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It 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 co
by kixiQu 4y ago
It 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.
- ivanmontillam 4y agoI used to own blockchain.*.(my-ccTLD) and the national registry took these domains from me after a short while (like 3-4 months). The new owners didn't even use them properly.
- zamadatix 4y agoThe more traditional your TLD the less the risk but there is currently no option with 0 risk. At the same time not being able to reach 0 risk doesn't mean pursuing less risk is just a lost cause.
- lolinder 4y ago.com .org and .net are all very safe. If a registrar starts screwing you over you can switch, and the actual governing entities don't play these kinds of games.
- lupire 4y agoThey are not "very safe" .org was very nearly stolen by its operators. https://www.eff.org/press/releases/org-domain-registry-sale-ethos-capital-rejected-stunning-victory-public-interest https://www.eff.org/press/releases/org-domain-registry-sale-...
- layer8 4y agoI’d say the fact that this didn’t go through is evidence of its relative safety.
- lupire 4y agoLogic like this, ignoring risks because disaster was averted in the last, is causes plane crashes and space shuttle explosions. It's normalization of deviance. Ancestor wrote "the actual governing entities don't play these kinds of games" and I gave a recent example of that kind of game being played.
- ameliaquining 4y agoThere wasn't any specific bad outcome for consumers that was only narrowly averted, though. The thing that was narrowly averted was management of the registry being taken over by an entity that said it wasn't going to do bad things to consumers, but not everyone believed them. That's still a fair few steps removed from anything directly bad happening.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoThe bad outcome was removal of the price caps. That happened without any outside interference. The rest of the scheme depended on that first step and they got away with it.
- lgats 4y agoPerhaps a better solution would be owning your own TLD?
- yencabulator 4y agoIf you can burn a cool $185k into brand awareness...
- kixiQu 4y agoI mean, I've got 2ish domains for self hosted stuff, 3 for public projects – they're rentals that I get enough value from to be worth it, and I'd recommend having a domain to a lot of people who don't currently have one. But they're rentals, and I think it's important to remain clearsighted about it.
- Retric 4y agoYou can effectively own .com and a few other domains because you can swap registers and sue for control if someone else fucks up. Without that you are just at the mercy of the monopoly.
- agwa 4y ago.com is operated by just a single registry, Verisign, which has just as much of a monopoly over .com as Google has over .dev. The difference is that Verisign's registry agreement with ICANN prohibits this kind of pricing shenanigans whereas Google's does not. Expect Verisign to try to renegotiate this when their agreement is up for renewal.
- factormeta 4y agowhen is the agreement up? We really ought to tell ICANN to not do that. There should be domains that can owned for every as long as we pay the fee.
- j-bos 4y agoIs there a mailing list to sign up for to be notified of ICANN events like these renewal agreements?
- Retric 4y agoVerisign’s role is that of registry operator which is different from that if a domain name registrar. It’s a very different relationship with ICANN and domain name owners and has basically zero leverage to set prices beyond what it costs them to operate the service and have some reasonable profit.
- kube-system 4y agoAll TLDs have a single registry.
- makeitdouble 4y agoNever thought about it, but can you sue from outside of the US ? Feels to me like it would be a lost cause depending on where you are.
- zapt02 4y agoYou can never truly own anything. Even a hut in the forest will have property and municipal taxes attached to it. With domains it's really about who you are "renting" it from. For example many country TLDs are run by government-affiliated organizations so you can feel pretty safe that you can at least get a fair treatment in any dispute. With generic TLDs I'd generally try to stay away for serious projects.