5 ms·

What's stopping a gTLD owner, .foo to get a bunch of customers onboard with $1.99/year deal and then 5 years later, increase that to $49.99/year? Surely, people

What's stopping a gTLD owner, .foo to get a bunch of customers onboard with $1.99/year deal and then 5 years later, increase that to $49.99/year? Surely, people who've built businesses on top of their .foo domains will fork up. Any laws preventing this?

techsupporter 6y ago
> What's stopping a gTLD owner... Nothing, absent a provision in the registration contract to the contrary, except the risk of everyone fleeing. > Any laws preventing this? No. Remember that [ccTLD - I originally wrote gTLD but those are a different thing, as corrected below] are assigned to the countries that they represent (or, in this case, the country that holds sovereignty over the named territory) so subject to their jurisdiction and there’s no real motivation for a country to pass such a law.
- axaxs 6y ago
  Minor correction...that's ccTLD, which .io is. And you're right about the rest. But gTLDs are basically every other TLD that's not a country code.
  - AndyMcConachie 6y ago
    There are also sponsored TLDs(.edu, .gov), generic restricted(.biz), and the single infrastructure TLD .arpa. https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
axaxs 6y ago
At least for the old TLDs, the ICANN contract specified the max it could be raised each year. I want to say it was 10 or 15 percent anually. Not sure about the new gTLDs but I'd imagine they have similar provisions.
- Macha 6y ago
  No, the new ones do not have such a provision and even some of the old ones (.org, .biz, .info) have renegotiated their contracts to eliminate that requirement
  - axaxs 6y ago
    Thanks for the info. It's been a while since I've been in the biz.
LaCiteDesAnges 6y ago
> What's stopping a gTLD owner, .foo to get a bunch of customers onboard with $1.99/year deal and then 5 years later, increase that to $49.99/year? Bad image and massively losing the original customers. >Any laws preventing this? No, the gTLDs are allocated by ICANN which is a non-profit based in the US. As a whole, the domain name market follows very economically liberal rules.
- zzanak 6y ago
  What exactly do you mean by liberal rules? Is lobbying part of that? I just remember that ICANN board was part of a recent .org story [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23878508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23878508
  - LaCiteDesAnges 6y ago
    I meant "economically liberal" as in "governed by capital, companies and other entities (such as reselling platform) that follow market dynamics rather than state rules", in the european sense.
underwater 6y ago
It probably doesn't make too much sense from a business perspective. Domains are dominated by the long tail. Some people have built multi-million dollar brands off the TLD, but how do you raise prices to take advantage of that without losing the 100,000 other registrations that will just churn away? In your example there's a fair bet they'd lose 99% of their existing user base, and kill any new use acquisition.
- paulgb 6y ago
  > Some people have built multi-million dollar brands off the TLD, but how do you raise prices to take advantage of that without losing the 100,000 other registrations that will just churn away? Is there anything to stop them from raising prices on the most established domains while keeping the long tail at the same price? E.g., some of the new TLDs already have "premium" pricing for dictionary word domains, is there anything stopping them from raising the price on dictionary domains after someone has started using them?
  - ryan29 6y ago
    I’ve been trying to find an example of someone having a domain reclassified to premium while it’s registered and haven’t been able to. I think that would signal the end of that TLD. I know I’d never buy one after hearing about that.
    - akadruid1 6y ago
      We pre-registered a dictionary .london domain we had a trademark on for £200 as a potential switch from the longer .co.uk we were using. When it came to sunrise, our registrar told us that .london told them there was an error and our domain hadn't actually been pre-registered but was now available for £5000. I consider it fortunate that we got the early warning before investing money in rebranding.
Symbiote 6y ago
I think this is already common, especially on the new wave of gTLDs. I registered a ".plus" domain for $2 a year for two years. It made a decent domain hack for a project. After two years, the renewal price became $20-ish. The project had a new name by then, so I didn't renew. The same happened for a personal Chinese domain (.网站 I think) that I had for a couple of years while I was learning Chinese.
Ayesh 6y ago
Nothing really. Even ccTLDs can freely change the pricing scheme. You are pretty much bound to what the registry can do. Take it away, hike the price up, etc.
gravitas 6y ago
To put an example to the other comments, look up the history of the XYZ domain - in a nutshell, they had a fire sale selling domains for pennies to gain market share. Besides normal people, three groups descended upon it: spammers, squatters and hackers. 6 years later and the entire .xyz space is blocked in Enterprise firewalls (source: my workplace) due to that behaviour, preventing me from getting to valid tech sites on the TLD. The XYZ image is still tarnished from cheap domain fire sales at the beginning of it's life - I'd never pay $50 for anything in .xyz today. To contrast, the .io space entered at what, $50 USD? and continues to be expensive to maintain year over year, providing a natural monetary resistance barrier to the same three groups of people (spammers, squatters and hackers) and seems to enjoy a healthy respect amongst internet users; most consider it a tech-type domain space with tech worker dollars buying the domains for real sites, I even owned one for a brief period when they came out.
- rukshn 6y ago
  Same thing happened to me but with an .icu domain, it’s always better to buy an expensive domain extension than a cheap one https://ruky.me/2020/12/15/dont-buy-a-icu-domain/ https://ruky.me/2020/12/15/dont-buy-a-icu-domain/
  - gravitas 6y ago
    While I only named .xyz above, my (enterprise) company blocks several other TLDs as well like .info, I'll check .icu when I'm back after holiday but would not doubt it's blocked. Corporate IT subscribes to some sort of hosted service, I would not doubt other companies are using this same service (name-brand).
    - ryan29 6y ago
      Any idea why .info is blocked? I always considered it to be ok since it’s an ogTLD.
      - gravitas 6y ago
        I think it's just part of some generic category of strict blocking used by the hosted service - there's a lot of other stuff blocked, we generally don't get reasons as users other than it being the corporate security posture. We are a business partner of many firms (some have high security due to their needs) so our company trends in that direction - maintaining compliance is a big deal, entire team(s) manage it at various levels.
howlgarnish 6y ago
Nothing, and .space did pretty much exactly this: $1.99 first year, $9.99 renewal, now yanked up to $20+/year. Existing domains were grandfathered to the old pricing if and only if you noticed and complained about the bait and switch.
wiggler00m 6y ago
You can buy [x] years in advance, no?

