I'm not saying they are doing anything right or wrong but they are probably a profitable company who could have theoretically spared to absorb some (or all) of it without passing it through to their customers
Why should namecheap subsidize the cost? That makes 0 sense and I say it as a namecheap customer. I don't see how its fair for them to cover the cost and I don't want them to do so because I am a happy customer and don't want them to go out of business or lower their product quality.
Precisely, Not to defend Namecheap but we are in a different time. I don't know everyone's age on HN. But If they were just 40s, they would have lived in a zero interest era for 15 years and nearly all of their professional lives. We are having inflation, cost of money going up. The margin that used to work for Namecheap may no longer works for them now. And you have plenty of option outside of NameCheap. And again, none of this could be called rent seeking.
Of course there is an argument in US and Tech today ( as shown in many of the comment ) that margin is somehow evil. And should be as low as possible. I guess that is a different argument.
I think because the Verisign price increase is only 7%, and presumably namecheap has a margin on top of that. So increasing the price by 9% and blaming the registry could be considered unreasonable.
They use the occasion to get more commission, by encouraging renewals further in the future to "lock" the current price. Presumably they get the full 10 years worth of commission today when a .com is renewed for that long.
“I think calling them a monopoly at this point is an unfair comparison. Verisign is no more a monopoly than your Ford dealer is a monopoly,” Redl said. “It’s not the original days of the internet where that was the only top-level domain.”
It is bothers me that the monopoly is excused this way.
When I live somewhere and the owner of the water company decides they need to increase prices 9% despite having lower costs, they are definitely exercising their monopoly, even when there are several other utilities coming to my home and so many other kinds of beverage I might acquire.
How do you know they have lower costs? My local water municipality recently increased prices citing increased pricing across the entire spectrum of equipment, materials, chemicals and labor. This in addition to state-mandated improvements to waste water management that must be completed within a certain timeframe.
If you're in Britain most likely your water company has been saddled with debt [so it could pay more to its shareholders] and is in serious economical difficulties.
Also are Ford dealers not doing very similar anticompetitive things? Demanding high markups over msrp for electric vehicles, or refusing to offer them altogether, for example.
If you already have a .com domain that all your customers are familiar with, its not like you can just switch to a different domain. _Maybe_ I could excuse this if it was only for new registrations, but left the price for renewals the same, at least for existing domain owners.
Yep, there is no magic bullet to "thing I rent from someone else who has nigh complete discretion on price decides to price me out." You either regulate (which is what happened here that limits the price hikes to 7% yoy) or figure something out. If you can't leave or retaliate then you're basically proving explicitly why they're able to increase prices to the point of ruining you.
At a certain price you just pony up the $200k to ICANN become your own registrar and then actually own your domains.
You tell people to use the new email. I don't understand this, if you make a thing the root of your identity then you have get everyone to migrate when it changes. There is no solution to this problem that doesn't involve implementing USPS mail forwarding for email.
Easier said than done. For most people that probably means updating literally hundreds of sites (and better hope all of those have a way to change your email). Not to mention telling your contacts to use the new email, and hope they don't forget and send an important email to the wrong domain.
If you run a successful restaurant paying for "protection" to mobsters is a negligible cost to keep your business running (and your kneecaps not broken), but that doesn't make the racketeering acceptable...
I can’t imagine a world where Google would move their primary domain from .com to .io. Over the past 20 years, I’ve witnessed numerous successful restaurants move locations due to rent hikes that are still in business in their new locations indicating continued success. I’m having trouble thinking of any major companies that have changed their domains after already being established and successful. Migrating domains feels a smidge different.
The reason it's different is that domains are so cheap and the price increases are so small. Why would a major company (or even a tiny company) change their domain over an increase of a dollar or two per year? It doesn't make sense.
If those restaurants' landlords had hiked their rent by a few dollars per year, they wouldn't have moved either. But it's not uncommon to see increases of thousands of dollars per month, even for a small restaurant, when the lease comes up for renewal.
The problem here is how justifiable is the change in prices, not the amount. If you raise prices because you really have to and I can't keep up, that's OK, that means that my business is not viable anymore, I need to charge more also or cut on expenses (or go out of business, which is also OK). But if you keep milking me for more money just because you can, as I have no other options, it's not OK at all.
There are some differences in the regulation of DNS assignments and real estate that makes this comparison not as direct as it may have been intended. Namely who can own the assets and if they are transferable. In real estate both of these lean much more on the open side, creating market forces which allows capitalism to work. Even if you yourself don't own property in e.g. NYC there is more than one investment company looking to buy and sell in NYC. In DNS these assignments enforce a system of renting and registry lock in. There is little room for capitalism to do its thing when avenues for competition are removed in this way.
Even seeming outs such as "invest in a gTLD" don't provide the opportunity. Aside from being the virtual equivalent of "why don't you just go build your hair salon 50 miles out of town where nobody owns anything yet for 1,000x the cost of a building in town?" gTLDs require being a well established organization, among other eligibility requirements, which creates a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
Both do have a 3rd component of "group good overhead" but the IANA fees of ~18 cents don't seem to be the problem so there's no sense in comparing/contrasting these differences.
Well, you usually can simply move just for a few streets/blocks, it's very unlikely you'll have to move out of the town...But let's imagine if many little shops would be forced to move out of the town because of high rents - wouldn't the town come up with some regulations to prevent that?
Capitalism is fine when it benefits the overall economy, but when it starts self-imploding because of interests of a few, then government jumps in usually - that's why we have anti-monopoly laws, because monopoly hurts the progress...
If your business is at a desirable address that customers are familiar with, and have visited for years... should you be entitled to 4 different landlords available to negotiate your next lease? Might be a nice thought but it's not a reality. You've got one landlord, make peace with that, or move.
