17 ms·
Premium .dev domain with Google costs $850
- emir 4y agoAs you know, domain extensions like .dev and .app are owned by Google. Last year, I bought the http://forum.dev http://forum.dev domain for one of our projects. When I tried to renew it this year, I was faced with a renewal price of $850 instead of the normal price of $12. Since I looked at it in Turkish Lira, I thought at first that Google made a mistake when converting the currency, but it turns out that was not the case. Apparently, they are renewing generic domains like the one I own for $850 under the name Premium domain. I could understand if I were to buy this domain from scratch, but I have been the owner of hundreds of domains for almost 20 years and I have never faced anything like this before. Once again, I realized that it is foolish to trust Google on any matter. Thank you, Google.
- KomoD 4y agoYes, marking domains as "Premium" is very common, it's not just Google that does it. I registered a .sbs domain for a couple dollars the first year, and they want $200-300/yr from me now.
- davchana 4y agoMy lastname.sbs was a dollar or two for 1st year. $200 2nd year. Understandable, but still its bad. Good thing I didn't use it for something big, being lazy paid.
- metadat 4y agoCan you transfer it to a less greedy registrar? Or is it always a TLD-wide issue? This is highway robbery.. maybe even worse than being robbed. Imagine if your mobile phone plan rate could vary on a floating basis year by year depending on how "premium" the carrier decides your number is. Gross.
- thebooktocome 4y agoChinese mobile carriers used to (and may still) do exactly this. Numbers with multiple 8’s were more valuable because 8 is lucky, whereas a single 4 (a homophone for “death”) meant a reasonable discount.
- metadat 4y agoIt's also a thing with US-based numbers, e.g. repeating digits. However, the pricing not variable year over year, and may even be only a one-time fee if at all. Once you are assigned the number, it's yours and the annual reservation price doesn't change significantly. This instance is straight up Google acting in bad faith with the bait and switch. Are they really that desperate to make a few extra bucks? What PM decided this was a good idea? Day by day, Big-G is burning every ounce of public goodwill they ever had, speedily on their way to sinking down to FB Meta territory.
- DelightOne 4y agoOne can argue scalpers expecting 3000 for a domain means the domain is premium-enough to be worth that renewal.
- KomoD 4y agoI'm pretty sure it's TLD-wide basically all/most of the time.
- simfree 4y agoIt's usually a choose your own frontend registrar for the TLD. Whether that is Gandi, Namecheap, Google Domains, Cloudflare, etc. But the TLDs fix the price underneath, registrars are just resellers.
- warbler73 4y ago
- tdeck 4y agoICANN could have just prohibited registrars from doing this, but it seems like the neo-TLD thing is just a cash grab for them so they probably don't mind.
- cubesnooper 4y agoI don’t exactly like it, but isn’t it an effective measure to reduce scalping? So many .com domains are owned by entities who bought piles of dictionary words just to slap them on a SEO ads page, only willing to part with them for exorbitant prices. What better means are there to fight these people who insert themselves into the internet namespace to siphon money while providing zero value?
- lupire 4y agoUnless the money goes to help the Internet somehow, it is still going to scalpers, but only a few billionaires instead of anyone who is willing to speculate.
- noduerme 4y agoMaybe HN can pool together to form a non-scalping, dev-friendly TLD.
- koolba 4y agoWhy does it even have to be a TLD? You have have a subdomain of an existing TLD. Kind of like the dynamic DNS services that give you your-custom-name.foo.example.com.
- wiremonger 4y agoHere’s another perspective. We own voltive.com. It cost us $28k. “Us” is me and my partner, small business owners with families and bills, working to build something of value in the world. We bought the domain from someone who had never used it for anything. Is it just that some guy fleeced us for $28k by squatting on that domain for 20 years at $12/year when we were actually trying to do something productive with the name? I certainly don’t think so.
- noduerme 4y agoI've never heard of .sbs. What does it mean? In junior high after P.E. class we would joke that we had SBS - sweaty ball syndrome - that acronym has always stuck with my friends.
- KomoD 4y ago"Special Broadcasting Service", belongs to the "Special Broadcasting Service Corporation"
- noduerme 4y agoHah. Wow. At this point I feel like we should just do away with new TLDs altogether and let anyone register any domain with any ending they want, if it's available. The idea that you can buy a TLD and then dole out domains if you have enough capital just seems antithetical to the ideal of an open internet. Unless you're a country, I guess.
- chillfox 4y agoI hate the practice, it’s scummy behaviour. One of my domains got hit by it and now I can’t even move it because it’s market as premium.
- eloff 4y agoThis is pretty low behavior. I've registered a few .dev names over the years, I'll let them lapse. I'll stick to .com.