techsupporter 6y ago

> What's stopping a gTLD owner... Nothing, absent a provision in the registration contract to the contrary, except the risk of everyone fleeing. > Any laws preventing this? No. Remember that [ccTLD - I originally wrote gTLD but those are a different thing, as corrected below] are assigned to the countries that they represent (or, in this case, the country that holds sovereignty over the named territory) so subject to their jurisdiction and there’s no real motivation for a country to pass such a law.

axaxs 6y ago
Minor correction...that's ccTLD, which .io is. And you're right about the rest. But gTLDs are basically every other TLD that's not a country code.
- AndyMcConachie 6y ago
  There are also sponsored TLDs(.edu, .gov), generic restricted(.biz), and the single infrastructure TLD .arpa. https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

axaxs 6y ago

At least for the old TLDs, the ICANN contract specified the max it could be raised each year. I want to say it was 10 or 15 percent anually. Not sure about the new gTLDs but I'd imagine they have similar provisions.

Macha 6y ago
No, the new ones do not have such a provision and even some of the old ones (.org, .biz, .info) have renegotiated their contracts to eliminate that requirement
- axaxs 6y ago
  Thanks for the info. It's been a while since I've been in the biz.

LaCiteDesAnges 6y ago

> What's stopping a gTLD owner, .foo to get a bunch of customers onboard with $1.99/year deal and then 5 years later, increase that to $49.99/year? Bad image and massively losing the original customers. >Any laws preventing this? No, the gTLDs are allocated by ICANN which is a non-profit based in the US. As a whole, the domain name market follows very economically liberal rules.

zzanak 6y ago
What exactly do you mean by liberal rules? Is lobbying part of that? I just remember that ICANN board was part of a recent .org story [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23878508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23878508
- LaCiteDesAnges 6y ago
  I meant "economically liberal" as in "governed by capital, companies and other entities (such as reselling platform) that follow market dynamics rather than state rules", in the european sense.