Well, if you don't like Verisign's service, you can always move one county over, and deal with a different TLD domain registrar for .com, just like with your Ford dealer.
(As an aside, I'd pay for a better-curated DNS infrastructure. For instance, google's font domains of whatever could just resolve to something federated, and that has TLS certs that are trusted by the alternative infrastructure. Google's chain of trust could be on a certificate revocation list.)
I hope that someone sooner or later will be able to propose an alternative model to the current DNS infrastructure.
Exceeding the current limits and the abuses that derive from it is certainly something extremely difficult to achieve, but I think there's a market in trying to fix the status quo.
It is a monopoly. - .com domains have the brand-recognition and trust behind them. Other TLDs still feel 'knock-off' especially for lesser technically aware people.
TLDs may sort of be fungible, but not really. No one looks at widgets.com and widgets.tube as identical, whereas no one really cares about one car versus another beyond feelings of personal worth.
When you have a monopoly, you spend all of your time explaining why you don't have a monopoly. When you don't have a monopoly, you spend all your time building toward a monopoly.
> How is this anything but rent seeking on the part of Verisign?
While I generally agree with you --this smells like potential rent-seeking--, in order to be able to conclusively label it as such we have to know about the real cost structure that drives a company like Verisign. All of that information is here:
I wish I had the time to dive into this. I just don't. I generally try to avoid making assertions without having done some work in support of them. That's why I can't reach this conclusion --I can suspect it to be true though.
As a reminder, "rent" in "rent seeking" isn't the colloquial "rent", as in what you pay to rent a car or a house. Economic rent, as a term of trade, is related to financial gains obtained without increases in productivity. As such it has been "fuzzified" to make it apply to all kinds of things that have nothing whatsoever to do with economic rent-seeking. As an example of real rent-seeking, an article in Forbes describes how writing an essay in college to obtain a grant (and maybe even admission or tuition discounts) is classic rent-seeking. Same with a company lobbying government for subsidies --they didn't make their process or product better in exchange for the financial gain.
In other words, the question here is squarely centered around the real cost structure at Verisign. Frankly, I don't know everything they do and how much it costs to support the TLD's they administer. I still remember when domains were free --as a fool, I didn't register a pile of them back then.
It sure feels like rent-seeking. That doesn't mean it is. Without the proper analysis of their accounting this characterization might not be correct. In other words, it might be quite possible that they can fully justify the increase in rates due to increases in costs.
Not to go too far, wages have gone up across the board (in numerical, not real terms) and inflation has made everything more expensive. Power, taxes, food, transportation, labor, etc. Every single business has had their cost structure increase, in some cases dramatically so. Given this framework, I'd be cautious about ascribing nefarious intent to any business increasing their pricing.
Put a different way: A rent-seeking claim needs to include a "Minimum Viable Financial Analysis" in support of this conclusion. Prices going up isn't enough evidence of this at all. Not liking price increases is no evidence at all.
There's nothing whatsoever hand-wavy about inflation. It's as real as can be, and it affects everyone and everything.
> As of 2022, their operating margin was about 65%... That doesn't indicate a company that needs to increase prices.
It indicates nothing. That isn't even close to proper analysis of their financials. As is often the case with chat room discussions, people just love to grab onto one number or one fact and use it to flog everyone to death. Well, I have news, reality --as opposed to fantasy-- is a complex multivariate problem. A single number is meaningless.
Note that I am not at all defending Verisign. I know nothing about their operations and don't have the time to dive into it. For all I know this actually is 100% rent-seeking, in the full economic sense of the term.
I am defending reason and the requirement for solid analysis and justification before accusing anyone of anything. This, in sharp contrast with the typical lynching mob mentality that permeates online conversations.
What I am sick of and will not do, is people just jumping at labelling things (people, businesses, etc.) because they don't like something rather than through critical thinking, demonstrable and reproducible analysis of facts in full context. You know, like calling someone "racist" because they bought vanilla ice cream (not making light of real racism, but one has to admit we have taken that term to insane lengths and depths).
Maybe this is rent-seeking. Don't know. What I do know is that the claim has been made in this thread and the only real support is feelings, not well-presented evidence.
Also, saying someone makes 65% operating margin as a measure of evil-ness is ridiculous. Who put anyone in charge of deciding how much margin makes someone worthy? 5%? 10%? 25%? 0%? What happens to that fake virtuous badge when things go wrong (pandemic, economic downturn) and the company has to fire half the staff because they were labeled evil for making more than 5%? Yeah, the people who lost their jobs are going to think very highly of the virtue police on that day.
As someone who has founded and operated multiple businesses in the last four decades, this kind of thing really drives me up a wall. People who have never risked a dime of their own trying to make a non-trivial business go actually think they understand business. It's both the saddest and the funniest thing seen online and, with some frequency, on HN.
If we're going to fix issues with domains I would like to find a way to ban domain parking and "premium" domain prices sold by registrars.
I'm fine with an individual holding a handful of unused domains, but the legislation should eliminate anyone holding domains as their primary source of income.
That's part of my point. Since customers can't actually replace a ".com" domain with a domain from a "competitor" TLD, it isn't actually competition.
If .name was just as good as .com then if verisign increased the price, they would lose customers who would use .name instead. So the fact that verisign can increase the price when .com is _already_ more expensive than other TLDs is evidence that they do have a monopoly.
$15.88 per .com is pretty steep, damn. Dynadot shows $10.99 per renewal.
How legitimate is the Namecheap claim about "its out of our control" part? I have a number of domains with Namecheap, enough to be an annoyance to transfer them all but that number seems excessively high.
The upstream cost increase is 7% (the maximum allowed by Verisign's contract). Verisign is allowed to increase .com prices by up to 7% next year, and likely will.
It's $5 over a year. If that's a meaningful amount of money you probably have no business owning domain names.