- cubesnooper 4y agoThis is why I always purchase my domains for ten years up front, and top it up to ten again each year after. This way if the renewal fee increases beyond what I’m willing to pay after I’ve already got infrastructure running on the domain, I have a whole decade to migrate to a better (cheaper) name. $120 is a larger investment than $12 which means I buy fewer domains overall, but the stability benefits are worth it for me.
- FpUser 4y ago>"This is why I always purchase my domains for ten years up front, and top it up to ten again each year after." I do exactly the same. I also always stick to com. I leave "coolness" factor to other parts of the domain.
- habibur 4y agoI find only ".com" names cool. All other are cheap, junk or designed to extort.
- daemoens 4y agoname.info/.dev and the like are pretty cool for personal pages though. People always design them really well because it's about them personally.
- xwdv 4y agoThis same reason is why they are perfect for extortion. It’s personal so you will be emotionally motivated to fork over $850 on renewal. Plus if you’re a developer, you make good money, so they know you’re good for it.
- phendrenad2 4y agoSupposedly they do it to discourage domain squatters, which makes some sense, because every .com or .net that's even remotely usable is held by some squatter and they would rather hold the domain for decades than sell it for anything less than thousands.
- pwdisswordfish9 4y agoPlease don't call TLDs domain extensions.
- thiht 4y agoActually « extension » is more specific than TLD. .co.uk is a sold extension but it’s not a TLD, even though it works as what we usually call a TLD.
- pwdisswordfish9 4y agoMaybe if you said "more general", but TLD is definitely "more specific" (which is why co.uk is not considered a TLD). Referring to TLDs as extensions is a telltale sign of someone who is semi-technically literate enough to have heard of file extensions but not enough to know why it's incorrect when talking about domains, nor that it outs them by making them sound silly.
- candiddevmike 4y agoAs someone who is all in on .app and .dev, wtf. I build a brand using these domain names and Google is going to sell them to the highest bidder??
- jaquer_1 4y ago
- galuggus 4y agoaccording to tld-list you can renew .dev domains on porkbun for $10.87.
- chillfox 4y agoBet you can’t move premium domains there.
- CydeWeys 4y agoYou can move premium domains there, you'll just pay the appropriate price for them.
- mikea1 4y agoThere are price tiers for different domains. If a domain has been classified in a premium tier, then its create and/or renew price is significantly higher. Price tiers are generally controlled by the registry (Google Registry, in this case.) This is going to happen to .tv too: sometime in January 2023 GoDaddy Registry, which just took over the .tv tld from Verisign, is adding premium price tiers when no such tiering had already existed.
- danillonunes 4y agoIsn't .tv a country code TLD?
- mikea1 4y agoYes, a registry just manages TLDs. The registry Verisign, for example, manages .com, but it's not the owner. In this case, Tuvalu owns .tv and they contracted with GoDaddy Registry to manage it [0]. It can be confusing because the lines are blurring. For example, Google has considerable vertical integration: they operate a registry, a registrar, and they own a few TLDs too. [0] https://registry.godaddy/blog/dottv-contract-signing-release https://registry.godaddy/blog/dottv-contract-signing-release
- rahimnathwani 4y agoWhat did you pay for the first year? $12 or $850?
- CydeWeys 4y agoThey paid $850 for the first year.
- CydeWeys 4y agoTo clarify, they paid a premium price for the first year. Had they been paying in USD it would be the same initial price as the renewal price, but apparently they're paying in Turkish lira so exchange rate changes come into play. What I know for sure is that, from the registry side, the wholesale USD-denominated premium price has remained consistent over the length of the registration.
- warbler73 4y ago[flagged]
- jrockway 4y agoI mean, you can edit your resolv.conf to point at my DNS server and I'll sell you the entire .dev TLD for $69 a year. I have no idea why people think that Verisign's root server is the important one. Good marketing campaign, I guess.
- warbler73 4y ago> domain extensions like .dev and .app are owned by Google Why are domain extensions like .dev and .app owned by Google?
- yencabulator 4y agoBecause ICANN will give a gTLD to anyone who pays them enough.
- warbler73 4y agoAny gTLD whatsoever owned by some for profit corporation is not acceptable.
- yencabulator 4y agoYou're about a decade late. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain#New_top-level_domains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain#New_t...
- warbler73 4y agoThat is not acceptable.
- colejohnson66 4y ago.com has been run by Verisign since before the gTLD nonsense
- account42 4y ago.com is however not owned by Verisign. They can't just set arbitrary prices without ICANN approval.
- blululu 4y agoICANN allows anyone to create a domain. You need to pay a bunch of fees to register it and service it but it is not that much. In this case I believe Google created these domains for internal tools and they have owned them ever since.