underwater 6y ago

It probably doesn't make too much sense from a business perspective. Domains are dominated by the long tail. Some people have built multi-million dollar brands off the TLD, but how do you raise prices to take advantage of that without losing the 100,000 other registrations that will just churn away? In your example there's a fair bet they'd lose 99% of their existing user base, and kill any new use acquisition.

paulgb 6y ago
> Some people have built multi-million dollar brands off the TLD, but how do you raise prices to take advantage of that without losing the 100,000 other registrations that will just churn away? Is there anything to stop them from raising prices on the most established domains while keeping the long tail at the same price? E.g., some of the new TLDs already have "premium" pricing for dictionary word domains, is there anything stopping them from raising the price on dictionary domains after someone has started using them?
- ryan29 6y ago
  I’ve been trying to find an example of someone having a domain reclassified to premium while it’s registered and haven’t been able to. I think that would signal the end of that TLD. I know I’d never buy one after hearing about that.
  - akadruid1 6y ago
    We pre-registered a dictionary .london domain we had a trademark on for £200 as a potential switch from the longer .co.uk we were using. When it came to sunrise, our registrar told us that .london told them there was an error and our domain hadn't actually been pre-registered but was now available for £5000. I consider it fortunate that we got the early warning before investing money in rebranding.

Symbiote 6y ago

I think this is already common, especially on the new wave of gTLDs. I registered a ".plus" domain for $2 a year for two years. It made a decent domain hack for a project. After two years, the renewal price became $20-ish. The project had a new name by then, so I didn't renew. The same happened for a personal Chinese domain (.网站 I think) that I had for a couple of years while I was learning Chinese.

Ayesh 6y ago

Nothing really. Even ccTLDs can freely change the pricing scheme. You are pretty much bound to what the registry can do. Take it away, hike the price up, etc.

gravitas 6y ago

To put an example to the other comments, look up the history of the XYZ domain - in a nutshell, they had a fire sale selling domains for pennies to gain market share. Besides normal people, three groups descended upon it: spammers, squatters and hackers. 6 years later and the entire .xyz space is blocked in Enterprise firewalls (source: my workplace) due to that behaviour, preventing me from getting to valid tech sites on the TLD. The XYZ image is still tarnished from cheap domain fire sales at the beginning of it's life - I'd never pay $50 for anything in .xyz today. To contrast, the .io space entered at what, $50 USD? and continues to be expensive to maintain year over year, providing a natural monetary resistance barrier to the same three groups of people (spammers, squatters and hackers) and seems to enjoy a healthy respect amongst internet users; most consider it a tech-type domain space with tech worker dollars buying the domains for real sites, I even owned one for a brief period when they came out.

rukshn 6y ago
Same thing happened to me but with an .icu domain, it’s always better to buy an expensive domain extension than a cheap one https://ruky.me/2020/12/15/dont-buy-a-icu-domain/ https://ruky.me/2020/12/15/dont-buy-a-icu-domain/
- gravitas 6y ago
  While I only named .xyz above, my (enterprise) company blocks several other TLDs as well like .info, I'll check .icu when I'm back after holiday but would not doubt it's blocked. Corporate IT subscribes to some sort of hosted service, I would not doubt other companies are using this same service (name-brand).
  - ryan29 6y ago
    Any idea why .info is blocked? I always considered it to be ok since it’s an ogTLD.
    - gravitas 6y ago
      I think it's just part of some generic category of strict blocking used by the hosted service - there's a lot of other stuff blocked, we generally don't get reasons as users other than it being the corporate security posture. We are a business partner of many firms (some have high security due to their needs) so our company trends in that direction - maintaining compliance is a big deal, entire team(s) manage it at various levels.

howlgarnish 6y ago

Nothing, and .space did pretty much exactly this: $1.99 first year, $9.99 renewal, now yanked up to $20+/year. Existing domains were grandfathered to the old pricing if and only if you noticed and complained about the bait and switch.

wiggler00m 6y ago

You can buy [x] years in advance, no?