Minor correction, registrations are never free. Come 2019-02-28 16:00:00Z, they will be available at the base price. Registrars set their own prices, so depending on which registrar you're using, expect that to be around $12-20/yr (including the initial year).
Free in the sense that there is no initial up-front cost (compared to the pre-sale pricing). Everything else is an initial dollar amount ($11,500, $3,500, $1,150, etc.) in addition to the $12 maintenance cost. After February 28th, there is no up-front cost but there is still a maintenance cost.
Slack and Github were so worried about someone cybersquatting that they were willing to pay $11,500 each to get those domains today? I guess that's the point of the Dutch auction system, but still seems like a waste of money.
But does the money come from Microsoft or from GitHub?
In a lot of the large companies I've worked, money is siloed from one operating unit to the next. They would send bills between units and sometimes even departments.
The larger the company, the more common this seemed. It's not one giant piggy bank.
But note I think you mean the $12 price but that’s only available from the 28th Feb. To buy today it is $11,500 (unless as others have pointed out you got it as part of the trademark sunrise period)
If you buy the domain during trademark holder's period, you pay the normal price, and not the day 1 landrush price. So no, Slack et. al. did not pay $11,500 to secure their name.
Okay I appreciate you're still willing to engage my snarky commentary, but I really really disagree that 12k is going to be a good barrier to enable people to "get the domain they really want". It enables people with money to do that.
It looks like someone looked at this and said "well 12 grand is affordable but not at scale so people will think twice" - no this is just impossible for some people and amplifying unequal distribution. People with this kind of money already have a "I can get 1000 of em" advantage at $12 a year. No need to give those people more of a head start.
This policy comes from a place of privilege and I despise it. Period.
What's next, ReCAPTCHA bypass if you have Google One? (Ha I say that like it's not already implicitly the case that RC trusts a well tracked Google user more.)
Web devs aren't the only ones that need test/dummy hostnames. That being said, as mentioned in another comment, there are other TLDs already reserved for such use.
localhost is reserved for a very different purpose, though .local is a reserved pseudo-TLD for a purpose encompassing much of what was suggest by GP for .dev.
That's right,.local was a bad suggestions ; while the notional purpose is specifically residential, the local-use behavior that people are looking for is associated more with the reserved domain .home.arpa if .test isn't desired (.test is technically for testing DNS-related code.)
I feel like mDNS isn't used enough in general so there are weird cross-implementation bugs in it. (Partly just because of weird overlaps between early Bonjour entities, modern mDNS stacks, and weird-in-betweeners like "UPnP".) A lot more peer-to-peer applications could bootstrap better from mDNS than currently do simply because bootstrapping from known HTTP(S) endpoints is easier and less buggy.
I've wondered at times if, say, enterprise adoption of .local and proper mDNS might be a kick in the pants to sort out mDNS and make it better for everyone.
There is one thing that annoys me about generic TLDs like .dev, .website, .cloud, .network etc. For example, Salesforce have https://crm.dev - are they the only CRM in the world? Hell no, but they're the biggest, so they can be the only one in the .dev space. Same with workers.dev.
What's your proposed alternative? That generic category names should be disallowed within a TLD? Or that some public or community-driven version of a for-profit service should control the generic names?
Probably the former as it doesn’t require as much aggrandizement.
I wonder whether a different approach would work. Instead of basing TLD name spacing on nebulous terms (com,net,org,io,edu,etc) create a naming system that better reflects the real world. The abstracted terms lead to clashing. So addressing actually reflects physical addressing. There’s only ever going to be one company at Apple’s corporate address. Not sure how it’d work.
Edit-the tech to do this via gps even exists today.
The irrelevance of physical location is one of the advantages of the Internet; adding that to addresses just to provide an unique key seems absurd. Would a company have to change all their addresses if they move their headquarters? What if the country's street system changes? And what about individuals?
I don't see a need to change the current system, but I'd rather move to random strings than tying them to some irrelevant and mutable piece of data.
We could just give everyone who wants a domain a UUID.
My site could be 'uuid://09953e01-8164-4e40-8504-ed5507b50b03'.
This seems to solve all of your complaints. No clashing, reflects the real world (names are all meaningless is reality, and physical locations are nebulous).
> There’s only ever going to be one company at Apple’s corporate address.
On the other hand, there are corporate addresses that have many companies, and many domains, and many distinct technical departments with different needs.
What you're missing here is that domain names are meant to be easy to remember. That is their only goal.
They were created so people didn't have to memorize ipv4 addresses. Proposing that we use corporate addresses or gps coordinates is absolutely unrealistic and against the spirit of the domain name system in the first place.
