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As 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.
by emir 4y ago
As 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...