- jeffparsons 4y ago> Once again, I realized that it is foolish to trust Google on any matter. Thank you, Google. Yep, that is a great takeaway. Another important example is GCP pricing, and their habit of killing off products and services as fast as they build them. What Google is doing or charging today is not a reliable indicator of what they will be doing or charging tomorrow. AWS may have its own problems, but at least they don't do much bait-and-switch pricing, and they tend to support services for a while after they launch them.
- mda 4y agoExcept that OP is full of it.
- CydeWeys 4y agoHi. I work on Google Registry. forum.dev is and always has been a premium domain name (and you paid that same premium price at initial registration). We price some domain names higher than others to help prevent cybersquatting, so that desirable domain names remain available for legitimate registrants rather than being sold for extravagant sums on the after-market. We have never increased the price of a single domain name after registration in our entire decade of existence. For another example of a premium domain name that is still available for registration (in case people here want to verify the user experience), perform a domain name search for money.dev at your registrar of choice. It will be clearly marked with its yearly premium price. You would have seen this same information when you initially registered forum.dev.
- bdlowery 4y agoAaaaand the truth comes out.
- sieabahlpark 4y ago
- piscataway 4y agoThe story is actually more nuanced than your knee-jerk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33928717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33928717
- berkut 4y agoThe "more" is surely whether they're premium or not, which is what Op was responding to.
- CydeWeys 4y agoThat post links to a query for a non-premium domain name. Of course forum.dev is more valuable than asdfggg.dev. If you query a premium domain name that is available for registration (e.g. money.dev), you'll see that the listed price is higher than $12/yr.
- ryan29 4y agoCheck out section 2.10(c) of the registry agreement for .dev [1]. If you registered the domain when it was a non-premium domain, and you haven't agreed to a price increase, you might have a valid complaint with ICANN. > The parties acknowledge that the purpose of this Section 2.10(c) is to prohibit abusive and/or discriminatory Renewal Pricing practices imposed by Registry Operator without the written consent of the applicable registrant at the time of the initial registration of the domain and this Section 2.10(c) will be interpreted broadly to prohibit such practices. I've been watching for it to happen to someone for years because I own a domain that would be at risk of getting reclassified as premium if it were allowed. I've been monitoring the same word as my domain on 300+ TLDs for about 2 years. I've never seen one get reclassified as premium without being dropped first. Are you positive yours wasn't classified as premium with a huge discount for the first year? I think the new TLDs would do much better if they'd quit with the pricing games and strengthen registrant rights instead. As a registrant, I want predictability and minimal risk when I register a domain. The only way to get that right now is to stick with .com AFAIK. It's too bad because I'm a huge fan of using 'somecompany.tech' plus 'somecompanytech.com', but, in my opinion, most of the new TLDs are too risky to depend on. I'm really interested in any updates you would have because I always considered .app and .dev to be "safe" domains in the sense that I thought Google would always have transparent, uniform, predictable pricing without any exorbitant increases. 1. https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/registry-agreements/dev/dev-agmt-html-16oct14-en.htm https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/registry-agreements/dev/d...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ggm 4y agoIt's such an odd valuation. It's neither high enough to reflect imputed exclusivity which would put in $100,000 class nor low enough to reflect some real world cost. It appears purpose designed to exclude only the low end indie and freemium developer.
- anakaine 4y agoTo what end, I wonder? It's not like domain names cost much money to issue.
- qeternity 4y ago> To what end, I wonder? Increase revenue. > It's not like domain names cost much money to issue. You charge what the market will pay, not how much it costs to produce.
- mlyle 4y ago> You charge what the market will pay, not how much it costs to produce. Though don't be surprised if you lose a lot of goodwill if you offer a low introductory price, and then maximally gouge at the moment that the customer is trapped. When domain names are a tiny portion of your revenue, they're probably not worth getting a reputation as a predatory vendor over.
- ydlr 4y ago> You charge what the market will pay, not how much it costs to produce. That saying usually applies to market participants. Google has exclusive right over the TLD, so there is market for them. There isn't much of a market for people buying from Google, either. Its not likely Google looses much by letting inventory go unrented.
- dv_dt 4y agoThis is the real source of inflation
- version_five 4y ago
- truth777 4y agoJust high enough to be a total bullsh*t scam, just low enough that it'd be easier and cheaper to pay them instead of sue. Easier said then done, but if you choose to sue them over this you have my respect. We NEED laws against dirty dark pattern business practices like this.
- throwawaylinux 4y agoSue for what?
- ceejayoz 4y agoBait and switch? I dunno. If retroactive “your domain is now premium, pay up” is legal, it shouldn’t be.