> They were created so people didn't have to memorize ipv4 addresses
New problem: memorising a UUID is even harder than memorising an IP address. Someone will eventually invent a DNS for the UUID-space, and we'll have this problem all over again.
If anyone actually wants to test this: IPv6 is already a modified version of this UUID plan. The designers were even kind enough in designing IPv6 to provide some nice memory shortcuts over UUID in the IPv6 address style, such as :: to fill runs of zeroes.
It might~ be fun to see how much of the web you can explore just memorizing IPv6 addresses rather than using DNS.
I know we're both just joking, but unfortunately due to SNI headers and load balancers, memorizing ipv6 addresses doesn't necessarily get you the right site.
The DNS system has also managed to make ip addresses less stable over time.
Maybe names that have obvious “generic” squatter value—i.e. names that (at the time of their attempted purchase) describe entire verticals, rather than uniquely identifying a business—should be put up for auction rather than being first-come-first-served.
(That would also include names that describe a vertical that someone tried to trademark into being the name of a business anyway: pets.com and the like. If that trademark isn’t already well known, then this is just an attempt to end-run the auction system, rather than a valid claim.)
Given that TLDs can decide their own allocation policies, I’m surprised none of them have tried this yet.
Well the .dev domains are going up in a "dutch auction" style.
The price starts off at an insane $11,500 per domain, and then slowly over the course of 2 weeks goes down to $12 per domain, first come first serve.
It's a pretty good solution in my opinion to the problem of how to "fairly" distribute domain names.
I want to pick up a few, but I'm going to wait until they are down to the lowest tier as i'm pretty sure nobody is going to pay even $100 for them. And if they do, well then they probably want it more than I do!
Why? Even if it's "cute", it serves no other purpose than racking up prices and keeping buyers second-guessing themselves. Just run a normal Dutch or a second-price auction.
If your question is why not run a standard auction, the answer is that operational overhead to do that is much higher than simply having a given price for creations on a given day, and there'd thus be fewer registrars participating. You need a whole eBay-like experience to run a standard auction; it's a non-trivial amount of work just to support one launch.
I stand corrected on the name. The operational overhead might be reasonable excuse, but I don't think a second-price auction would necessitate that much effort. You could get by with just a form and running a query on it.
It's a LOT of effort. And said effort is required not just at the registry level, but also at the dozens of registrars that support EAP.
This isn't a theoretical concern. We actually did use standard auctions for our first three TLD launches. They were operational nightmares. The Dutch auctions we're using now are much more light-weight, have greater participation, and are now the preferred way of doing launches across the entire industry. We're not even the ones who started using Dutch auctions for TLDs.
You'll just have to trust the word of someone who's been doing this stuff for years that the alternatives really are worse.
The thing is that DNS infrastructure (which registrars basically rely directly on) is very OLAP oriented. bind(8) and DNS daemons like it are DBMSes in some sense, with replication and serving highly-concurrent reads being their primary focuses, and inserts/updates/deletes taking about fifth place compared to those needs. And registries (and sometimes registrars as well) build their entire infrastructure to use the DNS-daemon “store” as the canonical store, rather than having it be a secondary system synchronized into from an online OLTP DBMS. So this writes-are-expensive paradigm creeps into the entire DNS infrastructure, including things seemingly far away from the core, like the registrars’ control panels.
A good comparison is blockchains, which are also highly-replicated, cheap-reads expensive-writes DBMSes. CryptoKitties chose Dutch auctions to sell their kitties for a similar reason to that of the .dev registry: since putting state into their “DBMS” is so expensive, they wanted as stateless a system as possible. (In their system, even the current price is just statelessly computed by comparing the client’s time-at-bid to the chain’s recorded start-of-auction time. The only writes needed are to start the auction, to place the winning bid, or to cancel the auction.)
>should be put up for auction rather than being first-come-first-served.
Have you by chance heard of the Coase Theorem in economics? Which states that given that property rights are well defined and transaction costs relatively low, initial distribution of the property rights will not affect the efficiency of the final outcome reached. In other words, if a given company is given the rights to something and some other company would value that thing more, we do not have a problem, they will negotiate to the efficient outcome on their own by trade.
Except it's not, Google has price ranges for registration dates. So if you wanted to registered today (Feb 19th) that's gonna cost you $11,500, but if you want to wait until it's free, that's 10 days from now.
> There is one thing that annoys me about generic TLDs like .dev, .website, .cloud, .network
And this doesn't annoy you about '.com' or '.org'?