Namecheap has always been good for me in terms of service and reliability. I only own a few domains but if $15/year was unaffordable I think I'd just let them expire.
> It's $5 over a year. If that's a meaningful amount of money you probably have no business owning domain names.
I don't think you have a say on what others do with their money, or what could have possibly led you to believe you had.
I've bought domains for my employer before. Domain name pricing was absolutely a factor in the decision-making process. Only a moron pays $20 for something they could pay $10 instead.
Everybody here can express an opinion on any topic under discussion; it's a public forum.
I might say only a moron spends 10 seconds of his employer's time worrying about a $5 difference in an expense over the course of a year. At that cost differential, many other factors are more important than price.
> Everybody here can express an opinion on any topic under discussion; it's a public forum.
I've expressed mine, and my opinion is that it's stupid for anyone to make wild claims on how anyone can or cannot base their decision to buy domain names based on price, and argue that they should be deprived of their right just because they are price-conscious.
Do you disagree?
> I might say only a moron spends 10 seconds (...)
Only a moron buys domain names without assessing their availability, and this also covers variants including based on TLDs. A company does not simply buy example.com while leaving out typosquatter variants like example.org, example.xyz, example.io, example.co.uk, etc. If you had any experience in the domain, you would know that all it takes is a domain squatter to turn your 5$/year domain into a >10k expense.
.xyz was a terrible TLD. I used it a few years ago and giving people my email address was so annoying. Even some logins didn't accept it. No benefits whatsoever.
I have a .live domain I am afraid to advertise for the same reason. But nowadays .xyz has become popular with anyone involved with 3D and it was good value. I swapped everything to Cloudflare as Registrar following advice on HN and their policy not to raise the rates but not much you can do about this kind of thing.
I use .dev now. It's not much better tbh. I usually have to spell .dev "like developer," but I think people get it a lot more quickly than they did xyz. It's been awhile since I've had to say it to anyone though.
Can I say something stupid but maybe true: Do you want to be on a domain registrar for whom registration is a loss-leader or their core business?
Like, I like cheaper too, but even just in the last few years I can think of a few "loss-leader" registrars who decided they no longer wanted that division operating at a loss and scrapped it. Google Domains being the most popular example[0], but Gandi[1] is another where they operated at a loss then got acquired with huge price increases.
Disclosure: I'm on NameCheap and AWS's Route53.
I've seen way too many NameCheap alternatives come & go or turn "evil." If NameCheap starts being sketchy or misleading, I'll move, but that hasn't happened yet. I want a rock solid registrar for tens of years, with a business strategy that supports that, rather than saving $4/year.
Yep, I'm still on NameCheap, for all the same reasons. They're not the cheapest any longer, but I've also never had an issues with them. And I like knowing that they're making a profit on me - keeps them likely to continue doing what they're doing.
Given you're on Route53 I'm surprised you would even bother with anyone else. Route53 is hands down the best registrar no questions asked. They have no side hustle to auction off domains that fall off renewal and all their customers would be pisssed if that ever happened. They're a company where the incentives actually align.
before i moved to porkbun, i had 12 domains. now i have 23. their great domain search, their friendly, funny words everywhere, and cute graphics.. it gets people to buy more domains than they normally would, and not want to move away. that's my guess.
I would think DNS registration is a value-add/loss leader for Cloudflare, not something they anticipate large numbers of users taking advantage of without signing up for other Cloudflare services, no?
.XYZ domains were already too difficult to use for anything other than a regular site since they have such a bad reputation (however warranted it may be) as being used for spam. Not sure what the point is in paying even more for a TLD that's discriminated against by default.
.xyz is one of the most popular TLDs for crypto and web3, but it has a horrible email spam reputation and some gateways blacklist the entire TLD. With the exception of a16z, VCs aren't funding these businesses much anymore, either.
I've been using .xyz as my primary email address. Everything from banking to shopping, to governmental stuff. The number of sites that gave me problems is probably less than 10 that I can remember. I have around 700 accounts in my password manager so go figure.
It's not the receiving that's the problem, but the sending. Even with all necessary records in place and using a reputable email provider isn't enough in a lot of cases. You'll just end up in spam.
I just increased mine to the max of 10 years, I guess I should have done that anyway just for security. What happens though if namecheap goes out of business during that?
You can transfer it elsewhere at any point and you'll still get credit for the years you've paid for (though the receiving registrar will likely make you buy at least one additional year).
Namecheap can hand over their records to another registar before they go out of business or ICANN can step in after the fact and give their domains to another registar to manage. The new registar would likely reach out to introduce themselves.
This happened several years ago with a registrar I had at my domains at called RegisterFly. Upper management fraud and fighting led to the company spiraling, ICANN accreditation getting canceled and the site shutting down. ICANN transferred all ownership over to GoDaddy at the time.
"What happens though if namecheap goes out of business during that?"
.COM agreement between registrars and ICANN requires registrars to regularily store all registrant contact infos in IronMountain and set ICANN as escrow, therefore allowing ICANN to contact all registrants should a registrar fold and allow them to transfer to another registrar. Another reason to keep the domain ownership informations up-to-date. [1]
There's also vanity DNS for business and enterprise plans - but AFAIU that's basically just slapping another name on cloudflare DNS - not ability to point ns records to non-cf servers?
I have had a good experience with Cloudflare's registry service over the last couple of years.
I have taken to gradually pushing my registrations out as far as they can go. I just occasionally add years onto domains I buy, so as to lock in the $9 price for that term. Seems like an excellent way to avoid inflationary price increases, or general pricing creep.
It appears to read, "If you want to take advantage of the current price tag," which seems to suggest locking in the current price before the increase. Not sure what you mean.
