Premium .dev domain with Google costs $850(twitter.com) |
Premium .dev domain with Google costs $850(twitter.com) |
Even if there is an argument to be made about supply and demand on names... at least it should be easier to agree that private entities shouldn't be allowed to profit from it; distinct from charging a reasonable service fee.
whatever happened to Google's Don't be evil? $850 for a .dev domain?
And my fee is morally justified. Finding compensation for a guy that was the victim of an injustice.
Am I an hero? Just doing the best I can.
EDIT: Realized racketering isn't the right term here I think but I don't remember the right term and need to go do bed.
Easier said then done, but if you choose to sue them over this you have my respect.
We NEED laws against dirty dark pattern business practices like this.
If you paid $12 the first year, it would have been labelled as a discount, with the renewal price being listed separately. It’s crappy and misleading, but it’s not retroactive. I sometimes explicitly filter out “discounted” TLDs so I don’t get distracted by listing like this.
Original post:
I'm looking through namecheap now, and all the available .dev domain I can find say they renew at (Canadian)$20.37 per year. Can anyone find listed ones that say they renew for way more?
Theft of what? You never really 'owned' a domain there in the first place since Google outright owns the TLD and can increase / decrease prices at any time.
It always has been 'rented', meaning you never truly owned it.
It's a bad thing for Google to do, but let's not act like it's illegal.
The OG model here is one of decentralization. In this model, the registrar (Google) isn't the owner of the domain. They're just a business that deals with the annoying details around registering a domain on your behalf, and you pay them a small fee to do so. Once again, the registrar can't sell or rent you anything, because they don't own anything to sell you. The registrar only sells the service of acting on your behalf.
Premium domains were originally seen as a shitty thing to do, because it put the domain registrars in the business of acting against their customers. Instead of registering a domain on behalf of their customers, they instead would buy the domains for themself, so they could then sell them at huge markup to their customers. Some registrars then took things further and pre-register domains their customers searched for, even if they never had any interest in buying the domain originally. Extra shitty.
The current .dev (or similar) situation once again feels really dirty to people thinking of the web under this traditional mental model. Domains aren't supposed to be just GIVEN to a single company to then charge whatever price they want. The web is supposed to be decentralized, and instead...we're here.
Don't expect Google to care since they are after your money.
That a bunch of startups and small companies use a trendy .io suffix to their domain is entirely by the grace of the British Indian Ocean Territory's permissiveness on the matter.
CC-tlds are owned by their affiliated sovereign nation.
p.s. and no, I sure wouldn’t like my landlord to 70x my rent. Like from say 1,000/mo to 70,000/mo ? That’s like totally cool then right? How about let’s act like it _should_ be illegal, and then make it so.
Oh come on, let's not kid ourselves here. There are _plenty_ of other TLDs to choose from. Google owns .dev, they can do what they want with it. The debate of whether a company should own a TLD like Google does is another question entirely.
> p.s. and no, I sure wouldn’t like my landlord to 70x my rent. Like from say 1,000/mo to 70,000/mo ? That’s like totally cool then right?
No it's not cool; that's totally exploitative. But my landlord sure could do that if they wanted to because they own the building. If my landlord thinks someone will pay $70,000/mo for my unit why shouldn't they be allowed to see that profit?
Google definitely should not be treating their customers like this, especially considering that they're burning bridges for such little income.
And yes, it's a monopoly.
ICANN designates what TLDs are valid
Registries own individual TLDs fully
Registrars resell domains on those TLDs that registries own.This doesn't sound like it's retroactive, they're negotiating a renewal and Google changed their price. Doesn't seem out of the ordinary unless there were some particular terms about pricing and renewals.
Google isn't a charity, they're a greedy non-ethical corporation that is not famous for providing reliable consistent products. I'm surprised this kind of behavior comes as a surprise to anybody in tech.
I don't think it would be extortion, it would just be Verisign breaching their agreement with ICANN.
> People build brands on these, and it’s odd that you can’t permanently buy one or at least have a predictable cap on price increases.
I think you could have those things if you use services that are backed with appropriate contracts or regulations. It's more odd that people would build their brand using a company that is not known for providing stable, consistent, long term products and services.
A classic example is creating a dependency and then raising the price.
Also look up "antitrust".
Okay let's see your example then. What's a case you are thinking of that is vaguely similar to this that was ruled a breach of contract?
> Also look up "antitrust".
This isn't a constructive argument. I could equally just rebut it by telling you to look up "antitrust", right? What part of antitrust laws would apply here? Surely if you have an idea you can write a sentence or two to explain.