'pets.com' is owned by petsmart, and they're sure not the only pet store. Practically every generic sounding '.com' has been taken and has the "issue" you cite. 'x.org' was registered in the early 90s, and the Xorg foundation certainly isn't the only 'X' out there.
It's a little too late to protest now, this problem has existed since the dawn of the domain name system.
Owning a category domain name is not a guarantee of success or market position. (ex. pets.com)
Think of all the companies with domain names that do not reference their product category. (ex. google.com, amazon.com, etc.). It's not like they needed search.com or shopping.com to be successful.
On a recent thread Google personnel mentioned that ICANN forces all domain providers to backup their data so that any domain provider going bankrupt won't affect domains. However there was no mention of what procedures Google Domains themselves have put in place to protect their customers in case their customers get irreversibly banned somewhere within Google's vast empire.
If the answer is they keep your domains, like they do with Adsense revenue when they ban accounts, then you should definitely be getting your .dev through a different domain provider who Google cannot avoid cooperating with because of ICANN rules they have to follow.
The domains customers aren't tied to Google user accounts. You buy them from the regular registrars like Gandi.net or (heaven forbid) Godaddy, and use them from your dashboards there. You don't have to use a gmail address anywhere.
If you buy them through Google Domains you need your Google account to renew domains, set nameservers etc, which is why these other registrars should be used.
This same argument actually dates back years for not using your web host for your domain registrar, because of contrived problems hindering domain transfers.
Everything I said is true for Google Registry too... and anywhere else Google sells domains. They each should be ensuring domain portability for their respective customers and so far they're not doing that.
Can you clarify what exactly you think we're not doing? (Google Registry, that is.) Transfers are a contractually mandated requirement by ICANN, and we definitely support them.
Also, because of GDPR and WHOIS privacy/proxies, we frequently don't even know who the registrant for a given domain is anyway.
What is the support number for people to call when Google locks them out of their account because of an unrelated issue with a separate Alphabet property? There is an established track record for Google screwing over people unfairly.
In addition to using another registrar, it's generally a good idea to use single-purpose email accounts not associated with your identity to log in to places like Gandi and Namecheap.
The new gTLDs are much more "real" than the ccTLDs in the sense that they are actually governed in ways that protect registrants. A ccTLD operator can unilaterally yank any domain they want with no restrictions whatsoever. They aren't contracted parties.
Google owns Youtube, which bans people for any reason they feel like, including people for whom it had become a full-time job with their channel monetization paying the bills.
It is extremely unwise and very much against the founding spirit of the Internet to allow one company this much control, especially one that has shown itself to be censorious in the past.
Despite the ban being due to a violation of YT terms of service they lost their entire Google account.
> "But because my Google account was terminated as well I didn't have access to my email so I couldn't see what happened."
There are even horror stories about personal accounts getting banned and the ban subsequently propagating to the corporate GApps account of the violator's employer, thus completely shutting down corporate email and document sharing.
This kind of nonsense happened rather frequently when Google+ was suspending people for using "not-real" names. The suspension extended to youtube, to gmail, and to other services.
We're twenty years in so likely there are actually thousands of legitimate reasons, the problem is their system seems designed to dismiss any evidence to the contrary so a false positive is a lifetime ban too.
>I remember your story. I clicked this expecting to hear that everything is wonderful and you're living the good life. Instead, the nightmare continues. I'm sorry
Something is really fucked up if getting one of your Google accounts banned is a "nightmare".
To everybody who's reading this: make the necessary arrangements to make sure getting one of your Google accounts banned is not the end of the world for you.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, but perhaps lack of empathy? For people dependent on Youtube for their income, it's not easy (or perhaps even possible) to just diversify so you aren't dependent on Google.
Your advice is good tho. Diversify as much as possible so that any one company can't ruin your life.
Maybe, I don't know. The thing is that most people don't make a living out of youtube. But they might have a gmail address, then lots of files in drive or photos, stuff from work in docs, their schedule in calendar... Losing all of that at once is like having the rug pulled from under their feet. I'm just saying: if that's your case, please diversify.
Yeah, that site isn't configured/launched yet; if/when it is, expect to see some kind of announcement. It's common to not resolve at all or display a simple error message when you already have your domain but aren't using it yet.
Try putting a one-character .dev domain in your cart (0.dev is available as of now). It's not a lump sum plus $12/year. It's thousands every year after registration.
In a way, I guess this is useful for deterring "domainers".
Even a 4-letter word or name .dev is hundreds of dollars a year. I wonder if the annual fee will drop as the days go by or just the purchase price.