Funnily I even looked up this distinction before writing because I very much know of the difference (see my comment history) but wrote exactly the wrong one. Oh well. Yes I meant registrar, not the TLD registry.
Pretty much. Everyone wants to upsell you on their hosting, page creation and blogging tools where they have ridiculous margins. How much disk space and bandwidth do you think a random small business or Jane Rando's recipe blog actually use vs. what they're being charged for? Not to mention things like "brand protection" where they'll do you a solid and buy/squat your domain on the .xxx and .sucks tlds for extra $$ each month.
This is true, but Porkbun couldn't be further from the big registrars like GoDaddy in their approach. It is actually difficult to buy a domain on GoDaddy for most people without getting sucked in to buying extras, whereas Porkbun barely even suggests extras at any point since I've been a user, and what are extras other places are offered for free.
I've been slowly migrating all of my domains over and have been very happy with them. Lower prices, faster website, almost ridiculously clean interface. Even has passkey support.
couldnt really tell you but i switched from namecheap to porkbun and recommend it. better prices, better site (and the only non stupid bulk editor ive seen on a frontend), better support and supporting a small company
tl;dr: NameCheap is now NameExpensive. I'm a long-time customer of theirs and I was surprised at the price differences compared to the newer competitors.
Root server costs should come out of the ICANN fee, which I believe is $0.18/domain year for all domains that aren't in a ccTLD.
Running the TLD servers for .com is likely more challenging than running the root servers; the .com zone is tons bigger, changes more often, and is clearly a commercial endeavor as opposed to the root servers which is collaborative in scope.
Not off domain registration, clearly. It's a loss-leader and gets you in their product. Significantly cheaper than any of the "low cost" registrars I've seen for `.net` and I already used them for DNS anyway.
I find things like this to be a shady business practice. Not antitrust level shady, but still. For customers it's a win, but it kills competition long-term, turning the mid-term wins into a long-term loss.
How do other registrars compare with Namecheap? I've been using them for a long time and haven't had any problems with their services, so I stopped keeping track of how the industry has evolved.
I wish there was some kind of bulk price increase.
I know all the issues but if you own 1,000 domains you're just sitting on, that 1,001th you're trying to snatch should be more expensive
Hoarding domains for ransom shouldn't be a business model
I guess another model is you could regulate the transfer and selling of domains to a certain cap. If the most you can legally get is say $5000, then people wouldn't collect and squat in such giant volumes
It wont. If anything it'll just consolidate the squatted domains into fewer hands.
Progressively increasing prices for each domain purchased seems pretty reasonable, but unless it raises very quickly it'll still end up being worth it to a wealthy few. Combining those raising prices with capping the resell price of domains seems like it would actually work! Someone somewhere might find it worth it to buy their 600th domain at a huge price, but if they can only sell that domain for a small fraction of what they paid for it they'll lose money if they aren't planning to use it themselves.
There's a balance I'm trying to strike. If you're sitting on say, news.com then I get it, that's a good asset to have.
It's those other groups that throw combinatoric dictionaries at the registrars that force the latest round of startups to have a bunch of letters smashed together for a name, they're the problem.
I've got half a mind to just go with katakana for my next company, register a domain like ツイッター.com and just say "well, there's 46 characters. You can memorize it in like 2 weeks. Not my problem!"
> It wont. If anything it'll just consolidate the squatted domains into fewer hands.
This is actually great if your end is to get rid of squatting, consolidate the market into a number of throats that's feasible to choke and then do it via regulation.
Seems like it'd be easier to get throat choking regulation in place before ownership is consolidated into a small number of people with deep pockets, vast resources, and disproportionate influence. The nice thing about policy is that it can be applied to huge numbers of entities instantly. Why risk creating behemoths too big to fight before you even start?
Because big behemoths have legal departments and compliance officers and actually have to follow the law because many eyes are on them constantly. Deep pockets make juicy lawsuit targets. You're right that the law applies to many people at once but you only have to actually follow the law if you're big enough for someone to care about you.
Regulations have never worked when there are few throats to choke. The few either band together and create their own regulatory association or bribe, sorry, lobby their way out of it.
> If the most you can legally get is say $5000, then people wouldn't collect and squat in such giant volumes
Quite the opposite. They squat on giant volumes so they can stick ordinary people for $2500 instead of $10.
They should just prohibit selling domain names. It would solve 99% of the problem because then they couldn't use domain parking pages or otherwise openly offer them for sale.
Someone would still manage to sell million dollar domains by some subterfuge where it's claimed to be part of the sale of a company, but that was never the problem and has enough overhead to make it uneconomical for the low value domains that cause them to register every plausible variant of English text.
So Joe Squatter will retain ownership, but permits company.com to use it for 99 years for the same price as he would have sold it for.
Or something like that... I don't really disagree with you as such, but where there's a will, there's way, and never underestimate the creativity and twattery people will come up with to make a buck. Banning this will be hard, and I'm not sure it's worth the downsides.
> So Joe Squatter will retain ownership, but permits company.com to use it for 99 years for the same price as he would have sold it for.
Then company.com is going to object that they would lose the domain they've had for 99 years or be subject to an extortionate price increase, because they really actually do want to own it. And you can prohibit leasing domain names too.
I mean this isn't that hard. You know who these companies are. You prohibit sales, you go to the website of the company trying to sell a million domains and see what scam they're running now, and two hours later you prohibit that too. Eventually they'll make a mistake and do something which is explicitly prohibited and forfeit all of their domains.
"We should not attempt to solve this problem because the first attempt might be less than 100% effective" is pointless defeatism. So what if they come up with a way around it? Prohibit whatever they do until they go out of business.
> company.com is going to object that they would lose the domain they've had for 99 years or be subject to an extortionate price increase
Then do a perpetual lease, or 999 year lease, or pay every year, or [...]