Yeah, this is kinda my point. Google (probably; I haven't read the agreement) has no obligation to keep the renewal price the same. I'm not saying they should be doing this (especially considering they're a trillion dollar company), but Google seems well within their right to do it.
This is the same with housing where it is not uncommon to have occasional raises in rent that loosely trails inflation.
Does Disney have a monopoly on superheroes because they own Marvel? Google owns .dev. There are plenty of other TLDs to choose from.
The analogy is, of course, not the point here.
I mean, yes, sure. That's technically how it works, but in practice I'm not sure that really matter. What happens to your domain if your Google account gets banned? Does your domain disappear? Does Google let you transfer it out?
This isn't some hypothetical, unrealistic utopia - this is *how the web worked*. We gave that away by giving registrars sole control over tlds.
It's easy to say 'well nobody really cares about .dev domains anyway' - but why will it just be .dev moving forward? Is it so hard to imagine a world where .com is no longer the default, and companies/individuals have to pay exorbitant monopoly prices to some gatekeeper?
I've never been an activist in this regard. It just feels really shitty to see something that used to belong to us all, everyone, equally, get divvied up and sold off.
.com is not a requirement. Companies use non-standard TLDs everywhere. .com is still the default, but you would do just fine with other TLDs, and if some gatekeeper arrived this would only strengthen the argument as businesses would flock to lesser known TLDs.
Of all of the things I worry about regarding computing, the internet, etc., domains does not make the list.
Registrars are domain *resellers* who sell your domain by buying it from the *registry* for you. There is only one Registry per TLD.
That's why it was such a big deal when .net and .org were looking to change hands.
In any case, it appears the whole OP was either a lie or at the least misleading. Apparently the guy paid $850 to begin with, not $12.
Since I looked at it in Turkish Lira, I thought at first that Google made a mistake when converting the currency, but it turns out that was not the case. Apparently, they are renewing generic domains like the one I own for $850 under the name Premium domain.
I could understand if I were to buy this domain from scratch, but I have been the owner of hundreds of domains for almost 20 years and I have never faced anything like this before. Once again, I realized that it is foolish to trust Google on any matter. Thank you, Google.
For another example of a premium domain name that is still available for registration (in case people here want to verify the user experience), perform a domain name search for money.dev at your registrar of choice. It will be clearly marked with its yearly premium price. You would have seen this same information when you initially registered forum.dev.
It's hard to take this seriously when $850/year is still way higher than other registrars charge for new domains. Are "legitimate registrants" supposed to be comforted that their extravagant sum is being paid on the primary market instead of the after market?
He shared the invoice: https://twitter.com/emirkarsiyakali/status/16014366748564643...
According to that, he paid 4360TRY last year ($300), and now asked to pay 13040TRY ($850). You can’t even make up the difference with the exchange rate changes.
Money is maybe a sufficient discriminator, but it is not a good one. Money is very unequally distributed around the world and this basically presumes that the only legitimate use of such a domain could be in an enterprise in a first world country. Or someone rich enough to not be price sensitive at all.
Fun fact, I reserved tty0.dev as a "vanity domain" during the presale, but someone decided to pay $300 more for the joke than me. And that domain still doesn't do anything "useful".
Last year's invoice and Google Domain dashboard screenshots: https://twitter.com/EmirKarsiyakali/status/16014366748564643...
What's so premium about a domain? You're just pretending it has artificial scarcity and desirability. It's one step removed from NFTs in terms of fake value.
(I am omitting the actual name because HN is a public forum)
The only thing that doesn’t seem great is that in the invoice shared by OP, the domain isn’t designated clearly as a premium.
This way if the renewal fee increases beyond what I’m willing to pay after I’ve already got infrastructure running on the domain, I have a whole decade to migrate to a better (cheaper) name.
$120 is a larger investment than $12 which means I buy fewer domains overall, but the stability benefits are worth it for me.
I didn't realize registrars let you buy for 10 years. The best I have seen are discounted pricing for 2-years.
I do exactly the same. I also always stick to com. I leave "coolness" factor to other parts of the domain.
you have just as much real control over domain as you have over entire DNS — zilch and a half — it all holds on trust and good faith, until greed comes into play
> The parties acknowledge that the purpose of this Section 2.10(c) is to prohibit abusive and/or discriminatory Renewal Pricing practices imposed by Registry Operator without the written consent of the applicable registrant at the time of the initial registration of the domain and this Section 2.10(c) will be interpreted broadly to prohibit such practices.
I've been watching for it to happen to someone for years because I own a domain that would be at risk of getting reclassified as premium if it were allowed. I've been monitoring the same word as my domain on 300+ TLDs for about 2 years. I've never seen one get reclassified as premium without being dropped first.