Do TLDs even matter? I'm working on building a professional blog, and although a .dev TLD seems appropriate, using a cheaper one like .co or .be, or even .io seems functionally identical and a lot less costly. Paying hundreds or thousands for .dev seems like paying for pure vanity.
Is it going to help people reach your site? I kinda doubt it. Will Google use it to index your site differently? Maybe, but I dunno. I hope not, but it would kind of make sense.
Yeah, because we're currently in the early access program, which is a Dutch auction. Once the auction ends on the 28th, domains will be available starting from the base registration price.
I believe the price of a .dev eventually will go to $12/year. The hundreds/thousands price applies to people who want to pay more upfront to get the first shot at a "popular" domain name.
TLDs matter, in that you want .com if you can get it.
Otherwise, personally I would use something more well known, but most of the differences are vanity, unless you're using a country specific TLD such as .co.uk or .us
Unless it's a "premium domain" which has a separate pricing structure, independent of the release phase, and renewal fees that stay higher forever.
Hence, right now kjaegrlkjnfvaf.dev is "$11,500 + $12/year" [0] while hn.dev is "$11,500 + $720/year" [1]
So alex.dev and aj.dev will cost $720/year forever, tim.dev, james.dev and emma.dev are $360/year, tony.dev and grace.dev are $180/year, olivia.dev and harry.dev are $98/year, yusef.dev, oscar.dev and sanjay.dev are $12/year.
Maybe not "prohibitive" but a big premium for the Alexes among us!
Thank you for explaining this; I don't see these high yearly priced domains adequately disclosed anywhere. Google's marketing is all about how the "premium" is a one time fee for early registration, do they explain the higher yearly fee names anywhere?
gTLDs have very different rules under ICANN from ccTLDs. For the most part, ccTLDs, the ones governed by countries are very subject to those own countries laws/jurisdictions as ICANN has let countries be relatively sovereign in their domain name usage. This is a part of why it is even possible for there to be colonialist/imperialist baggage in domain names, because ICANN won't interfere in "local" politics, it "simply" allows ccTLD registrars to act as they see fit. Once "hip" ccTLDs have had domains seized in regime changes, for example.
Meanwhile, as mentioned elsewhere in these threads, ICANN has a much more hands on regulatory approach to non-country-code gTLDs. They have formal escrow requirements and complicated seizure/forfeiture rules intended to protect domain registrants. These are not entirely immune to political battles, but are generally more "internationally protected".
Anyway, the point is awareness. Use a ccTLD if it makes you happy, just be aware that there is a different risk footprint than a gTLD.
Yeah, it's a Dutch auction. This is the first price step, so everything costs that much today, even adgfhjklhajklsdfghaksdfasdf.dev. The price will go down according to the schedule, and it'll be bought when someone is willing to pay that much for it.
The auction isn't designed to be fair for all, it's designed to allocate domains efficiently (in the economic sense).
Mr. mslev does not consider [hisfirstname].dev to be worth $11k, so he will not buy it yet. But someone else might consider [hisfirstname].dev to be worth $11k, so they will buy it.
However, if nobody else values [hisfirstname].dev much, then Mr. mslev will buy it when it costs $12 (or earlier, if he thinks it's worth more).
So domain XYZ.dev is given to whoever values having XYZ.dev the most. And yes, people need money to demonstrate that they value it so much.
This also helps prevent domain squatting. I would love to buy asdf.dev and apple.dev and facebook.dev and hello.dev. apple.dev and facebook.dev would be worth it even at $11k because you could resell them to the actual companies, but laws effectively prevent this. However, I would not want to buy asdf.dev and hello.dev at $11k unless I know I could resell them for more than $11k. If I could resell them for more than $11k, that means someone else (the buyer) would buy it right now at $11k.
If everything was $12, bad guys would buy up asdf.dev and hello.dev and everything they could get their hands on, but now that's not a valid strategy unless asdf.dev and hello.dev are actually worth that much (or you'll lose money reselling them). And if they are worth $xxx, they will get bought at auction when the price drops to $xxx.
Speed will still win (buy valuable-name.dev at the crack of dawn when auction begins, before anyone else has a chance to, and resell it within hours), but hoarding domains long-term is no longer an effective strategy.
Exactly. The alternative of not doing a Dutch auction at launch is much worst; valuable names end up in the hands of squatters who are perfectly happy to sit on many names that remain unused so long as they can sell a few at exorbitant prices. The average non-squatter registrant is better off with EAP and premium prices, as the prices you pay during EAP are lower than what a squatter would try to get out of you for the same domain.