How would you enforce a prohibition of leases? Plus, the tricky bit here is there are lots of reasons for a domain owned by entity A to be used by entity B (companies might be related, might just be allowing a friend to use a domain, etc.)
I don't think it's defeatism at all, by my estimation it will do very little or nothing at all, while creating a hassle for everyone. I guess I could be wrong about that, but that's what I'd expect.
> Then do a perpetual lease, or 999 year lease, or pay every year, or [...]
A perpetual or 99 year or 999 year lease is constructively a sale. Anything which is constructively a sale is banned.
Anything which is not constructively a sale will be rejected by the buyer, because they actually want to own the domain and not pay the danegeld to the squatter in perpetuity or be subject to extortionate price increases after they've committed to using the domain by publishing it in their advertising etc.
> How would you enforce a prohibition of leases?
If you offer to provide someone with use of a domain name in exchange for more money than you pay to the registrar to register it, you lose the domain name.
> Plus, the tricky bit here is there are lots of reasons for a domain owned by entity A to be used by entity B (companies might be related, might just be allowing a friend to use a domain, etc.)
You can use it all you want as long as you never pay them for it.
It doesn't matter if you can get around this with complicated corporate shenanigans because you can't sell that to arbitrary strangers who don't actually want to pay a premium for an unused domain.
If you advertise it in such a way that strangers understand you to be constructively selling the domain then they report you to the registry and you lose the domain, which then becomes unregistered and they can go register it for the ordinary nominal fee. If you don't advertise it in such a way that strangers understand you to be constructively selling the domain then you will have a much harder time finding anyone to pay you for it, as intended.
This isn't like drugs where both the buyer and seller want the transaction to happen. The seller wants the transaction to happen and the buyer wants the seller to go out of business and DIAF so the domain will be unregistered and they don't have to pay a shakedown tax for it. It's optimized for putting the sellers out of business because that's what the buyers want -- because the sellers provide no value to anybody and nobody but themselves wants them to exist.
> I don't think it's defeatism at all, by my estimation it will do very little or nothing at all, while creating a hassle for everyone. I guess I could be wrong about that, but that's what I'd expect.
We have a longstanding counterexample: Trademarks. You can't register a trademark without using it and you can't sell it.
And the latter is practically in name only -- you can sell the "goodwill" associated with the trademark and transfer the trademark with it.
Yet with as little as that, we don't have companies squatting on millions of trademarks or shaking down small businesses who just want to use a name nobody is already using.
The problem here is that it's really artificial scarcity. The true value of the names is negligible because there are plenty of good names that aren't actually in use, but they are registered.
It's like selling access to sunlight. There is more than enough to go around until some jackass puts a massive wall in the sky and wants to charge money to remove it.
I appreciate the ideals. I'm entertaining the idea that there's a non-asshole way to do domain brokering that's more like a store and less like a hostage negotiation. Maybe that's not possible.
What is the point of domain brokering? A company shows up to squat on a domain nobody was using and then extort a premium when someone comes along who actually wants to use it. It's pure useless rent seeking. They add no value to anything, they merely tax the public in exchange for nothing.
that argument can be given to stock trading, art and stamp collecting, and basically any speculative investment. Are you suggesting there should be none of that?
The value of stock speculation is that it gives the original owner a way to raise capital for a company that could make money later but doesn't yet. It's how founders and growing businesses raise money. And the prospect of speculators being able to sell to future speculators makes the original speculators willing to pay more to the business itself.
A speculator in these markets also has the incentive to preserve the art or stamp and protect it from damage. Which also applies to stocks, because the speculator has the incentive to vote their shares in a way that maximizes the value of the company.
None of that is happening with domain names. The squatter didn't create the name, no one did and no one needs to be compensated for that. If no one "maintains" the name it doesn't degrade in any way, it just goes unregistered until someone wants to actually use it.
For years Google Domain allowed buying and renewing all tld they supported in Turkey's TRY regardless of registrant nationality and card issuance country.
I just checked for .com and its TRY195, around $7.17. For .xyz its TRY75, around $2.7.
Too bad they're selling to Squarespace. I just renewed my .dev for TRY75 there few days ago. Everywhere else .dev is around $10.
Doubling the price seems reasonable to reduce squatting. $20 or $30 would be nothing to anyone starting a project but a much higher cost for someone squatting on thousands of domains.
This is what capitalism is: intermediation, rent-seeking and creating a monopoly via a regulatory moat.
Some time ago I watched this excellent video on the history of Tetris [1]. The only "innovation" of capitalism in this entire story are layers of licensing agreements. Again: intermediation, rent-seeking and regulatory moats (through intellectual property).
A domain is nothing more than a digital record. The cost of providing that service is essentially zero. The cost should be pretty much zero. You'd have to do something about squatting but, hey, that's already an unaddressed problem.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] threadEdit: not surprised how this got regulatory approval... https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/09/website-domain-more...
What has it got to do with namecheap when they dont own the registry of .COM or .XYZ?
Instead, they are passing it on 100%.
Why are they entitled to have their profit margins protected no matter what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage-price_spiral
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation
Certain businesses get made obsolete over time. Namecheap decided to pass along 100% of the cost, what if their competitor passes along 50%?
Of course there is an argument in US and Tech today ( as shown in many of the comment ) that margin is somehow evil. And should be as low as possible. I guess that is a different argument.
They're passing it through by 209%, not 100%.
https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/registry-agreements/com/c...
I was under the impression that the other $6 comes from Namecheap, no? Maybe I misunderstood it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37213773
It is bothers me that the monopoly is excused this way.
At a certain price you just pony up the $200k to ICANN become your own registrar and then actually own your domains.
Easier said than done. For most people that probably means updating literally hundreds of sites (and better hope all of those have a way to change your email). Not to mention telling your contacts to use the new email, and hope they don't forget and send an important email to the wrong domain.