Are you positive yours wasn't classified as premium with a huge discount for the first year?
I think the new TLDs would do much better if they'd quit with the pricing games and strengthen registrant rights instead. As a registrant, I want predictability and minimal risk when I register a domain. The only way to get that right now is to stick with .com AFAIK. It's too bad because I'm a huge fan of using 'somecompany.tech' plus 'somecompanytech.com', but, in my opinion, most of the new TLDs are too risky to depend on.
I'm really interested in any updates you would have because I always considered .app and .dev to be "safe" domains in the sense that I thought Google would always have transparent, uniform, predictable pricing without any exorbitant increases.
1. https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/registry-agreements/dev/d...
Yep, that is a great takeaway. Another important example is GCP pricing, and their habit of killing off products and services as fast as they build them.
What Google is doing or charging today is not a reliable indicator of what they will be doing or charging tomorrow. AWS may have its own problems, but at least they don't do much bait-and-switch pricing, and they tend to support services for a while after they launch them.
I registered a .sbs domain for a couple dollars the first year, and they want $200-300/yr from me now.
This is highway robbery.. maybe even worse than being robbed.
Imagine if your mobile phone plan rate could vary on a floating basis year by year depending on how "premium" the carrier decides your number is. Gross.
One of my domains got hit by it and now I can’t even move it because it’s market as premium.
Why are domain extensions like .dev and .app owned by Google?
Price tiers are generally controlled by the registry (Google Registry, in this case.)
This is going to happen to .tv too: sometime in January 2023 GoDaddy Registry, which just took over the .tv tld from Verisign, is adding premium price tiers when no such tiering had already existed.
https://domains.google.com/registrar/search?searchTerm=asdfg...
I think there's more to the story here.
For example, setting.dev is $180/yr https://domains.google.com/registrar/search?searchTerm=setti...
It is likely that there was no premium pricing in the beginning. It was established after the initial lease
The premium pricing was there in the beginning. We have never increased the price of a single domain name after it was initially registered.
After weeks of going back and forth with Google support I ended up initiating a chargeback.. They locked me out of my account and I lost access to all of the domains tied to it.
It took weeks to unravel the whole thing.
If Google would make the renewal prices available in the 30-day renewal emails this class of problem would go away. Omitting the price is a choice.
I bought a .dev domain from Google, when the auction was at $200/year. Every renewal period has been $100/year. If there is a way to decrease it to $12/year, that would be great.
EDIT: Looking at other comments on this thread, looks like that Google is dynamically price adjusting renewal costs? I am sad that yet another pillar of the original free internet seems to be falling even further pray to capitalism.
What I am wondering right now is if there is any regulation about buying a domain, building a popular product on top of it, and then having your registrar keep increasing the renewal cost. (Something that I never considered, but now looks possible)
I bought a Premium domain from them during the auction, and still pay for it. They've always been very clear about the renewal cost both before I bought it in the auction and every year on renewal.
The most famous example I can think of is the flower auction/Amsterdam clock.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAdmzyKagvE
If this is the first time people on Hacker News are hearing about premium domains, gTLDs and asymmetric renewal prices, color me shocked. There are even ccTLDs that have asymmetric renewals.
Not quite the same punch. A domain scalper can only demand a premium price once (when they sell/transfer it to you.) But, a registry may charge you a premium price every single year.
Presumably you can freely move your .dev domains between those registrars?
Well fuck you and your squatting and how does it feel?
Old registries weren't able to participate in that process themselves without also owning a registrar that participated in the same competition; but, a few decades of hindsight means the newer TLDs are going after potential earnings that Verisign never got a chance to have.
After a few years of paying the £500+ annual renewal due to its Premium domain status, my enthusiasm has waned somewhat...
Get a .com domain, preferably no-hyphen, and no_underscore.
If you have something like mydomainis.cool, then try to get mydomainiscool.com too. You can redirect mydomainiscool.com to mydomainis.cool.
However, why should Google or Verisign make money from selling names? Other than operational costs, it would be better to auction off domains fairly to extinguish the squatters and use the surplus for non-profit internet infrastructure work.
trouble.dev is $180/yr... meaning it's going to be $180 each year to renew
trouble.art is $10,764 for the first year, and then $36/yr for renewals.
There's plenty of non-premium .dev domains that are $12/yr.
I do agree that charging premiums every year is a shitty move, but I don't think they're being overtly shady about it.
I doubt forum.dev would have ever been $12/yr. Most single word .dev domains are marked as premium and vary from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars annually. I know because I had speak.dev at one point and it was $350/yr and renewal was $350/yr as well.