It's much more fair this way. If domains were cheap right away, bots would buy all them up. This gives people the chance to buy a domain- this round is more for businesses, but future rounds in the hundred of dollars will be better for the average person.
How can it be called fair at all when only the rich get first pick?
> If domains were cheap right away, bots would buy all them up.
No. Bots would buy them all up if bots were allowed to buy them all up. It's laughably easy to prevent bots from buying domain names if you don't want bots to buy domain names.
> This gives people the chance to buy a domain
This gives rich people/businesses the chance to buy a domain.
> future rounds in the hundred of dollars will be better for the average person.
After the rich have had their pick. Again, I don't see how you can with a straight face call this fair.
Here's a suggestion: Offer domains to all humans who can pay a reasonable non-refundable application fee. Block bots. When a domain receives more than one offer, randomly assign it to an applicant. Block domain transfers permanently to prevent squatters. Let any domain that isn't renewed fall back into the pool and become available (again to a randomly assigned new owner).
I'm sure there are pitfalls doing it this way, but it took me a minute to come up with that. A few hours of thought, some robust debate, and I'm certain we can come up with a fairer way to assign domain names.
Mine is not available either and I doubt someone paid $11,500 for an Italian name with the dev extension. How come? My guess is some providers are "reserving" them.
Yeah, real WHOIS (like from the command line, not one of those sites that proxies it for you). That'll go direct to our registry application, bypassing all registrars entirely.
Try to register through Gandi. They give you options that decrease in price all the way down to ~$16 -- that's the "get it when it GAs" price. If someone scoops it up before you, you're refunded. Otherwise, it's yours.
I managed to get <lastname>.dev, and it's a somewhat common last name, for $133.50 on the "GA" pricing. I expect someone will grab it before then. But if not...
Unfortunately, 'mauricio' is on the global domain reserve list administered by ICANN, so it cannot be registered on any ngTLD. I believe it's Mauritius in another language?
Oh, interesting, yes this is "mauritius" in Spanish a not so common name. I didn't know this, thank you for pointing it out. I guess that list is recent as mauricio.com and mauricio.co belongs to regular people and are currently working.
Do you happen to have a link to said list? A quick googling returned nothing relevant for me.
.com is a legacy gTLD, which existed long before these restrictions were codified in 2012 for the new gTLD program. .co is a ccTLD (it's for Colombia), and ccTLDs also predate the gTLD program and are not subject to the gTLD program restrictions besides.
The content on those domains is highly relevant and appears to be thorough. What do you think a non-profit could have used them for that would be better?
> ...it requires HTTPS to connect to all .dev websites. This protects people who visit your site against ad malware and tracking injection by internet service providers
The latter is true (it protects against injection), but I'm not sure how the former is. How would it protect against ad malware?
My assumption from that sentence is that both "ad malware" and "ad tracking" are injected by some ISPs somewhere between the client and the server. By forcing HTTPS, you'd prevent some amount of this by ensuring the data in transit from client-to-server-to-client is encrypted (and thus mostly tamper-proof) using the .dev domain's public cert.
A couple years ago ICANN started letting companies buy customized TLDs through an auction process. I'm not sure how much they paid, but for comparison, Google tried buying .blog a while ago but was outbid by Automattic, who paid $19 million. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686086
It's not. You can make your own DNS server and sell records to anyone you want. You just have to convince users to type in your address instead of 8.8.8.8.
226 comments
[ 6.6 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] thread444 comments a couple of days ago in "Google .dev domain early access" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178757
So $12?
In a lot of the large companies I've worked, money is siloed from one operating unit to the next. They would send bills between units and sometimes even departments.
The larger the company, the more common this seemed. It's not one giant piggy bank.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-venezuela-cafe-con-l...
But note I think you mean the $12 price but that’s only available from the 28th Feb. To buy today it is $11,500 (unless as others have pointed out you got it as part of the trademark sunrise period)
Ok.
It looks like someone looked at this and said "well 12 grand is affordable but not at scale so people will think twice" - no this is just impossible for some people and amplifying unequal distribution. People with this kind of money already have a "I can get 1000 of em" advantage at $12 a year. No need to give those people more of a head start.
This policy comes from a place of privilege and I despise it. Period.
What's next, ReCAPTCHA bypass if you have Google One? (Ha I say that like it's not already implicitly the case that RC trusts a well tracked Google user more.)
That would have been a good gift to all the devs out there.
