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No, Google did not hike the price of a .dev domain from $12 to $850
- _vufv 4y agoDomain squatting should not be a thing. Domain name prices should be such that squatting is unprofitable.
- lolinder 4y agoDoing so would price most individuals out of owning a domain, unless you tried to have separate pricing for individuals (which is messy).
- teddyh 4y agoIf you did that, you would effectively ban domain name ownership from everybody who does not make a lot of money from their domain. Is commercial activity the only thing which should have domain names?
- naniwaduni 4y agoGeorgism in a nutshell, no?
- zamadatix 4y agoNot necessarily, though there may be other tradeoffs depending on the approach. E.g. you could make the price base*registeredDomainCount^2 instead of base at the cost of registration privacy or you could have the max sanctioned transfer sale price capped (relatively) low at the cost of risking high demand domains be under-utilized or maybe something more inventive. After all if you can only squat a handful of domains before it becomes a loss or not worth waiting for it sure beats squatting hundreds or thousands being a valid business model. I don't necessarily prefer any proposal I can think of I just wanted to highlight "Domain name prices should be such that squatting is unprofitable" can be taken in much more interesting ways than "make owning a domain outrageously expensive".
- encryptluks2 4y agoI'd say for $10 per domain that it actually surpasses the price of Twitter Blue which Musk claims will prevent bots.
- drivebycomment 4y agoJumping to a drastic policy position without understanding the basic trade off involved should not be a thing.
- silisili 4y agoOoo glad to see this follow up. I remember reading the original and knowing that probably wasn't right. I worked for a registry for many years and premium domain names were never part of GA for the normal price. We also never moved a GA name to premium later, but I can't speak for other registries.
- pfoof 4y agoSo the best way is to buy the domain for 10 years upfront as long as the year prices are equal and not like first year for $5 and each subsequent for $150.
- skybrian 4y agoThis is especially true if you're paying with a currency that's experiencing high inflation and the price hasn't been adjusted yet. You can get a very good deal, so might as well buy all you can.
- notpushkin 4y agoUnless the prices go down! You never know. But if you see some promotional pricing on renewals or transfers, remember that you can add a few years anytime and not just on your registration anniversary. And when you transfer a domain, most of the cases it extends by a year too (although for some very rare ccTLDs that might not be the case I think).
- abruzzi 4y agomy personal domain is a ccTLD domain and has gone down over time. I know it's a bit iffy, but I like my ultra short domain, and if they take it from me...oh well.
- cmeacham98 4y agoHas the renewal price of any popular TLD _ever_ gone down? I guess you could argue that it has effectively gone down when staying the same due to inflation.
- yakak 4y agoThe original price of .com, .org, .net, etc was $50/year, then $35, then network solutions lost its monopoly and today you still pay less.. Of course the other issue is the future popularity is unknown. I think a lot of the first wave of new TLDs are not so hot today, but maybe they aren't lowering their prices if their last cash is from domain renewals of those reluctant to move on.
- mromanuk 4y ago> It's true that most .dev domains are just $12/year. But this person never paid $12 for forum.dev. According to his own screenshots, he paid 4,360 Turkish Lira for the initial registration on December 6, 2021, which was $317 at the time. So yes, the price did go up, but not nearly as much as the above comment implied. Alright, so it went from $317 to $850.
- lern_too_spel 4y agoAccording to TFA, $317 was a limited time deal created by Turkish Lira inflation and Google being slow to update prices in Lira.
- tourist2d 4y agoYou might want to learn about currency exchange rates.
- shkkmo 4y agoWhile the point you are making is correct, your comment comes across as unnecessarily condescending and snarky in a way that doesn't embody the guidelines for commenting on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- walrus01 4y agonow google "turkish lira to USD exchange chart" This is actually an astonishingly good time to buy products which are manufactured in Turkey for export, if you're a foreign customer.
- jacquesm 4y agoGood, more TB2's for Ukraine.
- orangepurple 4y agoI move all new registrations to the least criminal registrar I could find: porkbun
- EGreg 4y agoWhy that one
- agwa 4y agoI tried out the test domains mentioned in my blog post and Porkbun does a pretty good job disclosing the renewal price, except for the aftermarket domain where the renewal price is not listed. But at least in this case the renewal price is much lower than the initial price. So yeah, Porkbun looks a lot better than some of the other registrars out there.
- unshavedyak 4y agoCan anyone rate Porkbun vs Gandi?
- lern_too_spel 4y agoNeither are as good as Cloudflare, which sells domains at cost.
- orangepurple 4y agoDon't use Cloudflare. They won't let you pick NS server without paying $20 per domain. I made this mistake. Fastmail works best when you point your registrar to their NS record.
- orangepurple 4y agoLook at all pricing aspects. You will often have to renew at an elevated rate. Not with porkbun.
- dang 4y agoRecent and related: Premium .dev domain with Google costs $850 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33928399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33928399 - Dec 2022 (436 comments)
- jeffbee 4y agoAre there any practical ideas for ways HN can prevent itself from whipping up giant outrage threads based on something false?