Now if by some chance they initially paid $12/yr for it and now it's $850, then that is not ok and means that any .dev domain is at risk of dynamic pricing, which I feel like would kill the whole TLD forever for me.
We can make this into a proverb at this point.
Technically they could, but it wouldn't end up well. Probably even nation states would have a word or piles of paper.
gTLDs on other hand are owned by likes of Google so they can do just about anything.
Google owns and operates these tlds and is effectively a monopoly
With .com, the contract between Verisign and ICANN specifies a maxium price and that price descrimination is not allowed.
Edit: I found the gTLD base agreement[1], but didn't go looking further. It says, the registry needs to charge everyone the same price unless the registrant agreed to higher renewal pricing at the time of initial registration. I didn't look to see if there is any more specific agreement for .dev. But it seems like if this wasn't disclosed and explicitly agreed to during registration, the registry is in the wrong. However, a lot of people agree to things without paying attention. Would be good to check original paperwork and then see about how to get the registry's attention.
[1] https://newgtlds.icann.org/sites/default/files/agreements/ag...
It appears purpose designed to exclude only the low end indie and freemium developer.
If the information in this post is correct, it looks like google is just shaking down people who registered domains they control
poison pill the domain
file a trademark asap while you still have the domain, then when you lose access, sue them to prevent them from selling it to anyone else
(ideally bundle this with everyone else affected by this sort of price change)
(I'm not a lawyer)
The incentives here are perverse: the registry knows that changing domain names has a high switching cost; we should not have the "market" dynamics encouraging them to start, effectively, extorting domain owners. "That web presence you built up? It would be a shame if anything were to happen to it…"
I actually thought there were ICANN rules against this sort of thing.
Typically the registry won't arbitrarily increase the renewal price of specific domains during a period of time where the domain is owned by the same individual. That seems like an incredibly scummy practice.
Domain names aren't something you can just "move out" of like housing if your landlord decides to increase the price one year by over 6000%. They represent identity, discoverability and trust. By arbitrarily increasing the renewal price like this, the registry is constructively repossessing your online identity. It's the same as if they suddenly took your domain from you and put it up for auction for their own benefit.
Registrars (not registries) can get away with increasing their prices, but that's different because you can always switch registrars to one that charges a lower markup over the registry. You can't switch registries without switching your domain name entirely.
The difference is that Verisign's registry agreement with ICANN prohibits this kind of pricing shenanigans whereas Google's does not. Expect Verisign to try to renegotiate this when their agreement is up for renewal.
Feels to me like it would be a lost cause depending on where you are.
Referring to TLDs as extensions is a telltale sign of someone who is semi-technically literate enough to have heard of file extensions but not enough to know why it's incorrect when talking about domains, nor that it outs them by making them sound silly.
Would I pay for a premium domain name? Probably not. They might make sense for some uses though. I'd rather them be available at a public price than through someone who bought as many five letter words as they could and then sells them privately.
The real estate analogy is good. Find a cheap town!
I just thought that it was a misguided allocation policy. Someone ended up buying tty0.dev at the $300 price point and uses it for... a fake `ls` output. This registrant wasn't more or less legitimate than any other. They just had more disposable income to spend on vanity.
I got a premium domain for $20 and paying $260 every year to renew it (but I knew it'd happen).
Though don't be surprised if you lose a lot of goodwill if you offer a low introductory price, and then maximally gouge at the moment that the customer is trapped.
When domain names are a tiny portion of your revenue, they're probably not worth getting a reputation as a predatory vendor over.
That saying usually applies to market participants. Google has exclusive right over the TLD, so there is market for them.
There isn't much of a market for people buying from Google, either. Its not likely Google looses much by letting inventory go unrented.
It’s a very different relationship with ICANN and domain name owners and has basically zero leverage to set prices beyond what it costs them to operate the service and have some reasonable profit.
> The parties acknowledge that the purpose of this Section 2.10(c) is to prohibit abusive and/or discriminatory Renewal Pricing practices imposed by Registry Operator without the written consent of the applicable registrant at the time of the initial registration of the domain and this Section 2.10(c) will be interpreted broadly to prohibit such practices.
From what I've seen, people typically tend to be confused about what they bought when you see threads like this. In the past several years I've never seen anyone produce documentation or screenshots that show they registered a non-premium domain that was reclassified as premium while they had it registered.
1. https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/registry-agreements/sbs/s...
In this case, Tuvalu owns .tv and they contracted with GoDaddy Registry to manage it [0].
It can be confusing because the lines are blurring. For example, Google has considerable vertical integration: they operate a registry, a registrar, and they own a few TLDs too.
[0] https://registry.godaddy/blog/dottv-contract-signing-release
.org was very nearly stolen by its operators.