I feel like mDNS isn't used enough in general so there are weird cross-implementation bugs in it. (Partly just because of weird overlaps between early Bonjour entities, modern mDNS stacks, and weird-in-betweeners like "UPnP".) A lot more peer-to-peer applications could bootstrap better from mDNS than currently do simply because bootstrapping from known HTTP(S) endpoints is easier and less buggy.
I've wondered at times if, say, enterprise adoption of .local and proper mDNS might be a kick in the pants to sort out mDNS and make it better for everyone.
I wonder whether a different approach would work. Instead of basing TLD name spacing on nebulous terms (com,net,org,io,edu,etc) create a naming system that better reflects the real world. The abstracted terms lead to clashing. So addressing actually reflects physical addressing. There’s only ever going to be one company at Apple’s corporate address. Not sure how it’d work.
Edit-the tech to do this via gps even exists today.
I haven't seen any uses of it in the wild though.
For future reference, search Google for "site:*.dev"
I don't see a need to change the current system, but I'd rather move to random strings than tying them to some irrelevant and mutable piece of data.
My site could be 'uuid://09953e01-8164-4e40-8504-ed5507b50b03'.
This seems to solve all of your complaints. No clashing, reflects the real world (names are all meaningless is reality, and physical locations are nebulous).
> There’s only ever going to be one company at Apple’s corporate address.
On the other hand, there are corporate addresses that have many companies, and many domains, and many distinct technical departments with different needs.
What you're missing here is that domain names are meant to be easy to remember. That is their only goal.
They were created so people didn't have to memorize ipv4 addresses. Proposing that we use corporate addresses or gps coordinates is absolutely unrealistic and against the spirit of the domain name system in the first place.
New problem: memorising a UUID is even harder than memorising an IP address. Someone will eventually invent a DNS for the UUID-space, and we'll have this problem all over again.
It might~ be fun to see how much of the web you can explore just memorizing IPv6 addresses rather than using DNS.
The DNS system has also managed to make ip addresses less stable over time.
(That would also include names that describe a vertical that someone tried to trademark into being the name of a business anyway: pets.com and the like. If that trademark isn’t already well known, then this is just an attempt to end-run the auction system, rather than a valid claim.)
Given that TLDs can decide their own allocation policies, I’m surprised none of them have tried this yet.
The price starts off at an insane $11,500 per domain, and then slowly over the course of 2 weeks goes down to $12 per domain, first come first serve.
It's a pretty good solution in my opinion to the problem of how to "fairly" distribute domain names.
I want to pick up a few, but I'm going to wait until they are down to the lowest tier as i'm pretty sure nobody is going to pay even $100 for them. And if they do, well then they probably want it more than I do!
It's only insane if no one wants to pay that much. I bet tons of companies are willing to pay that for premium .dev domains.
Edit: Normal dutch, not reverse.
Why? Even if it's "cute", it serves no other purpose than racking up prices and keeping buyers second-guessing themselves. Just run a normal Dutch or a second-price auction.
If your question is why not run a standard auction, the answer is that operational overhead to do that is much higher than simply having a given price for creations on a given day, and there'd thus be fewer registrars participating. You need a whole eBay-like experience to run a standard auction; it's a non-trivial amount of work just to support one launch.
This isn't a theoretical concern. We actually did use standard auctions for our first three TLD launches. They were operational nightmares. The Dutch auctions we're using now are much more light-weight, have greater participation, and are now the preferred way of doing launches across the entire industry. We're not even the ones who started using Dutch auctions for TLDs.
You'll just have to trust the word of someone who's been doing this stuff for years that the alternatives really are worse.
A good comparison is blockchains, which are also highly-replicated, cheap-reads expensive-writes DBMSes. CryptoKitties chose Dutch auctions to sell their kitties for a similar reason to that of the .dev registry: since putting state into their “DBMS” is so expensive, they wanted as stateless a system as possible. (In their system, even the current price is just statelessly computed by comparing the client’s time-at-bid to the chain’s recorded start-of-auction time. The only writes needed are to start the auction, to place the winning bid, or to cancel the auction.)
Have you by chance heard of the Coase Theorem in economics? Which states that given that property rights are well defined and transaction costs relatively low, initial distribution of the property rights will not affect the efficiency of the final outcome reached. In other words, if a given company is given the rights to something and some other company would value that thing more, we do not have a problem, they will negotiate to the efficient outcome on their own by trade.
https://domains.google/tld/dev/
And this doesn't annoy you about '.com' or '.org'?
