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Comment by Lucent | Hacker News Reader

This isn't what makes investing in other gTLDs a danger. It's that some are offering registration for pennies, causing them to be almost entirely populated by "bad" domains. For example, .fun is 80% spammy domains, creating a strong incentive for all manner of services to blacklist the entire TLD.

https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/

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Same thing happened with .info domains. I used to trade domain names when I was in college. Initially, .info used to be decently well-used and respected.

Then the registrars started offering 1st year registration at $0.99/year and all the spammers jumped aboard.

Came to a point where .info was the equivalent of .spam

The other issue is with dark UI patterns in third party resellers, sure you can get some weird gTLD for $1 for the first year. But then if you actually build something that uses it, maybe the next year and the third year you find that the price is now $89/year. Totally undisclosed before you buy it.

At least if you buy a traditional ccTLD like .ca , or a regular TLD in .com , .net , whatever, you can expect pricing to remain consistent.

I really hate this. It's super scammy. Although namecheap does show a little message letting you know it costs more to renew.

But then it sounds like the $89 is not the general price of the TLD but rather your site as determined by the rate on how the registrar's been receiving queries for your domain on their DNS servers. Can't you "reset" the price by transferring to another registrar?

No, because it's not actually the resellers doing this. It's the people who own the tld doing the scammy pricing.

You mean the registry has the registrars do that? Do registries even have view on the popularity of different domains below their TLD? I didn't realize that they received requests from resolvers that included second-level domains. I thought it was only the registrars that received that, not the registries, but I guess misunderstood DNS if so, because it makes sense.

It's not popularity based. Everyone pays more to renew and it's a lot more than the initial price.

Can a TLD have ToS to revoke a domain being used for spam?

Otherwise, after sufficiently ruining .fun, I'm sure the spam crowd will just move on to the next cheap TLD until that one gets saturated and so on.

It can, but I mean really blocking spam at the TLD level is not the most effective way to do it.

If I control the rDNS for a public IP I can set it to anything I want. Of course if I want any chance at all for mail delivery the rDNS for the smtpd needs to be the same as its 'forward' DNS name and name in the MX records.

But you're much better blocking by IP RBL (ex: many /16 to /18 sized blocks of taiwanese DSL ISPs are blocked in all the major RBLs), using tools like spamassassin on your incoming smtpd, opendkim integrated with your smtpd for incoming DKIM verification, and generally filtering by content.

In the last year, I got hundreds of spam emails, each with a valid DKIM signature for a unique .bid domain registered at NameCheap. It costs less than 1$/year/domain.

I mailed NameCheap multiple times about this, they keep telling me they cannot do anything about it.

Did you try the TLD's administrative contact and did you make sure you are using tools that report to Spamhaus or other blackholes?

.bid seems to be 35% bad which is not all that bad if they have been offering $1 domains for long. So maybe they take some actions through the registrars to stay bellow being presumed spam by default or maybe not enough of these unique domains are getting reported..

You think the email space isn't an almost monopoly that actively makes it hard for others to get in?

Why do you think it's a monopoly? I think SMTP is more often on premises at organizations than web services for example.

The hoops to send have existed for a long time and simply evolve. A push protocol without trust is a pretty bad idea after all.. So bad the fax machine needed the legal system to inflict severe punishments for the physical resources consumed by unwanted push (in theory if not practice.)

It's not all .fun and games

.games

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