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/org-domain-registry-sale-...
Ancestor wrote "the actual governing entities don't play these kinds of games" and I gave a recent example of that kind of game being played.
This instance is straight up Google acting in bad faith with the bait and switch. Are they really that desperate to make a few extra bucks? What PM decided this was a good idea?
Day by day, Big-G is burning every ounce of public goodwill they ever had, speedily on their way to sinking down to FB Meta territory.
But the TLDs fix the price underneath, registrars are just resellers.
Registries (like Google for .dev, Verisign for .com/.net) set the pricing for domains under their TLDs. Registrars like Gandi add just a very slim markup.
Regardless, forum.dev was registered in 2021 (you can confirm via WHOIS), which was long after the Early Access Program for .dev ended in 2019.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33929354
Do you have proof of the initial price paid for registration or is this in some part speculation?
I only have experience with Namecheap. They typically only offer discounted pricing for the first year, but you can pre-purchase renewals at the full price for several years (maybe up to 10, haven’t looked recently)
For example, I sold hackathon.co for good money (I even gave them the GSuite at that time). I also sold html5.in to Microsoft sub $10,000 (via a broker, unfortunately, which I realized way later) still for a pretty good sum. I have also sold quite a few more for low $100s.
And I donated thus.org to a Texas university for zero dollar and gave them the GSuite too. I'm happy that an educational institute is using it and the domain is alive.
I own nsfw.in, which was "a link shortener to warn you that it might not be Safe before opening". I got lazy and is on sale and I keep getting regular emails/contacts to buy it.
Also, 13040 TRY is worth US$700 at the current exchange rate, not US$850. That's actually a slight discount on the correct exchange rate, as another available domain name in the same pricing tier (e.g. 6b.dev) is showing as costing US$720/yr. So by paying in Turkish lira it looks like they're currently getting a discount of around US$20/yr, presumably because the prices displayed in Turkish are lagging the real exchange rate.
EDIT: You edited your comment which made mine lose context. You had claimed something like “he had paid equivalent of $850 last year”. That’s provably not the case here.
https://www.google.com/search?q=what%27s+usd+try+rate+in+dec...
Every TLD is operated by a registry that has a monopoly over that TLD. .dev's registry is Google. .com and .net's registry is Verisign.
GoDaddy is a registrar which resells domains from the registries. You can register .dev domains on GoDaddy just like you can register .com and .net domains.
The bulk of the registration fee goes to the registry. What keeps .com and .net prices reasonable is not that there's no monopoly - Verisign totally has a monopoly - but that Verisign's registry agreement with ICANN forbids this kind of pricing shenanigans whereas Google's registry agreement for .dev doesn't. But I'm sure that when Verisign's registry agreement is up for renewal they will try to renegotiate this.
GoDaddy is the registry for .biz[0].
That is, GoDaddy was started as a registrar, but the company integrated vertically with a registry division, so it plays both roles now. This was approved by ICANN.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/1/22956581/russia-ukraine-na...
sure, an extraordinary example, but what stops anyone from wording their ToS ever so slightly vague, that any domain is held by a shoestring
Or if the country moves underneath you. Quite a few Brits lost their existing .eu domains after Brexit.
And they sometimes have undesirable policies. For example, .us prohibits any kind of WHOIS protection. It’ll be tied to your real name, address, and phone number, unless you take some steps like getting a P.O. box or buying in the name of a shell corporation.
The new owners didn't even use them properly.
EDIT: The user reached out to me privately and the domain name in question is indeed reserved (because it is a Google trademark), and has never been available for registration. Looks like the registrar did not correctly display it as unavailable for registration.
Unethical & Predatory? Sure, but it's not illegal.
Yes it’s a common business practice. Doesn’t mean google has to encourage that industry.
IIRC the domains that are reserved by registrars are usually moved into a temporary hold status with the TLD, so the registrar isn't paying to register the domain, they are just getting the exclusive option to buy said domain for a number of weeks or months. Much cheaper way to squat on domains than actually buying them!
Edit: "contact" to "contract"
All registries operate with ICANN. It's probably more due to their age and the contracts they have with ICANN given that age and ubiquity.
edit: nit: all registries that operate within the shared DNS the majority of the internet operates under
[0] https://www.icann.org/en/blogs/details/icann-decides-on-com-...
It's not rent seeking, which should be clear because the premium domains have a fixed price schedule that is far lower than what domain scalpers would charge, instead of a variable charge based on what they think they could get away with. Even at $850/yr, you can probably renew premium domains for multiple human lifespans before you end up paying as much as the scalpers might ask for certain domains. Instead of rent seeking, it is priced such that scalpers can't afford to squat on thousands of common word/phrase domains.