'pets.com' is owned by petsmart, and they're sure not the only pet store. Practically every generic sounding '.com' has been taken and has the "issue" you cite. 'x.org' was registered in the early 90s, and the Xorg foundation certainly isn't the only 'X' out there.
It's a little too late to protest now, this problem has existed since the dawn of the domain name system.
Think of all the companies with domain names that do not reference their product category. (ex. google.com, amazon.com, etc.). It's not like they needed search.com or shopping.com to be successful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178757
If the answer is they keep your domains, like they do with Adsense revenue when they ban accounts, then you should definitely be getting your .dev through a different domain provider who Google cannot avoid cooperating with because of ICANN rules they have to follow.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/adsense-lawsuit/248135/
This same argument actually dates back years for not using your web host for your domain registrar, because of contrived problems hindering domain transfers.
So I don't see the relevance in their thread.
Also, because of GDPR and WHOIS privacy/proxies, we frequently don't even know who the registrant for a given domain is anyway.
Same question for your colleagues at Google Domains.
This was for a real TLD but I suspect that there is something similar for vanity domains.
There’s no reason that a domain can’t end in ANY string. Bingo, no more fake “shortage.”
It is extremely unwise and very much against the founding spirit of the Internet to allow one company this much control, especially one that has shown itself to be censorious in the past.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47278362
Despite the ban being due to a violation of YT terms of service they lost their entire Google account. > "But because my Google account was terminated as well I didn't have access to my email so I couldn't see what happened."
System errors - https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/7nrx07/google_...
We're twenty years in so likely there are actually thousands of legitimate reasons, the problem is their system seems designed to dismiss any evidence to the contrary so a false positive is a lifetime ban too.
Something is really fucked up if getting one of your Google accounts banned is a "nightmare".
To everybody who's reading this: make the necessary arrangements to make sure getting one of your Google accounts banned is not the end of the world for you.
Your advice is good tho. Diversify as much as possible so that any one company can't ruin your life.
https://forums.dansdeals.com/index.php?topic=68066.0
Doesn't seem to have those listed in the top article, though, not sure why. Maybe it'll update later.
EDIT: The official source seems to be https://czds.icann.org/
> There was no service found for the uri requested.
> Error 404 (Not Found)!!1
Try putting a one-character .dev domain in your cart (0.dev is available as of now). It's not a lump sum plus $12/year. It's thousands every year after registration.
In a way, I guess this is useful for deterring "domainers".
Even a 4-letter word or name .dev is hundreds of dollars a year. I wonder if the annual fee will drop as the days go by or just the purchase price.
I'm interested in buying one, but not from them.
Is it going to help people reach your site? I kinda doubt it. Will Google use it to index your site differently? Maybe, but I dunno. I hope not, but it would kind of make sense.
C$14,572.71
:(
Then you use a corporate domain name registrar to register it during the sunrise phase.
To save some clicks (in addition to the $12/year):
Feb 19: $11.5k
Feb 20: $3.5k
Feb 21: $1150
Feb 22-24: $350
Feb 25-27: $125
After the 27th you only have to pay the normal $12/year rate.
Hence, right now kjaegrlkjnfvaf.dev is "$11,500 + $12/year" [0] while hn.dev is "$11,500 + $720/year" [1]
So alex.dev and aj.dev will cost $720/year forever, tim.dev, james.dev and emma.dev are $360/year, tony.dev and grace.dev are $180/year, olivia.dev and harry.dev are $98/year, yusef.dev, oscar.dev and sanjay.dev are $12/year.
Maybe not "prohibitive" but a big premium for the Alexes among us!
[0] https://domains.google.com/m/registrar/search?searchTerm=kja... [1] https://domains.google.com/m/registrar/search?searchTerm=hn....
I mean with these sort of pricing, are Startup suppose to be creative with their name or else they are forced to pay thousands to Google every year.
gTLDs have very different rules under ICANN from ccTLDs. For the most part, ccTLDs, the ones governed by countries are very subject to those own countries laws/jurisdictions as ICANN has let countries be relatively sovereign in their domain name usage. This is a part of why it is even possible for there to be colonialist/imperialist baggage in domain names, because ICANN won't interfere in "local" politics, it "simply" allows ccTLD registrars to act as they see fit. Once "hip" ccTLDs have had domains seized in regime changes, for example.
Meanwhile, as mentioned elsewhere in these threads, ICANN has a much more hands on regulatory approach to non-country-code gTLDs. They have formal escrow requirements and complicated seizure/forfeiture rules intended to protect domain registrants. These are not entirely immune to political battles, but are generally more "internationally protected".