- PascLeRasc 4y agoA Firefox extension that replaces the word Google with Microsoft would get everyone to calmly explain Hanlon's razor to each other and say that whatever's wrong is acceptable because they were worse in the past.
- colejohnson66 4y agoThen some would chime in about how raising the price is (somehow) Microsoft using the EEE playbook.
- akiselev 4y agoReplace all the humans with ChatGPT bots?
- smegger001 4y agoyou assume that the rest of the internet aren't just chat bot instances talking mindlessly to each other?
- dang 4y ago> giant outrage threads based on something false I think preventing those is impossible, because (a) human nature loves outrage, and (b) we don't have a truth machine. But it would be good to find ways to mitigate it. For example, it's useful to be able to put "[fixed]" or "[resolved]" in titles while the original thread is still active. "[refuted]" would be too provocative though. Building software to let the community make the call might be a good idea. Currently the moderators have to do it and that's risky enough that we end up being pretty conservative.
- novateg 4y agoThe domain names are rented. I remember $12 .com renewals on GoDaddy, now it's $18, Cloudflare charges about $8 for renewals. The registrars always use dependent customers and play with pricing. I have got a domain hack hal.al last year from host.al, the payment for the registration was done, and I got a confirmation for the domain ownership. After 2-3 days I got an email saying that it is a premium domain and I need to pay $2k to get the ownership. So it's always tricky to purchase a domain, you never own it
- behringer 4y agohttps://www.gandi.net/en-US/no-bullshit https://www.gandi.net/en-US/no-bullshit
- pie_flavor 4y agoAs the article mentions: > It's important to note that registries for country-code TLDs (which is every 2-letter TLD) do not have enforceable registry agreements with ICANN. Instead, they are governed by their respective countries (or similar political entities), which can do as they please. They can sucker you in with a low price and then hold your domain hostage when it gets popular.
- staunch 4y agoIt's worth considering the fact that this being a "premium domain" is the only reason it was even available register in the first place. If it had been a $12/year domain, some annoying domainer would have snatched it up on the first day it was available. Premium domains really do seem to be a win-win for registries and regular buyers.
- verst 4y agoMy five letter first name for some reason was not a premium domain (probably because it's not an English name and someone didn't do their homework) and I pay $12 / year. Of course the name would be snatched up quickly so I did buy it during the early access period when I had to pay $250 or so as an early registration fee.
- thiht 4y agoFirst names are usually not premium from my experience. Premiums are often three letter words (or less), or common dictionary words.
- verst 4y agoAll common first names for .dev were listed as premium at the time! I once spoke to someone in charge of the .ink gTLD and they made all animals (among other things) premium domains, but forgot some. For a while I had "sloth.ink" or as I called it Slo(w) Think.
- matheusmoreira 4y agoGoogle simply captured the domain squatter market.
- DannyBee 4y agoIt was taken by an annoying domainer, he owns several hundred domains and resells then, no?
- jeroenhd 4y agoThe domain in question redirects to an entirely different domain. It doesn't actually seem to be used in any way other than for a quirky name. Given that the domain has been registered for long enough to need renewal, I think this is just another domainer complaining that their scalper business model isn't working out. He got lucky Google messed up the conversion rate because of runaway inflation of the lira and he got a discount, had he paid in dollars this stunt would've cost him even more.
- t-writescode 4y agoI’m glad someone made this post. There was so much misinformation and uninformed discussion and misuse of terms in that thread that I was astounded. This person seems to have done a great job of breaking everything down.
- alar44 4y agoI've come to the conclusion that hackernews is mostly programmers and not sysadmins. This crowd is just not that savvy with these types of things. I could be wrong, but that's the vibe I get. There's always a ton of bad information when infosec comes up.
- thiht 4y agoAs someone who worked at a registrar for a few years, it's incredible how opaque the domain name industry is for customers. Even on highly technical communities like HN, people say completely false stuff about domain names, registrars and registries all the time. Every time I see a post about "xxx registrar scammed me" or "yyy lost my domain" I'm sure the OP has no idea what actually happens, and the top comments will be people saying stupidities because they think they understand something they don't.
- behringer 4y agoThe issue is that Google's charging for any domain at $850 dollars. It's absurd.
- mrunkel 4y agoWhy is that an issue?
- pie_flavor 4y agoOn other popular registries it would cost you thousands of dollars, or for .com tens of thousands of dollars, as a squatter would have picked it up instantly. By charging a high price for rental, Google ensures that it's unprofitable to squat on it, and legitimate owners get it for much less.
- behringer 4y agoSo the only solution to this problem is Google madly profiteering? I don't buy it.
- deznu 4y agoAny ideas then?
- xyzelement 4y agoWhat do you propose?
- Gigachad 4y agoIs it? Premium domain names have genuine scarcity and $850 is nothing to a company making productive use of it. Better than having them all squatted and resold for tens of thousands.
- 8note 4y agoIs Google doing something more with premium domains than other ones? What's the increase in services you get for buying a premium domain?
- daneel_w 4y agoDoes anyone happen to know if gTLD operators are allowed to make price hikes targeted at a specific premium domain name? For example if the operator noticed that the product/brand/company/site associated with some domain had suddenly become extremely popular, thus posing a potentially much higher reward than the initial annual renewal fee.