All other are cheap, junk or designed to extort.
Aldo, if this was your trademark before buying the domain, are you sure you couldn't have used the ICANN trademark squatting process to seize it? That would have only cost about $1500. Some people look for trademark registrations to preemptively buy the .com domain (and then sell it back to you for $10,000+), but the ICANN specifically has a process in place to prevent this kind of extortion.
But getting a decent name is hard. We wanted something that was two syllables, not trademarked (trademarks are important when selling on Amazon, as we do), easy to spell if you hear it said, had a toll free phone number available (we have 888-VOLTIVE). That narrows things considerably.
> We have long-deferred to the U.S. Government Department of Commerce (DOC) and Department of Justice for the regulation of pricing for .COM registry services, as per the Cooperative Agreement between Verisign and the DOC. That hasn't changed. Verisign continues to be required to provide at least six months' notice to registrars of any .COM wholesale price increase. This allows registrars, on behalf of registrant customers, to register or renew .COM domain names during the notice period for up to a 10-year total registration term, at the then-current price, prior to any increase. This allows the ability to lock-in current wholesale prices for up to 10 years.
It looks like there's a couple things going on here. The US DOC and Verisign decide the price; and they have to give 6 months warning. I don't think I saw anything stopping them from raising it to $30 next year, outside of inertia and the US Govn't (who really-really owns .com, iirc) saying otherwise.
edit: ... or .... the US Govn't has authority over .com? Or ... something, I don't think I ever knew / understood the details there.
It seems you failed to parse the subtext: At Google scale this seems like generating a lot of gnashing of teeth for questionable benefit.
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I don't know where the current trend of defending our corporate overlords as being emotionless bulldozers whose methods should not be questioned started but I wish it'd stop.
I feel like it's rooted in thinking that people who assign malice "just don't get it, Google is way too big to care about this". But I'd say it's the other way around, people who can't understand that this is like an individual saying their vote doesn't matter: The singular action isn't the problem, it's letting the mentality take root in society that's a problem.
tl;dr It's not a show of knowledge or intelligence to take the most blasè line of reasoning every time these companies screw someone over.
> This concern grew after it was revealed that the [$1.1 billion] transaction required taking on a $360 million debt obligation.
This might have been true in the past, but it isn't true anymore, especially not under new gTLDs. Nobody goes around typing in <word>.<tld> domains out of curiosity anymore, and advertisers don't pay anywhere near as much as they used to for impressions on domain parking pages. The vast majority of premium domain pricing is driven by pure greed.
Which is a modern take on domain parking.
That's actually a great price for a good domain name. If the name is already registered by a squatter looking to profit off it, you're looking at five figures minimum. I think the mistake you're making here is you're thinking it would be $12 vs $850, but it's not; it would be 'already registered by a squatter within milliseconds of TLD launch years ago and listed on a resale site for 5 figures' vs $850.
And to be clear, premium prices are set at the registry (i.e. wholesale) level, not at the registrar (i.e. retail) level. That means that these names are premium at all registrars. Premium pricing is not unique to Google (either the registry or registrar); it's used by nearly all new gTLDs.
That's an absurd false dichotomy. Gmail doesn't charge me $850/year for an email address, but somehow they managed to avoid people squatting thousands of addresses and selling them on the after-market at an exorbitant markup, and Google doesn't charge me $850/year to search things, and yet if I try to use `curl` to send a single search request it blocks it, but the Google domains team somehow doesn't think that it would have been possible to stop people from squatting thousands of domains "within milliseconds of TLD launch"?
Sorry, it's way more believable to me that this decision was made out of greed rather than a lack of imagination. Overcharging is may defensible position from a business perspective or even an ease of engineering perspective, but let's not pretend this decision was somehow made purely for the benefit of customers.
They don’t charge you for Gmail addresses, yes this is true, but there is definitely a thriving aftermarket for people squatting on desirable “OG” email addresses and user names, just as an example -> https://www.playerup.com/accounts/gmailogusername/
Clearly $850/yr is a price people are willing to pay, since there are plenty of great premium names unavailable at these TLDs. Greed or not, people are complaining here about the fact they own hundreds of other names and don’t see these kind of prices, but to me the economics seem pretty straight forward. They just happened to price these domains better than other registrars in my opinion…
Basically every service that gets any traction on the internet whatsoever has a bunch of people running in and getting the tiny or interesting or unique usernames as fast as possible.
Domain parking has been and still is a business model for so many people.
He says he has 100s of domains so presumably he's savvy to this and theres a dark pattern at play.
