Not only is .gg expensive but phonetically awkward on the telephone, something I didn't consider when registering my main domain years ago.
      - philpem 7y ago
        Every time I see a ".gg" domain, I read it out as "gee-gee" -- a colloquial term for a horse...
  - 7y ago

swiley 7y ago

I have some familiarity with the .com/.net stuff Yes the registry is incredibly cheap to run, it’s the name servers themselves that are so expensive (from what I understand this is partially due to uptime requirements.)

munk-a 7y ago
Can you clarify a bit here? I believe most people, when executing a name look up, will usually just end up talking to one of a battery of ISP provided DNS servers. So while the registry's name servers need to feed those servers (and probably be heavily redundant and reliable) they wouldn't actually end up handling an insane amount of traffic. I'm actually a bit curious now if there are any sorts of requirements on how much traffic registrars need to be able to support or if everyone just over-resources and still makes enough money that the question has never been deeply investigated.
- toast0 7y ago
  I don't know if there are stats available, but the requests per second has got to be huge. There are a ton of ISPs, and many of them run regional recursive servers. Each of those servers is going to see a ton of different domains that they need to query at the registry servers. Most registries are serving glue records with a 1-3 day TTL, but ISP caches may not have enough memory to keep the long tail names in cache for that long, and the long tail is long. There's millions of domain names to query the registry servers for.
- amaranth 7y ago
  With a short TTL being standard to allow quick changes and such a wide range of domains you're going to get a lot of cache misses and have to go to the TLD to get the answer.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  I worked for a Registry (.coop) and sat next to the lead, interestingly we (poptel) also bid for .org back in the day and lost to the shysters that are selling out Your right you have to have multiply redundant systems in four continents with everything running on HA kit with auto switch over diverse routing for power and data and I think hot standbys as well.

ardy42 7y ago

> I see the real answer to this as the gTLD program: radically expand the number of domain-issuing entities and normalize companies operating on something other than .com. However, that has another problem in that it increases the opportunity for fraud via. The benefit of a small number of tlds is that the most memorable part is typically the most unique and provides human-distinguishable identity, but that's out the window if you've normalized mybusiness.com, mybusiness.biz, mybusiness.business, mybustiness.bz, mybusiness.bus, etc. Typosquatting still exists with .com, but it's far more manageable that the above.

goodmachine 7y ago

> the entire enterprise is a license to print money Correct https://www.google.com/search?tbm=fin&q=NASDAQ:+QQQ&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgecRozi3w8sc9YSm9SWtOXmPU4OIKzsgvd80rySypFJLiYoOyBKT4uHj00_UNK8uTigyqsi14FrFy-zkGuzgGWikEBgYCAB-aW2VKAAAA&biw=1201&bih=835#scso=_WpQpXqv-E6Sl1fAP09ub4Ac9:0&smids=/m/07zlksb&wptab=COMPARE https://www.google.com/search?tbm=fin&q=NASDAQ:+QQQ&stick=H4...

baligad 7y ago

> the real answer to this Alternatively, I like the concept of Tor onion services, where the "domains" are acquired in a permissionless fashion. Names are just randomly generated ed25519 strings so there's no squatting and your address never expires. If you want a vanity domain, you just commit compute time to brute force something human-readable. [1] The obvious drawback is that you have to be a Tor client, but if you manage your own DNS, you could use Tor's DNSPort mode as a kind of forwarding target for non-Tor clients on your lan. [2] 1: https://www.jamieweb.net/blog/onionv3-vanity-address/ https://www.jamieweb.net/blog/onionv3-vanity-address/ 2: https://www.grepular.com/Transparent_Access_to_Tor_Hidden_Services https://www.grepular.com/Transparent_Access_to_Tor_Hidden_Se...