- throwawaylinux 4y agoContract law is pretty comprehensive and has been forged over centuries by scammers and grifters, I doubt there would be much new here. This doesn't sound like it's retroactive, they're negotiating a renewal and Google changed their price. Doesn't seem out of the ordinary unless there were some particular terms about pricing and renewals. Google isn't a charity, they're a greedy non-ethical corporation that is not famous for providing reliable consistent products. I'm surprised this kind of behavior comes as a surprise to anybody in tech.
- ceejayoz 4y agoI mean, if the .com registry said to Google “renewals are $10B for Google.com or we let someone else have the domain”, that would border on extortion. People build brands on these, and it’s odd that you can’t permanently buy one or at least have a predictable cap on price increases.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago> I mean, if the .com registry said to Google “renewals are $10B for Google.com or we let someone else have the domain”, that would border on extortion. I don't think it would be extortion, it would just be Verisign breaching their agreement with ICANN. > People build brands on these, and it’s odd that you can’t permanently buy one or at least have a predictable cap on price increases. I think you could have those things if you use services that are backed with appropriate contracts or regulations. It's more odd that people would build their brand using a company that is not known for providing stable, consistent, long term products and services.
- kixiQu 4y agoIt irritates me when people talk about "owning your own domain". This is great example of how "having" a domain does not at all match up with ownership as we commonly know it...
- gtirloni 4y agoHN often suggests having your own domain so you own your presence (instead of having a gmail.com address or a blog on medium.com). So it's a lost cause?
- TAForObvReasons 4y agoStick to .com domains
- Symbiote 4y agoOr country domains of your own country.
- cubesnooper 4y agoThere are downsides to country TLDs. What if you move? You might not be allowed to keep the domain from a country in which you no longer reside. Or if the country moves underneath you. Quite a few Brits lost their existing .eu domains after Brexit. And they sometimes have undesirable policies. For example, .us prohibits any kind of WHOIS protection. It’ll be tied to your real name, address, and phone number, unless you take some steps like getting a P.O. box or buying in the name of a shell corporation.
- KomoD 4y agoSome registrars offer a "trustee" service, so if you are no longer allowed to own the domain due to moving / whatever you can just transfer over the domain to a registrar that offers a trustee service
- 4y ago
- hejaodbsidndbd 4y agoSorry friend, but I don’t think these change after the fact. If you paid $12 the first year, it would have been labelled as a discount, with the renewal price being listed separately. It’s crappy and misleading, but it’s not retroactive. I sometimes explicitly filter out “discounted” TLDs so I don’t get distracted by listing like this.
- version_five 4y agoEdit: I'm wrong. Many domains say "renews at $xxx", the .dev domains say "retail $xxx" and offer some small discount. I can't see what they renew at. Original post: I'm looking through namecheap now, and all the available .dev domain I can find say they renew at (Canadian)$20.37 per year. Can anyone find listed ones that say they renew for way more?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- psanford 4y ago.sexy increased their price from $25 to $2500. For now, domains registered at the old price can continue to renew at the old price. But they could easily cut that off at any time.
- holler 4y agoNever heard of that tld, but "thats.sexy" is available for the bargain price of $250,000! What a world.
- Scaevolus 4y agogTLDs are a lovely combination of vanity and cashgrabs.
- Ekaros 4y agoThey cost what at the least 200k a year to run. And then just think how many times you seem actually used.
- j1elo 4y agoI guess https://privacy.sexy/ https://privacy.sexy/ (featured in HN) might end up changing domain, if this happens... that's the only useful .sexy domain I know
- kevinmrose 4y agoThis is pretty disgusting on Google's part if true. It sounds like they're only letting people rent domains then acting like a landlord who increases rent to match "market rates" when you renew the lease. Hopefully this is some sort of error, but somehow I doubt it.
- davchana 4y agoAlmost every registry does it (Google is one of them).
- kevinmrose 4y agoGoDaddy never did this to me, I used to own a single keyword domain name which would definitely be considered "premium" and never paid more than ~$10 in renewal fees per year. GoDaddy has plenty of problems, but they never shook me down on domain renewals. I wouldn't expect it from Google, but I guess I'm just naive.
- xnx 4y agoGoogle has a monopoly on the .dev domain. GoDaddy doesn't have a monopoly on .com, .biz, .net, etc.
- agwa 4y agoThis is an apples to oranges comparison. Every TLD is operated by a registry that has a monopoly over that TLD. .dev's registry is Google. .com and .net's registry is Verisign. GoDaddy is a registrar which resells domains from the registries. You can register .dev domains on GoDaddy just like you can register .com and .net domains. The bulk of the registration fee goes to the registry. What keeps .com and .net prices reasonable is not that there's no monopoly - Verisign totally has a monopoly - but that Verisign's registry agreement with ICANN forbids this kind of pricing shenanigans whereas Google's registry agreement for .dev doesn't. But I'm sure that when Verisign's registry agreement is up for renewal they will try to renegotiate this.