That or he's careless and someone has not realised many domains are cheap in the first 1-3 years then priced ludicrously.
Does that money go to the registrar?
> And to be clear, premium prices are set at the registry (i.e. wholesale) level, not at the registrar (i.e. retail) level. That means that these names are premium at all registrars. Premium pricing is not unique to Google (either the registry or registrar); it's used by nearly all new gTLDs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33929615
That's not as bad as I thought.
...which is absolutely a stereotype born of the Silicon Valley bubble, and not actually true in practice.
The vast majority of developers do not work in Silicon Valley, nor for FAANGs (or whatever the abbreviation is nowadays), and do not make several hundred thousand a year or have highly valuable tech stock options.
No one forces anyone to pay a domain squatter. This is literally a “problem” that only exists in people’s heads.
… uh, it's not even possible to move out of that that easily, either. (Although a 6000% increase would certainly do it.) I think landlords are (also?) very much aware of switching costs in their yearly price uppings.
Amazon and Cloudflare does not as far as I know.
So I had the domain for a year, I specifically went out of my way to find a domain that was not premium, but when it came time to renew it was marked as premium, and when I tried to move it I got error messages like “can’t move domain because it’s premium”.
.sbs registry has done it with my domain in 2021.
.xyz has done it another one of my domain few years ago.
None of my regular old tld domains, and cctld domains experienced it.
-footnote- I used to buy domains for my own use only, my family names & stuff, never for resale or business or anything.
Did the registrar email you at some point to tell you that they are no longer able to renew your domain at the standard rate, because the registry determined it to be a premium domain?
I usually stay on top of my domains, I found the way higher price for .sbs & .xyz when trying to renew them, at different times.
Surely the next not-sure it's April fools not-sure it's real gApp
There's definitely an aftermarket for emails I don't disagree, and in some parts of the world of you have a nice phone number you will be called asking to buy it frequently.
In countries where sanctions prevent access you can buy apple, Google, PSN etc accounts on scratch cards. Might be handy for privacy actually but not sure how effective that is or if sign up via VPN just as easy.
Releasing usernames is bad for impersonation, so we are stuck.
I also contacted another domain registration service to verify this price. They said that the domain transfer fee is $843 and that they have nothing to do with it, the pricing is determined by registrar(Google in this case).
Attached: https://twitter.com/EmirKarsiyakali/status/16014456975341649...
Even while writing this comment, they also responded from their own Twitter: https://twitter.com/Namecheap/status/1601447984775962625
If the price of forum.dev is indeed $850 then the attached TRY 13040 invoice implies USD/TRY 15.34 which was last seen in May. The $12 domains go for TRY 75 which implies USD/TRY is 6.25, last seen in 2020.
It looks to me that the prices in TRY are simply set by hand and not refreshed that often. OP got a nice deal via such manually set price in 2021 and that's all that is going on here.
Disclaimer: I work at Google but I have absolutely nothing to do with domains or forex rates.
The wholesale price is determined by the registry (Google), but the retail price will include markup from the registrar (Namecheap, Porkbun, Google). In the case of .dev Google runs the registry and acts as a registrar. As for registrars, that comparable (6b.dev) is $709 at Porkbun, $720 at Google, and $843 at Namecheap.
Namecheap is marking it up more than the other registrars.
I wonder if your registration last year included any kind of first year discount. This is the first time I've seen someone show an actual receipt for this type of complaint. I estimated the pricing at about $315USD vs $700USD. That's enough of an increase that I'm really curious to know what happened.
https://www.google.com/search?q=usd+try&client=safari&hl=en-...
I think this person's case is a good example of where that can be problematic. Even if they had paid the correct price originally, they'd be seeing a 35% price increase because of the exchange rate. It's not unreasonable for them to have assumed the original purchase and renewals were always going to be in their local currency without fluctuation due to foreign exchange rates.
I skimmed ICANN's registrar accreditation agreement for info about pricing and it basically says registrars can price domains however they want. The registry agreement has pricing related limitations, so I think the intent is to ensure registries don't engage in abusive pricing with the assumption that competition will keep the registrars honest because registrants can transfer their domain to a new registrar if they're being mistreated.
That leaves this person with no recourse. The registrar (in my opinion) undercharged them and didn't do a good job of communicating the true ongoing cost of the domain. Transferring to a competing registrar doesn't help because the registry pricing for the domain is going to be around $700 USD while the registrant's expectations were set at TRY4360 ($230 USD today).
There aren't any great options to make it right either. The registry can't start discounting domains to fix mistakes made by a registrar, the registrar can't take a loss of $470 / year (at current exchange rates, potentially forever), and the registrant shouldn't have to pay $700 USD / year for a domain they thought was TRY4360 ($230 USD today). To make it worse, the registrant's expectations didn't get reevaluated until the bill for renewal came due and if they've spent a year developing on the domain it feels like extortion (to them).