- agwa 4y agoICANN's standard registry agreement for gTLDs does not allow this, as explained in the article: > This means that Google is only allowed to increase a domain's renewal price if it also increases the renewal price of all other domains. If Google wants to charge more to renew a "premium" domain, the higher price must be clearly and conspicuously disclosed to the registrant at time of initial registration. This prevents Google from holding domains hostage: they can't set a low price and later increase it after your domain becomes popular.
- daneel_w 4y agoOh, that's exactly the answer I was looking for. I didn't read the entire article. Thank you for locating it for me.
- duxup 4y agoThat’s good. I had just recently moved a personal site from .io to .dev
- agwa 4y ago.imo isn't a TLD, but if you mean .im, then yes, moving from the Isle of Man's ccTLD to a gTLD was indeed a good move.
- thrdbndndn 4y agoWhat irked me the most in that post is that dude clearly knew he didn't pay $12 initially but tried to hide this fact. As for forex, at least he's actually from Turkey. People around the world have been abusing Turkey currency exchange rate for these online service fees for years (Google and Steam are notable ones, but there are quite a few others like Spotify, Netflix..). I don't know the technicality about this, but most, if not all, of these non-financial companies seem can only update their exchange rate once in a while (not to mention there is also regional pricing involved). So as soon as some violent exchange rate change happens, there are often days or even months to grab some sweet discounts by simply switching currency.
- threatofrain 4y agoAlso from Emir's own tweets we could see that he's part of the reason why there's any wind to the argument that premium pricing is justified -- he owns several hundred domains.
- nly 4y agoMost companies that don't update their pricing for FX don't do so because their margins are already huge. Domain names are basically a free resource. One would think it would be fairly easy to restrict purchases denominated in Turkish Lira to people who reside within Turkey.
- sattoshi 4y agoI don’t understand why a registrar would want to eat these costs at all. Just use a third party for currency conversions at the customers expense. If you’re big enough to do it yourself, you should do it as well as financial companies. Being a consenting victim of currency arbitrage is weird.
- CharlesW 4y agoLast month, Namecheap allowed me buy¹ a .love domain name for $9.98, and then seemingly intercepted the hand-off to me in order to re-classify the domain as a "premium" domain and kindly re-offer it to me for only $1,950. I've never experienced anything like it. I remain horrified about all the times I've recommended Namecheap in the past. ¹ By "buy", I mean that I received an email confirming the $10.16 charge (including ICANN fees) with transaction and approval IDs.
- agwa 4y agoThat's extremely frustrating. Unclear if that's the fault of Namecheap or the .love registry (Merchant Law Group LLP[1]), and whether it was intentional deception or just incompetence. In any case, domain registrants deserve better than that. [1] https://icannwiki.org/.love https://icannwiki.org/.love
- esskay 4y agoI'd bet it was NameCheap screwing up. They've really gone down the pan over the last few years.
- mjevans 4y agoIf that's the case who's the new hotness these days?
- ftio 4y agoI've been using iwantmyname.com for ages and love them.
- permanent 4y agohttps://porkbun.com/ https://porkbun.com/
- andrewflnr 4y agoThey haven't screwed me so far.
- hk1337 4y agoWhat are the criteria for a domain name to be considered “Premium”?
- agwa 4y agoIt's whatever the registry wants. Typically, it will be domains that they expect a lot of people would want, like very short domains or domains for common English words.
- hk1337 4y agoThat's what I was thinking but I wasn't entirely sure if there's a general criteria that certain blocks of domains are premium or not.
- Blue111 4y agoIt looks like the registries are trying to create more demand by making them seem more special then they really are....
- miiiiiike 4y agoYeah, clearly they didn’t change the price.. But they did offer to allow you register .dev domains a few days early for an extra fee. Many people were unaware of the concept of “premium” domains (domains that would renew at a rate other than $12) and Google didn’t go out of their way to remind people that the high rate they paid when first registering the domain was going to be closer to the eventual renewal rate, not a one-time fee.
- jrd259 4y agoIt bothers me that the author writes "If you register your domain in a banana republic because you think the TLD looks cool, and el presidente wants your domain..." with the implication that Spanish speaking countries are (more likely to be) corrupt. Remember that the first banana republic was a result of deliberate colonialism from the USA.
- type-r 4y agothe reason a country may be corrupt isn't really that relevant if all you care about is a country's likelihood of being corrupt.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> the author writes "If you register your domain in a banana republic because you think the TLD looks cool, and el presidente wants your domain..." with the implication that Spanish speaking countries are (more likely to be) corrupt. Well, first, that implication is obviously true if the comparison group is English-speaking countries. Second, the phrase "banana republic" refers to a set of countries that all spoke Spanish...
- walrus01 4y agoThe biggest takeaway from this is DO NOT BUY domains that are offered with a suspiciously low first-year price, and then can and do get jacked up to some ridiculous price per year ($85, $150, $300, whatever). the new gTLDs approved by ICANN are the worst. If you want a reliable domain name that you can trust to not cost more than $12-20 per year, go with something like your local country code, or .net, .org, .com, etc.