- Aeolun 4y ago> Once again, I realized that it is foolish to trust Google on any matter. We can make this into a proverb at this point.
- akiselev 4y agoA century from now the verb “google” won’t mean “to search,” it’ll mean “to cock something up so badly no one trusts you ever again.”
- Aromasin 4y agoIn my work team everyone universally calls a product getting axed "getting Googled", and there's no confusion on meaning. I suspect as Google loses market share to other search engines over the next few decades, we'll start to see a real mix up of what the word "to Google" means.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bagels 4y agoHow does this work for .com? Can I just get extorted for more money once my business becomes successful?
- binarymax 4y agoNo, because for .com there is a free market and you can take your domain to another registrar. Google owns and operates these tlds and is effectively a monopoly
- toast0 4y agoAfaik, other registrars service the .dev TLD as well. The problem is that Google is the registry, and it seems that their contract with ICANN lets them charge more for premium domains and mark domains as premium as they see fit; but I didn't look up the contract to check. With .com, the contract between Verisign and ICANN specifies a maxium price and that price descrimination is not allowed. Edit: I found the gTLD base agreement[1], but didn't go looking further. It says, the registry needs to charge everyone the same price unless the registrant agreed to higher renewal pricing at the time of initial registration. I didn't look to see if there is any more specific agreement for .dev. But it seems like if this wasn't disclosed and explicitly agreed to during registration, the registry is in the wrong. However, a lot of people agree to things without paying attention. Would be good to check original paperwork and then see about how to get the registry's attention. [1] https://newgtlds.icann.org/sites/default/files/agreements/agreement-approved-31jul17-en.html#article2.10 https://newgtlds.icann.org/sites/default/files/agreements/ag...
- charcircuit 4y agoHow is Verisign any less of a monopoly than Google?
- Ekaros 4y agoLegacy is bit different place. There would be enough players hitting hard in various ways both ICANN and Verising running it that it won't happen. Technically they could, but it wouldn't end up well. Probably even nation states would have a word or piles of paper. gTLDs on other hand are owned by likes of Google so they can do just about anything.
- PostOnce 4y agoThat's why I only use .com (strength in numbers, historical precedent) or the appropriate country-level domain so local politics and laws can get involved if need be.
- crossroadsguy 4y agoMost of the even half usable pronouns.com domains are long gone. Usually squatted, sometimes actually used. But gone nonetheless. That’s why people try to use other tld. Though I personally picked .net for my personal/name domain as .com is squatted.
- hanniabu 4y agoYou can always put your site behind a Handshake[1] or ENS[2] + Limo[3] setup. [1] https://handshake.org/ https://handshake.org/ [2] https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/ [3] https://eth.limo/ https://eth.limo/
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoIf you transferred to a different registrar do they have to follow Google's pricing structure for existing domains? Would that not be price fixing?
- naikrovek 4y agoGoogle owns those TLDs. they have no incentive or even any reason to allow anyone else to co-manage those TLDs. edit: as seen below, I'm wrong
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- danepowell 4y agoGoogle currently says .dev domains are $12 per year with no fine print about renewals. https://domains.google.com/registrar/search?searchTerm=asdfggg.dev&hl=en# https://domains.google.com/registrar/search?searchTerm=asdfg... I think there's more to the story here.
- TAForObvReasons 4y agothe "more" is that it depends on the actual term. For example, setting.dev is $180/yr https://domains.google.com/registrar/search?searchTerm=setting.dev&hl=en https://domains.google.com/registrar/search?searchTerm=setti... It is likely that there was no premium pricing in the beginning. It was established after the initial lease
- judge2020 4y agoI remember my desired domain being premium at launch. What happened might’ve been the premium list was expanded, but it’s bad to apply that list change to renewals that previously weren’t considered premium.
- CydeWeys 4y ago> It is likely that there was no premium pricing in the beginning. It was established after the initial lease The premium pricing was there in the beginning. We have never increased the price of a single domain name after it was initially registered.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- danparsonson 4y agoI can't believe asdfggg.dev is still available - I'm taking that!
- layer8 4y agoAh, crap, taking sdfghhh.dev then.
- gigel82 4y agoThat's why I only own .com domains. net and org are probably fine too. You're free to move the domain you own to a different registrar at any time (I'm all on cloudflare now which has no markup, it's great).
- varenc 4y agoGoogle runs the .dev gTLD but isn’t the only registrar. Google lists the many other .dev registrars here: https://www.registry.google/register-a-domain/ https://www.registry.google/register-a-domain/ Presumably you can freely move your .dev domains between those registrars?
- nly 4y agoSo if you register a .dev with say Gandi, will Google be able to pull these shenanigans on you, or do they have to honour the standard renewal price?