It's also not fair to expect the registrant to realize they're underpaying. Price differences between registrars are enough for people to assume a low price is the result of finding a registrar with better pricing.
Google Domains isn't the only registrar that gives the impression domains are priced in local currency either. Gandi bills me in CAD and doesn't mention USD when I'm buying domains. Namecheap shows me prices in CAD, but bills in USD and it's not clear USD is the real price rather than simply being the billing currency.
Forget you know the registry sets prices in USD and go pretend to register 6b.dev on Google Domains. Select a foreign currency and see if you can figure out the price will fluctuate based on the exchange rate for USD. I'm not sure where the OP got the idea renewal would only be $12 rather than the TRY4360 they paid originally. There's nothing that left me with that impression.
This is a tricky issue to solve. It's not like we can region-lock domains to a specific country, like how Steam is able to use price discrimination to sell the same game for different prices in different currencies. The real price is indeed denominated in USD and billed to registrars in USD, and these prices have always remained constant for all registered domains on all of our TLDs (so indeed the real price is steadily going down over time thanks to inflation, particularly over the past year). Any other price displayed in a different currency by a registrar is performing currency conversion and is presumably subject to change in the future along with the exchange rates.
I agree with you, it doesn't seem like registrars are communicating this well. Prices of other goods (e.g. luxury watches) do also change multiple times per year to reflect changes in underlying exchange rates, but crucially, what you're getting there is a one-time purchase, and you know up front the only price you'll ever be paying for it. Domains, by contrast, are essentially multi-year subscriptions, and the price of subsequent years is liable to change both as the registrar themselves adjust pricing and as underlying currency exchange rates shift as well. I think the registrars broadly have looked at this issue and decided it would be too complicated to display the underlying USD price to registrants, so better to hide it and just display the price in the local currency?
That would make sense to me. I wouldn't even be surprised if some registrants are unable to pay in USD or if they get charged exorbitant fees for foreign exchange.
Even if the registrars added a warning during checkout with a link to an explanation of how it works, I bet very few people would read it. They'd probably have the same number of upset customers and the complaint would shift to registrars hiding a complex pricing scheme in the fine print.
My hunch is the OP is an extreme outlier and the issue happens so infrequently that the complexity of explaining it up front isn't worth it. In the past ~5 years this is the first time I've seen someone with a receipt and a legitimate complaint.
I think some of the responsibility can fall on the OP too. They say they've registered hundreds of domains, so it's not unreasonable to think they should be spending some time learning what rights they have as a registrant, how disputes are resolved, how long term pricing works, etc., especially if they're registering premium domains.
Its my understanding, that any registrar & registry does this, it is quite prevalent, my own one domain fell through this. In this case Google is both registry & registrar. Some others, like Donut, & many other registries also do it all the time. Google, or any registry for that matter, is not gonna care if somebody like me don't renew it (although as a principal I prefer to vote with wallet & have opinion that if regular domain gets classified as premium, one shouldn't renew & let registry try to see if they can get $$$ for it, barring any big business).
Like many others, my digital life is also tangled with google ecoverse, and I am too lazy to even want it to be de-googled, although Google has hurt me quite a few times (first when they shut down the Reader), so, no I am not defending anybody. My understanding is, domains are on rent, nobody can own domain forever, at expiry owners (registry and or registrar) can price it what they want, and I try to register my important domains as far as possible.
I really question what makes a person need to live life like this. You're saying "at any level", so people really just aren't just allowed to be bothered by something, vent on their very reasonable grievance, and everyone moves on with their day... as long as you're around. No grievance shall pass this one untested!
To be frank, that sounds like an exhausting and sparingly rewarding way to live life.
And the irony when in your first sentence you're saying you're not defending them, and by your third sentence you've defended them again... maybe you should just read up on what "whataboutism" is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
The amount he paid for 1 year is worth about $120 today and then he's somehow dropped an order of magnitude AND forgot about the punishing inflation the Lira has seen.
I think I'd suggest OP is at fault.
I think I am done getting cutesy domains for projects and will just use subdomains going forward to avoid this kind of headache.
edit: One of the things I wanted to put on that domain was an ngrok like service targeting regions where ngrog is high latency, because I could really use that myself.
To clarify, I wasn't suggesting that the registrants in foreign countries pay in USD and potentially pay forex fees, merely that the underlying USD price be exposed to them so they are aware of what the future renewal price will look like as the exchange rate shifts. They'd still always be paying in local currency.