Like I'm flabbergasted at people complaining about the burdens of doing something nobody would do, because the cost isn't worth the effort.
Now if they raised prices to $100+/yr I could imagine, but $15/yr is negligible costs.
Yes it’s rent seeking. It’s also the way capitalism works.
If those restaurants' landlords had hiked their rent by a few dollars per year, they wouldn't have moved either. But it's not uncommon to see increases of thousands of dollars per month, even for a small restaurant, when the lease comes up for renewal.
Even seeming outs such as "invest in a gTLD" don't provide the opportunity. Aside from being the virtual equivalent of "why don't you just go build your hair salon 50 miles out of town where nobody owns anything yet for 1,000x the cost of a building in town?" gTLDs require being a well established organization, among other eligibility requirements, which creates a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
Both do have a 3rd component of "group good overhead" but the IANA fees of ~18 cents don't seem to be the problem so there's no sense in comparing/contrasting these differences.
Capitalism is fine when it benefits the overall economy, but when it starts self-imploding because of interests of a few, then government jumps in usually - that's why we have anti-monopoly laws, because monopoly hurts the progress...
(As an aside, I'd pay for a better-curated DNS infrastructure. For instance, google's font domains of whatever could just resolve to something federated, and that has TLS certs that are trusted by the alternative infrastructure. Google's chain of trust could be on a certificate revocation list.)
Exceeding the current limits and the abuses that derive from it is certainly something extremely difficult to achieve, but I think there's a market in trying to fix the status quo.
All TLDs in this case would be equivalent to all car brands.
Would you trust myshop.com or myshop.xyz more?
Seriously. It’s not an issue of brand recognition. It’s an issue of decades of basic phishing defense.
A real-life "we have TLDs at home" from someone who has probably never seen the related meme.
While I generally agree with you --this smells like potential rent-seeking--, in order to be able to conclusively label it as such we have to know about the real cost structure that drives a company like Verisign. All of that information is here:
https://investor.verisign.com/financial-information/annual-r...
I wish I had the time to dive into this. I just don't. I generally try to avoid making assertions without having done some work in support of them. That's why I can't reach this conclusion --I can suspect it to be true though.
As a reminder, "rent" in "rent seeking" isn't the colloquial "rent", as in what you pay to rent a car or a house. Economic rent, as a term of trade, is related to financial gains obtained without increases in productivity. As such it has been "fuzzified" to make it apply to all kinds of things that have nothing whatsoever to do with economic rent-seeking. As an example of real rent-seeking, an article in Forbes describes how writing an essay in college to obtain a grant (and maybe even admission or tuition discounts) is classic rent-seeking. Same with a company lobbying government for subsidies --they didn't make their process or product better in exchange for the financial gain.
In other words, the question here is squarely centered around the real cost structure at Verisign. Frankly, I don't know everything they do and how much it costs to support the TLD's they administer. I still remember when domains were free --as a fool, I didn't register a pile of them back then.
It sure feels like rent-seeking. That doesn't mean it is. Without the proper analysis of their accounting this characterization might not be correct. In other words, it might be quite possible that they can fully justify the increase in rates due to increases in costs.
Not to go too far, wages have gone up across the board (in numerical, not real terms) and inflation has made everything more expensive. Power, taxes, food, transportation, labor, etc. Every single business has had their cost structure increase, in some cases dramatically so. Given this framework, I'd be cautious about ascribing nefarious intent to any business increasing their pricing.
Put a different way: A rent-seeking claim needs to include a "Minimum Viable Financial Analysis" in support of this conclusion. Prices going up isn't enough evidence of this at all. Not liking price increases is no evidence at all.
So far I've seen them hand waive about inflation and "demand for domains".
As of 2022, their operating margin was about 65%... That doesn't indicate a company that needs to increase prices.
There's nothing whatsoever hand-wavy about inflation. It's as real as can be, and it affects everyone and everything.
> As of 2022, their operating margin was about 65%... That doesn't indicate a company that needs to increase prices.
It indicates nothing. That isn't even close to proper analysis of their financials. As is often the case with chat room discussions, people just love to grab onto one number or one fact and use it to flog everyone to death. Well, I have news, reality --as opposed to fantasy-- is a complex multivariate problem. A single number is meaningless.
Note that I am not at all defending Verisign. I know nothing about their operations and don't have the time to dive into it. For all I know this actually is 100% rent-seeking, in the full economic sense of the term.
I am defending reason and the requirement for solid analysis and justification before accusing anyone of anything. This, in sharp contrast with the typical lynching mob mentality that permeates online conversations.
What I am sick of and will not do, is people just jumping at labelling things (people, businesses, etc.) because they don't like something rather than through critical thinking, demonstrable and reproducible analysis of facts in full context. You know, like calling someone "racist" because they bought vanilla ice cream (not making light of real racism, but one has to admit we have taken that term to insane lengths and depths).
Maybe this is rent-seeking. Don't know. What I do know is that the claim has been made in this thread and the only real support is feelings, not well-presented evidence.
Also, saying someone makes 65% operating margin as a measure of evil-ness is ridiculous. Who put anyone in charge of deciding how much margin makes someone worthy? 5%? 10%? 25%? 0%? What happens to that fake virtuous badge when things go wrong (pandemic, economic downturn) and the company has to fire half the staff because they were labeled evil for making more than 5%? Yeah, the people who lost their jobs are going to think very highly of the virtue police on that day.
As someone who has founded and operated multiple businesses in the last four decades, this kind of thing really drives me up a wall. People who have never risked a dime of their own trying to make a non-trivial business go actually think they understand business. It's both the saddest and the funniest thing seen online and, with some frequency, on HN.
Who made the claim?