- agwa 4y agoYes, they can pull the shenanigans. Registries (like Google for .dev, Verisign for .com/.net) set the pricing for domains under their TLDs. Registrars like Gandi add just a very slim markup.
- mrkurt 4y agoIf I'm reading the Gandi cart right to renew "fly.dev", yes they can pull these shenanigans. It's showing $780 to renew. I can't tell if that's one year or not.
- endigma 4y agoPresumably fly will be keeping `fly.dev` around? Perhaps you're in a good place to make a fuss about this given your commercial usage of a "cool" .dev domain.
- iampims 4y agoHow much is Gandi’s markup? I’d bet it’s the same couple of dollars they charge for regular domains. I suspect Google is pocketing 99% of that price hike.
- indigodaddy 4y agoThis feels like outright theft. Given that you can’t transfer the domain away (correct?), I think you could argue that it is.
- shepherdjerred 4y agoWhat are you paying for when you buy a domain name? Isn't it essentially just a rental for a year? How is this any different than a landlord increasing rent after a rental agreement is up? It's a bad thing for Google to do, but let's not act like it's illegal.
- indigodaddy 4y agoThere should be regulations around this for single entity/registrar-owned domains. Otherwise it’s exactly the same as a monopoly. I’m sure Google won’t get away with this for long. p.s. and no, I sure wouldn’t like my landlord to 70x my rent. Like from say 1,000/mo to 70,000/mo ? That’s like totally cool then right? How about let’s act like it _should_ be illegal, and then make it so.
- shepherdjerred 4y ago> Otherwise it’s exactly the same as a monopoly. Oh come on, let's not kid ourselves here. There are _plenty_ of other TLDs to choose from. Google owns .dev, they can do what they want with it. The debate of whether a company should own a TLD like Google does is another question entirely. > p.s. and no, I sure wouldn’t like my landlord to 70x my rent. Like from say 1,000/mo to 70,000/mo ? That’s like totally cool then right? No it's not cool; that's totally exploitative. But my landlord sure could do that if they wanted to because they own the building. If my landlord thinks someone will pay $70,000/mo for my unit why shouldn't they be allowed to see that profit? Google definitely should not be treating their customers like this, especially considering that they're burning bridges for such little income.
- t-writescode 4y agoThis is how registries have worked since their inception (afaik). And yes, it's a monopoly. ICANN designates what TLDs are valid Registries own individual TLDs fully Registrars resell domains on those TLDs that registries own.
- ilikehurdles 4y agoOh boy. I own a $98/yr {firstname}.dev domain, and can renew for up to 9 years at a time. Now I have to debate whether I should renew next year at whatever price it happens to be, or lock in 9 years now at $98/yr to fend off the risk of google potentially price-gouging it.
- oefrha 4y agoTo confused and/or alarmed people: if you don’t have a premium domain (like forum.dev here) you’re fine. Anyone who has researched domain registration for five minutes probably has realized <common-english-word>.tld usually costs a lot more. They’re usually clearly marked from initial registration, though.
- gorkemcetin 4y agoAccording to the author's previous tweets, this domain wasn't premium when he purchased. Google decided to make it premium AFTER purchasing.
- hejaodbsidndbd 4y agoThe author is confused
- ROTMetro 4y agoWhy would you build value into something that can be so arbitrarily changed though? Let's say I build my company "beyondfoobar" to the #1 company on the planet, and therefor make my website beyondfoobar.dev extremely valuable. Why would I trust that Google won't jack the rates on that domain since it's now premium? Like it's said above Google has demonstrated that they deserve zero trust, and when building value into a domain you have registered, you kind of want to trust the registrar and tld owner. My company publishes our phone number, and we don't have to worry about how much we pay for our phone number each year based on 'popularity' metrics. We expect the same for our domain name.
- lupire 4y agoYou can buy an IP address and keep it forever.
- hejaodbsidndbd 4y ago
- 4y ago
- adoxyz 4y agoI believe Google is pretty transparent if you use Google Domains. For example if it's a premium domain it'll have the price per year, and a different price per year if it changes. Quick example: trouble.dev is $180/yr... meaning it's going to be $180 each year to renew trouble.art is $10,764 for the first year, and then $36/yr for renewals. There's plenty of non-premium .dev domains that are $12/yr. I do agree that charging premiums every year is a shitty move, but I don't think they're being overtly shady about it.
- acdha 4y agoAccording to the author, they changed it to premium after the fact: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33928401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33928401
- adoxyz 4y agoI'm not sure that's the case. I assumed the author bought the domain initially for $850, thinking that at renewal it would go down to $12/yr, like most .com, .net, .org, etc. do, but was surprised to find out that the .dev premium domains charge the higher fee every year. I doubt forum.dev would have ever been $12/yr. Most single word .dev domains are marked as premium and vary from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars annually. I know because I had speak.dev at one point and it was $350/yr and renewal was $350/yr as well. Now if by some chance they initially paid $12/yr for it and now it's $850, then that is not ok and means that any .dev domain is at risk of dynamic pricing, which I feel like would kill the whole TLD forever for me.