Anyway, the point is awareness. Use a ccTLD if it makes you happy, just be aware that there is a different risk footprint than a gTLD.
Aaaaaaand its $11,500.
Mr. mslev does not consider [hisfirstname].dev to be worth $11k, so he will not buy it yet. But someone else might consider [hisfirstname].dev to be worth $11k, so they will buy it. However, if nobody else values [hisfirstname].dev much, then Mr. mslev will buy it when it costs $12 (or earlier, if he thinks it's worth more).
So domain XYZ.dev is given to whoever values having XYZ.dev the most. And yes, people need money to demonstrate that they value it so much.
This also helps prevent domain squatting. I would love to buy asdf.dev and apple.dev and facebook.dev and hello.dev. apple.dev and facebook.dev would be worth it even at $11k because you could resell them to the actual companies, but laws effectively prevent this. However, I would not want to buy asdf.dev and hello.dev at $11k unless I know I could resell them for more than $11k. If I could resell them for more than $11k, that means someone else (the buyer) would buy it right now at $11k.
If everything was $12, bad guys would buy up asdf.dev and hello.dev and everything they could get their hands on, but now that's not a valid strategy unless asdf.dev and hello.dev are actually worth that much (or you'll lose money reselling them). And if they are worth $xxx, they will get bought at auction when the price drops to $xxx.
Speed will still win (buy valuable-name.dev at the crack of dawn when auction begins, before anyone else has a chance to, and resell it within hours), but hoarding domains long-term is no longer an effective strategy.
> If domains were cheap right away, bots would buy all them up.
No. Bots would buy them all up if bots were allowed to buy them all up. It's laughably easy to prevent bots from buying domain names if you don't want bots to buy domain names.
> This gives people the chance to buy a domain
This gives rich people/businesses the chance to buy a domain.
> future rounds in the hundred of dollars will be better for the average person.
After the rich have had their pick. Again, I don't see how you can with a straight face call this fair.
Here's a suggestion: Offer domains to all humans who can pay a reasonable non-refundable application fee. Block bots. When a domain receives more than one offer, randomly assign it to an applicant. Block domain transfers permanently to prevent squatters. Let any domain that isn't renewed fall back into the pool and become available (again to a randomly assigned new owner).
I'm sure there are pitfalls doing it this way, but it took me a minute to come up with that. A few hours of thought, some robust debate, and I'm certain we can come up with a fairer way to assign domain names.
That's where you are wrong.
I managed to get <lastname>.dev, and it's a somewhat common last name, for $133.50 on the "GA" pricing. I expect someone will grab it before then. But if not...
Do you happen to have a link to said list? A quick googling returned nothing relevant for me.
https://www.icann.org/resources/country-territory-names#rese...
ICANN definitely went overboard on these required reservations, but of course we have no choice but to comply.
It feels like those would've been better suited for non-profit orgs
This is just yet another scattershot TLD. It's about as consequential as .ninja in the grand scheme of things.
It just happens to be cute for developers from a vanity perspective, but it doesn't matter.
The latter is true (it protects against injection), but I'm not sure how the former is. How would it protect against ad malware?
It hardly seems like a worthwhile problem to solve at gTLD-scale.
advertising and malware (both ad-related and not) injection by ISPs is a well documented global issue.
It's a well-documented global problem.
> and you fix it with regulation,
Governments are often not opposed, and sometimes active encouragers or procurers of the ISP injection.
Also, the HTTPS requirement for .dev domains is regulation, even if it isn't government regulation.
Defrauding someone electronically is illegal but you still encrypt your data in transit.
https://support.google.com/domains/answer/4639612?hl=en
For example, using GoDaddy, you can buy .dev domain for 800$ instead of 350$ on Friday (4th stage of early access).
And we have no control over registrar prices, or countries that any given registrar operates in.
I mean, how do we get everyday normal people to use it?
Its been attempted before (namecoin etc)...but maybe some advantage could be given to make it more attractive.
• Google paid $25 million for “.app” [1]
• Amazon paid ~$5 million for “.buy”
• Amazon paid $2.2 million for “.spot”
• Verisign paid $135 million for “.web”
• Automattic paid $19 million for “.blog”
• ICM paid $3 million for “.sex”
[1] https://gtldresult.icann.org/application-result/applications...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-just-paid-25-million-...
I guess that miiight stop squatters, but I feel like it will result in a squatter with deeper pockets.
https://get.dev/ https://github.dev/ https://grow.dev/ https://accessibility.dev/ https://slack.dev/
etc.
I remember people complaining about the .dev tld for this reason. Many people have it routed locally.