Also, saying someone makes 65% operating margin as a measure of evil-ness is ridiculous
You said evil, not me. Projection?
I'm fine with an individual holding a handful of unused domains, but the legislation should eliminate anyone holding domains as their primary source of income.
If .name was just as good as .com then if verisign increased the price, they would lose customers who would use .name instead. So the fact that verisign can increase the price when .com is _already_ more expensive than other TLDs is evidence that they do have a monopoly.
How legitimate is the Namecheap claim about "its out of our control" part? I have a number of domains with Namecheap, enough to be an annoyance to transfer them all but that number seems excessively high.
They're still at $9.73 for both registration and renewal.
Namecheap has always been good for me in terms of service and reliability. I only own a few domains but if $15/year was unaffordable I think I'd just let them expire.
I don't think you have a say on what others do with their money, or what could have possibly led you to believe you had.
I've bought domains for my employer before. Domain name pricing was absolutely a factor in the decision-making process. Only a moron pays $20 for something they could pay $10 instead.
I might say only a moron spends 10 seconds of his employer's time worrying about a $5 difference in an expense over the course of a year. At that cost differential, many other factors are more important than price.
I've expressed mine, and my opinion is that it's stupid for anyone to make wild claims on how anyone can or cannot base their decision to buy domain names based on price, and argue that they should be deprived of their right just because they are price-conscious.
Do you disagree?
> I might say only a moron spends 10 seconds (...)
Only a moron buys domain names without assessing their availability, and this also covers variants including based on TLDs. A company does not simply buy example.com while leaving out typosquatter variants like example.org, example.xyz, example.io, example.co.uk, etc. If you had any experience in the domain, you would know that all it takes is a domain squatter to turn your 5$/year domain into a >10k expense.
Yes. No wild claims were made. Arguing over 5$ a year is silly and that's an equally valid opinion.
> argue that they should be deprived of their right
Another of your wholly invented strawmen.
> all it takes is a domain squatter to turn your 5$/year domain into a >10k expense
Irrelevant strawman. A squatter can take a single domain and say it costs 10k. This has nothing to do with the subject.
"yourname@domainxyz.com??"
Namecheap, I think domains are their primary business - they need to make money on them.
Like, I like cheaper too, but even just in the last few years I can think of a few "loss-leader" registrars who decided they no longer wanted that division operating at a loss and scrapped it. Google Domains being the most popular example[0], but Gandi[1] is another where they operated at a loss then got acquired with huge price increases.
Disclosure: I'm on NameCheap and AWS's Route53.
I've seen way too many NameCheap alternatives come & go or turn "evil." If NameCheap starts being sketchy or misleading, I'll move, but that hasn't happened yet. I want a rock solid registrar for tens of years, with a business strategy that supports that, rather than saving $4/year.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Domains
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandi#History
edit: here is their announcement..
august 8 - https://mailchi.mp/porkbun.com/porkbun-unwrapped-whats-in-st...
"We expect our pricing to change from $9.73 to around $10.37 on September 1"
https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/28/wtf-is-xyz/
The biggest user might be block.xyz.
.io, .co, and .ai are still the most popular alternative TLDs for startups.
is there a good link for this ranking? i'm curious as to 4th place and below too. what position does .app or .tech or .cloud come, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RegisterFly
.COM agreement between registrars and ICANN requires registrars to regularily store all registrant contact infos in IronMountain and set ICANN as escrow, therefore allowing ICANN to contact all registrants should a registrar fold and allow them to transfer to another registrar. Another reason to keep the domain ownership informations up-to-date. [1]
[1]: https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/rde-agreement-09...
[1]: https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/registry-agreements/com/c...
https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/
Are you saying that it's not possible to use your own nameservers for domains purchased through Cloudflare?
Kinda, but enterprise only?
There's also vanity DNS for business and enterprise plans - but AFAIU that's basically just slapping another name on cloudflare DNS - not ability to point ns records to non-cf servers?
https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/additional-options/cus...
I have taken to gradually pushing my registrations out as far as they can go. I just occasionally add years onto domains I buy, so as to lock in the $9 price for that term. Seems like an excellent way to avoid inflationary price increases, or general pricing creep.
.com (9.73USD): https://porkbun.com/tld/com
.xyz (9.92USD): https://porkbun.com/tld/xyz
.com (9.73USD): https://porkbun.com/tld/com
.xyz (9.92USD): https://porkbun.com/tld/xyz
Registry is like verisign owning .com
Registrar is all of the people who sell you .com domains, by having a contract with the registry.
The announcement page might be behind a login, couldn't seem to link it directly
Porkbun doesn't make money when you buy a domain name, but they may make money when you do not renew it:
> At about 21 days into the Auto-Renew Grace Period, the expired domain will be submitted to third-party auction services.
https://kb.porkbun.com/article/37-what-happens-after-a-domai...
Other registrars, like GoDaddy, do this too.
.com (9.15)
.net (9.95)
.org (10.11)
.xyz (9.33)
"We expect our pricing to change from $9.73 to around $10.37 on September 1, so don't wait to lock in our low rate today!"
Running the TLD servers for .com is likely more challenging than running the root servers; the .com zone is tons bigger, changes more often, and is clearly a commercial endeavor as opposed to the root servers which is collaborative in scope.
> All .COM domain renewals will see an approximate 9% increase. This price increase will happen across registrars, not just Namecheap
You can shop for a new registrar but you'll be paying more for .com domains regardless of which one you choose.
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/
i was part of the godaddy > namecheap exodus, and it was such a pain in the ass that i never wanted to touch it again.
I wish there was some kind of bulk price increase.
I know all the issues but if you own 1,000 domains you're just sitting on, that 1,001th you're trying to snatch should be more expensive
Hoarding domains for ransom shouldn't be a business model
I guess another model is you could regulate the transfer and selling of domains to a certain cap. If the most you can legally get is say $5000, then people wouldn't collect and squat in such giant volumes
It wont. If anything it'll just consolidate the squatted domains into fewer hands.