- jaquer_1 4y ago
- rvz 4y agoSorry. It's Google registrar service and they own .dev and .app and can increase and decrease prices whenever they want. Just like how Donuts owns .io and has increased renewal prices a while ago. [0] Don't expect Google to care since they are after your money. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29403773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29403773
- t-writescode 4y ago.io is a country-code TLD that uses Afilias as a backend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io That a bunch of startups and small companies use a trendy .io suffix to their domain is entirely by the grace of the British Indian Ocean Territory's permissiveness on the matter. CC-tlds are owned by their affiliated sovereign nation.
- dathinab 4y agoDoesn't this pretty much fulfill the requirement for counting as racketeering? EDIT: Realized racketering isn't the right term here I think but I don't remember the right term and need to go do bed.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoGuessing you mean rent-seeking, and I'd argue yes.
- amazon_illegal 4y ago
- MangoCoffee 4y agoonly .com .org and .net for me. whatever happened to Google's Don't be evil? $850 for a .dev domain?
- Brajeshwar 4y agoI don't know it has become out of fashion these days but as an Internet veteran-ish (started Internet journey late in the 90s), I believe one should get a .com domain. This is especially true when you are going to run a business and grow it. Get a .com domain, preferably no-hyphen, and no_underscore. If you have something like mydomainis.cool, then try to get mydomainiscool.com too. You can redirect mydomainiscool.com to mydomainis.cool.
- lupire 4y ago.com is a US TLD, for better or for worse. US got the original "cool" TLD names.
- pxx 4y agounderscores aren't valid in dns
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- userbinator 4y agoAs someone who started using the Internet in the early 90s, I still unconsciously rate .net, .com, and .org (as well as some associated ccTLDs) as more reputable than all the other .randomletters domains that seem to show up in search results these days; probably because the majority of sites I see in the latter are SEO spam.
- LAC-Tech 4y agoFollowing your rules, in 2022, you're just left with made up words for .com domains.
- nasalspirant 4y agoNot exactly https://sive.rs/com https://sive.rs/com
- Guthur 4y agoWe should not tolerate this rampant monopoly based rent seeking. Even if there is an argument to be made about supply and demand on names... at least it should be easier to agree that private entities shouldn't be allowed to profit from it; distinct from charging a reasonable service fee.
- Nican 4y agoFor those who do not remember, Google did an auction for .dev domains when it was first released in 2019. I think it was something like that every week the price was halved until it reached the $12/year. I bought a .dev domain from Google, when the auction was at $200/year. Every renewal period has been $100/year. If there is a way to decrease it to $12/year, that would be great. EDIT: Looking at other comments on this thread, looks like that Google is dynamically price adjusting renewal costs? I am sad that yet another pillar of the original free internet seems to be falling even further pray to capitalism.
- lupire 4y agoWhat is that pillar? Google was never a pillar of free Internet.
- Nican 4y agoCheap DNS registration, and being able to keep it at the same price. What I am wondering right now is if there is any regulation about buying a domain, building a popular product on top of it, and then having your registrar keep increasing the renewal cost. (Something that I never considered, but now looks possible)
- matheusmoreira 4y agoDomain names used to be cheap and accessible to everyone. Now DNS makes me wish Tor would replace this rotten web with hidden services.
- bityard 4y agoThat doesn't sound anything like an auction...
- Nican 4y agoPrice decreases as time passes? It is called an Dutch auction. [1] The most famous example I can think of is the flower auction/Amsterdam clock.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAdmzyKagvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAdmzyKagvE
- jpgvm 4y agoI got bitten by this also. I registered a .dev domain thinking the ~$200 price tag was one-time only during the initial bidding phase when the registrar was opening. However it turns out that is a yearly renewal. I think it's a bit scumbag but I also like the domain so I guess they are just charging what people can afford.
- lovelearning 4y agoBait and switch. It is indeed foolish to trust Google. I moved my .com domains to other providers without waiting for Google's switch. The only thing I trust about Google is their intention to deceive in future.
- threatofrain 4y agoA Google employee is in here saying that they've never raised the price on any registered domain in their decade of existence. So far it seems to be a credible story so I'd wait for further development. Also the OP claims to own hundreds of domains, so this "premium" pricing seems quite relevant to the discussion of squatting.
- maria2 4y agoI think this is fine. Too many good domains are held by squatters. Domains should be put to productive use, not speculation. I don't know what forum.dev is used for, but when I visit it, I get a Cloud Flare error page.
