17 ms·
I registered my own name under one of the new gTLDs because it was $10 for a year and I thought, "why not?". I didn't do anything with it, partly because I rema
by robert_tweed 5y ago
I registered my own name under one of the new gTLDs because it was $10 for a year and I thought, "why not?". I didn't do anything with it, partly because I remained sceptical of the new gTLDs so didn't want to switch anything critical over to it, like my email address.
That is probably just as well, because a year later, it had been reclassified as a "premium" name. The renewal fee was over $400,000.
The fact that the owners of gTLDs can set pricing arbitrarily is the biggest problem in all this. A given domain name usually has no intrinsic value. What gives it value is the effort someone puts into marketing it.
With the new gTLDs, the domain operators are free to offer useful names that aren't trademarks, but are unavailable as .com or similar. Then should anyone build a successful business on that name, they are free to seek arbitrarily high rents.
There is no sense in which you can buy a domain name outright. Nor do the new gTLDs have any form of rent control. That is a fundamental problem with the system as it stands.
- iomcr 5y agoWas it {firstname}{lastname}.gtld or only one of those?
- robert_tweed 5y agoIt was just my last name. So in a way surprising it wasn't classified as premium to begin with. But the fact such a concept exists at all, and the goalposts can move at any time, is the troubling part.
- ziml77 5y agoI was looking at gTLDs when getting my own domain. I think I got lucky with the timing because all the desirable ones had already classified the name I wanted as being premium. Around the same price you're saying your renewal would have been. I ended up going with firstnamelastname.net. I don't thing it's a good idea for anyone to use a gTLD for anything serious. Even without the prices being uncapped, there's no guarantee that a gTLD will stick around. Would be crappy to lose a domain because the company who owns the gTLD went out of business or just didn't want to deal with handling domains anymore.
- CydeWeys 5y ago> Even without the prices being uncapped, there's no guarantee that a gTLD will stick around. Actually, there is a guarantee that a gTLD will stick around. ICANN correctly determined that this would be ruinous to the health of the Internet as a whole if entire TLD's worth of domains could simply disappear, hence they set up procedures to guard against it, including a required daily data escrow deposit from all TLD operators that can be used to spin up the TLD by another registry operator if the worst catastrophe were to happen (which, it should be pointed out, has never happened). For more info see: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/ebero-2013-04-02-en https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/ebero-2013-04-02-en https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/data-escrow https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/data-escrow The only TLDs that have ever ceased operation entirely, like .xperia in the linked articles, are closed brand TLDs that were never used for anything, were never available for external registration, and that the company in question (Sony here) simply got tired of paying the annual fees on given their lack of use of it. These TLD discontinuations don't threaten anything.
- ziml77 5y agoThat's good to know! Still worried about the prices getting out of control if someone thinks you have a valuable name, but at least it's not too easy to nuke an entire TLD.
- oauea 5y agoOh good, it will remain available at the low, low price of half a million per year. That soothes my worries entirely.
- CydeWeys 5y agoYou're painting a very broad brush with that one extreme outlier. Most registries don't operate like that; stay away from the few that do.
- josephcsible 5y agoIsn't the problem that there's nothing preventing all of the registries of new gTLDs from suddenly starting to operate like that tomorrow?
- devwastaken 5y ago.coms are cheaper now anyways with cloudflare. 8 years pre-purchased for $60.
- throw0101a 5y ago> That is probably just as well, because a year later, it had been reclassified as a "premium" name. The renewal fee was over $400,000. At that price it may be cheaper to simply create your own TLD.
- moonchild 5y agoIndeed; registration fees are about $100k, and infrastructure costs a similar amount.
- judge2020 5y agoSpecifically this link shows $185,000 and $6,250 per calendar quarter: https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/global-support/faqs/faqs-en#:~:text=5.2%20How%20much%20is%20the%20evaluation%20fee%3F https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/global-support/faqs... For infrastructure, I can imagine this being a case a single colocated server rack would work great, especially if you don't expect your TLD to be super popular among other people (SaaS likely wouldn't be suitable due to the high industry bandwidth costs).
- sneak 5y agoDNS doesn't use a lot of bandwidth, and has built-in caching.
- throw0101a 5y agoThe bandwidth usage is low unless you're DDoSed. It may be prudent to have some of your own distributed servers act as hidden masters, and then use a DNS anycast service for the publicly listed servers.
- CydeWeys 5y agoWhat was the TLD with the huge price hike?
- cpach 5y agoYikes. That’s very lousy behaviour of them. Thanks for the warning.
- ryan29 5y agoWhich TLD was it? I’ve been trying to find an example of a domain being reclassified as premium while registered for almost two years. Are you sure you didn’t let it expire? That violates the registry agreement AFAIK. They’re not allowed to arbitrarily change the price for a registered domain. Can you give more detail?
- iomcr 5y agoMy first thought, while I don't know the exact rights of the parties involved, they should have filed a complaint with ICANN regardless.
- billpg 5y agoWhich TLD is that? Because I never want to use that domain and I'm thinking about hacking my DNS to fake-NXDOMAIN it entirely.