Progressively increasing prices for each domain purchased seems pretty reasonable, but unless it raises very quickly it'll still end up being worth it to a wealthy few. Combining those raising prices with capping the resell price of domains seems like it would actually work! Someone somewhere might find it worth it to buy their 600th domain at a huge price, but if they can only sell that domain for a small fraction of what they paid for it they'll lose money if they aren't planning to use it themselves.
It's those other groups that throw combinatoric dictionaries at the registrars that force the latest round of startups to have a bunch of letters smashed together for a name, they're the problem.
I've got half a mind to just go with katakana for my next company, register a domain like ツイッター.com and just say "well, there's 46 characters. You can memorize it in like 2 weeks. Not my problem!"
This is actually great if your end is to get rid of squatting, consolidate the market into a number of throats that's feasible to choke and then do it via regulation.
Quite the opposite. They squat on giant volumes so they can stick ordinary people for $2500 instead of $10.
They should just prohibit selling domain names. It would solve 99% of the problem because then they couldn't use domain parking pages or otherwise openly offer them for sale.
Someone would still manage to sell million dollar domains by some subterfuge where it's claimed to be part of the sale of a company, but that was never the problem and has enough overhead to make it uneconomical for the low value domains that cause them to register every plausible variant of English text.
So Joe Squatter will retain ownership, but permits company.com to use it for 99 years for the same price as he would have sold it for.
Or something like that... I don't really disagree with you as such, but where there's a will, there's way, and never underestimate the creativity and twattery people will come up with to make a buck. Banning this will be hard, and I'm not sure it's worth the downsides.
Then company.com is going to object that they would lose the domain they've had for 99 years or be subject to an extortionate price increase, because they really actually do want to own it. And you can prohibit leasing domain names too.
I mean this isn't that hard. You know who these companies are. You prohibit sales, you go to the website of the company trying to sell a million domains and see what scam they're running now, and two hours later you prohibit that too. Eventually they'll make a mistake and do something which is explicitly prohibited and forfeit all of their domains.
"We should not attempt to solve this problem because the first attempt might be less than 100% effective" is pointless defeatism. So what if they come up with a way around it? Prohibit whatever they do until they go out of business.
Then do a perpetual lease, or 999 year lease, or pay every year, or [...]
How would you enforce a prohibition of leases? Plus, the tricky bit here is there are lots of reasons for a domain owned by entity A to be used by entity B (companies might be related, might just be allowing a friend to use a domain, etc.)
I don't think it's defeatism at all, by my estimation it will do very little or nothing at all, while creating a hassle for everyone. I guess I could be wrong about that, but that's what I'd expect.
A perpetual or 99 year or 999 year lease is constructively a sale. Anything which is constructively a sale is banned.
Anything which is not constructively a sale will be rejected by the buyer, because they actually want to own the domain and not pay the danegeld to the squatter in perpetuity or be subject to extortionate price increases after they've committed to using the domain by publishing it in their advertising etc.
> How would you enforce a prohibition of leases?
If you offer to provide someone with use of a domain name in exchange for more money than you pay to the registrar to register it, you lose the domain name.
> Plus, the tricky bit here is there are lots of reasons for a domain owned by entity A to be used by entity B (companies might be related, might just be allowing a friend to use a domain, etc.)
You can use it all you want as long as you never pay them for it.
It doesn't matter if you can get around this with complicated corporate shenanigans because you can't sell that to arbitrary strangers who don't actually want to pay a premium for an unused domain.
If you advertise it in such a way that strangers understand you to be constructively selling the domain then they report you to the registry and you lose the domain, which then becomes unregistered and they can go register it for the ordinary nominal fee. If you don't advertise it in such a way that strangers understand you to be constructively selling the domain then you will have a much harder time finding anyone to pay you for it, as intended.
This isn't like drugs where both the buyer and seller want the transaction to happen. The seller wants the transaction to happen and the buyer wants the seller to go out of business and DIAF so the domain will be unregistered and they don't have to pay a shakedown tax for it. It's optimized for putting the sellers out of business because that's what the buyers want -- because the sellers provide no value to anybody and nobody but themselves wants them to exist.
We have a longstanding counterexample: Trademarks. You can't register a trademark without using it and you can't sell it.
And the latter is practically in name only -- you can sell the "goodwill" associated with the trademark and transfer the trademark with it.
Yet with as little as that, we don't have companies squatting on millions of trademarks or shaking down small businesses who just want to use a name nobody is already using.
It's like selling access to sunlight. There is more than enough to go around until some jackass puts a massive wall in the sky and wants to charge money to remove it.
A speculator in these markets also has the incentive to preserve the art or stamp and protect it from damage. Which also applies to stocks, because the speculator has the incentive to vote their shares in a way that maximizes the value of the company.
None of that is happening with domain names. The squatter didn't create the name, no one did and no one needs to be compensated for that. If no one "maintains" the name it doesn't degrade in any way, it just goes unregistered until someone wants to actually use it.
I just checked for .com and its TRY195, around $7.17. For .xyz its TRY75, around $2.7.
Too bad they're selling to Squarespace. I just renewed my .dev for TRY75 there few days ago. Everywhere else .dev is around $10.
Some time ago I watched this excellent video on the history of Tetris [1]. The only "innovation" of capitalism in this entire story are layers of licensing agreements. Again: intermediation, rent-seeking and regulatory moats (through intellectual property).
A domain is nothing more than a digital record. The cost of providing that service is essentially zero. The cost should be pretty much zero. You'd have to do something about squatting but, hey, that's already an unaddressed problem.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fQtxKmgJC8