- klabb3 4y agoYes, squatting should be mitigated and is worth some collateral damage. OP mentions having owned “hundreds of domains” and the domain in question appears unused, so my sympathies are… let’s say low. It’s a widespread problem that that squatters can sit on good domains for years, at a very low cost, waiting to extort someone who wants to use it for something productive. That could potentially be fixed with higher fees for popular words and names. Changing the price at renewal time is deeply problematic though, since it increases the surface area for extortion (by a different party). However, why should Google or Verisign make money from selling names? Other than operational costs, it would be better to auction off domains fairly to extinguish the squatters and use the surplus for non-profit internet infrastructure work.
- maria2 4y agoI don't think Google is really making money here. The amount of money they collect for the registration is surely a rounding error to Google. Rather, the high price must be to deter squatters.
- WheelsAtLarge 4y agoI think it's due to the domain name. They charge a premium for some of them. OP got lucky they didn't charge the premium price from the beginning. I looked at mine and they're still charging $12 for it.
- awinter-py 4y agoOne way to screw them back is trademark law poison pill the domain file a trademark asap while you still have the domain, then when you lose access, sue them to prevent them from selling it to anyone else (ideally bundle this with everyone else affected by this sort of price change) (I'm not a lawyer)
- nilespotter 4y ago...the domain in question is forum.dev
- fimdomeio 4y agoDoes anyone want to buy forum.dev for $10.000? I can make it happen for you, just let me get on twitter... And my fee is morally justified. Finding compensation for a guy that was the victim of an injustice. Am I an hero? Just doing the best I can.
- ranger_danger 4y agoI noticed a similar thing using enom, but the high price only came into play if you let the domain expire before renewing it.
- eckza 4y agoI buy all of my domains from Namecheap. I'm not 100% how TLDs work or who owns them or whatever... but just to be safe, I bought another 8 years of my .dev email address. Fortunately, the renewal rate was something like $17/yr. Jusr posting this in case anyone else is concerned about renewal prices on Namecheap; they appear to be stable, and you can still buy .dev domains from them.
- yazzku 4y agoThey lost several k$/sec yesterday with the ads downtime and are now trying to make the losses back.
- yazzku 4y agoAt this point, even blockchain-based names command higher trust than Google.
- miiiiiike 4y agoGoogle charged me a couple hundred to renew a .dev domain. I was under the impression that I was paying a premium to register the domain a few days early and that the renewal price would be lower. I was mistaken, but, the renewal price was behind a few clicks in a settings menu. My fault, but I still wanted a refund. After weeks of going back and forth with Google support I ended up initiating a chargeback.. They locked me out of my account and I lost access to all of the domains tied to it. It took weeks to unravel the whole thing. If Google would make the renewal prices available in the 30-day renewal emails this class of problem would go away. Omitting the price is a choice.
- reustle 4y agoI mean, with the reputation that Google has in regards to customer support, you were definitely whacking the beehive by doing a chargeback to them. Wish it wasn’t this way, though.
- vonsydov 4y ago
- crossroadsguy 4y agoI learnt this lesson early with another tld (and that wasn’t even this steep a raise). Since then I decided to keep my personal domain as .net since.com wasn’t available.
- holografix 4y ago…”but I have been the owner of hundreds of domains for almost 20 years and I have never faced anything like this before.” Well fuck you and your squatting and how does it feel?
- indigodaddy 4y agoI don’t think that’s fair.
- t-writescode 4y agoWhy not? A major reason that premium domains even exist is because the second-hand market for squatted domains meant that some domain names have sold for literal millions of dollars; and otherwise that domain is sitting as a dummy advertiser page trying to sell itself. Old registries weren't able to participate in that process themselves without also owning a registrar that participated in the same competition; but, a few decades of hindsight means the newer TLDs are going after potential earnings that Verisign never got a chance to have.
- EugeneOZ 4y agoDo you think that a regular developer pays thousands of dollars every year to prolong hundreds of domains?
- jchw 4y agoI'm sorry but this is a non-story. gTLDs have been working this way since before Google got into gTLDs. Don't get me wrong, they're making bank on this stuff; but frankly, they're just beating domain scalpers to the punch. Compared to what domain scalpers try to charge... $850 just isn't much. If this is the first time people on Hacker News are hearing about premium domains, gTLDs and asymmetric renewal prices, color me shocked. There are even ccTLDs that have asymmetric renewals.
- mikea1 4y ago> they're just beating domain scalpers to the punch Not quite the same punch. A domain scalper can only demand a premium price once (when they sell/transfer it to you.) But, a registry may charge you a premium price every single year.
- Jaydon564 4y ago[flagged]
- 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 4y agoSounds a lot like he is just lying. Inflation is in play here and that's it