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I'm sad to see this, not b/c I like Google, but because domain names are otherwise a manipulative space, and Google was saving us from that. Domain service - n
by w10-1 3y ago
I'm sad to see this, not b/c I like Google, but because domain names are otherwise a manipulative space, and Google was saving us from that.
Domain service - name registry - is a weird market because it includes cross-subsidizing businesses and the information has value (and people will pay for anonymity to avoid hassle), so buy decisions aren't just price/performance.
Google and Cloudflare can offer it near cost just to build goodwill in their clients (i.e., to save them from predation). Cloudflare promises for renewals to only pass through their costs, which makes sense (they make back their customer acquisition cost on the first purchase).
What's the business model of others like porkbun? By hypothesis, you have to pay more to go without the cross-subsidy. If cost is on par, then you might expect them to be marketing the information or to customers somehow. Perhaps just making it back on anonymity charges?
At a minimum, the company would need to have some real reputational concerns about maintaining good relations with customers. E.g., with porkbun, it's super-cute in an ostensibly-benign jurisdiction, but it's a completely hidden LLC who's privacy concerns seem limited only to WHOIS anonymity. What exactly prevents them (or any successor in interest) from misusing the information they have?
On the internet, associating real people with IP's will always be a key goal of governments and criminals, and yet domain name services are a free-for-all with no underlying privacy guarantees.
- andersrs 3y agoI have a conspiracy theory that a lot of domain registration companies like GoDaddy sell the domain name searches to squatters (sometimes themselves). The larger cloud companies don't have so much incentive do this. I always look up domains from the terminal.
- cocoa19 3y agoI was disturbed by learning squatters no longer just sell domains for big bucks, some of them started to offer them for rent.
- andersrs 3y agoThat's awful. So someone pays them them, builds a website on their property and they still have you by the balls. I guess you'd only rent to add a redirect over to a new domain. I've just tried negotiating with a squatter. I'm trying to resurrect a web game with a few thousand players which the original dev neglected. I've rebuilt it on another domain but the community have game data stored in the browser localStorage against the original site. I offered US$200 and was told no - not even a counter offer. I believe they see the domains as lotto tickets - it's in their interests to let a lot of the negotiations fall though so they can win big on a few massive deals.
- comatory 3y agoWhats the game?
- account42 3y agoI guess that's yet another problem of the web platform - data locked to individual operators and not available to others even when the user wants it to be.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoWrite an app to extract the data client side.
- no_wizard 3y agoit doesn't work this way with normal dev tools, since local storage is scoped by the domain, other domains can't see whats in your storage
- zeroonetwothree 3y agoTBF, there's no way that $200 is profitable for them to deal with the hassle of selling. IME offers only start to get accepted once you are in the range of $2000+
- sam0x17 3y agoOh I've confirmed this. Back in the NetworkSolutions days I saw multiple examples of their bot parking a domain I had searched for the previous day.
- qodeninja 3y agoyup, happened to me twice.
- notatoad 3y ago>The larger cloud companies don't have so much incentive do this. I always look up domains from the terminal. somebody runs those whois servers. verisign runs .com and they like money just as much as the next guy - i wouldn't expect your lookups of unregistered domains to be unsold no matter how you do them.
- eeegnu 3y agoTime to use an LLM to sandwich my actual domain name searches between thousands of other similar sounding ones. Let them pay for all of those.
- supriyo-biswas 3y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running
- TwoNineFive 3y agoI've heard Porkbun has weird Chinese ownership and apparently most of their operations are in China.
- duckmysick 3y agoWhere did you hear that?
- qodeninja 3y agosauce?
- CydeWeys 3y agoYou must be thinking of someone else. Porkbun is based out of Oregon. The founder is American.
- drawkbox 3y agoI agree Google had trust here and it was nice to have them in the game. With this infrastructure move especially, it is hard to trust in Google. This can't have been losing money or been that costly. Google why? Google Domains integrates well with Google Cloud and Google Workspace and other products. Even if it was a loss leader it had to be useful. Tell me how this makes sense.
- shawabawa3 3y agoThis is what i find strange about this Surely this was at worse profit neutral, or could have been with a modest price hike, I know I would have continued using them even if their domains were an extra $1/year vs competitors because I trusted them more
- vlakreeh 3y agoI'm really sad that the list of trustworthy registrars is so small. I use Cloudflare for most of my domains and then Google for my .dev domains but now I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my .dev domains, probably keep them on square space. I'd love for CF to get more TLDs on their registrar because I'm very confident that registration isn't something they'd ever kill but there's a told of niche TLDs they don't have yet.
- aTinyCat 3y agoWas worried about this too, but CF released a blog post the other day saying they're aiming for mid-July for .dev and .app support. Going to transfer mine over as soon as they do.