They also compete in random new industries each time this happens.
It doesn't seem like a smart move to lease a domain from a politically active mega-monopoly that might decide to randomly become your competitor in 2 years.
You'll be glad to know that TLDs can't simply be discontinued like other products might be. ICANN doesn't allow it. The procedures in place preventing a live TLD from shutting down are called EBERO; more details here: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/ebero-2013-04-02-en
The way it works is that all registries must send daily full backups to a third-party escrow provider, which are then used to restore the TLD under a different operator if the original operator shuts down unexpectedly. This is not some theoretical backup/restore procedure that goes untested; it's been used in the past, e.g. with .wed: https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2017-12-08-en
But this typically only happens when the registry operator goes abruptly bankrupt, and is thus quite rare. Many, many widely used TLDs have been seamlessly sold/transferred across registry operators without you ever realizing it, including .io last year. That would be the "worst" you would expect from TLDs launched by large established players like Google. You actually get a lot more protections with gTLDs than you do with ccTLDs (such as .io), as ccTLDs aren't bound by contract with ICANN and thus aren't forced to do EBERO, or anything else for that matter.
> During both the Early Access Program and General Availability, there is a $12/year cost for .dev domains. Annual fees may vary for Premium domains.
Domains being sold by resellers are something different entirely, but yeah, some registrars that participate in reseller networks may lump those in as "premium" as well, which is confusing. Those prices tend to be one-time acquisition costs.
If I could buy a domain for 50 years, I'd do it.
As for longer registration periods than that, I suspect it's the same reason you can't, e.g., call up your cable company and try to pre-pay 50 years of service. They have no idea what things will be like that far down the road, and they don't want to have such longstanding obligations weighing on them.
It comes down to business decisions, not technical issues; technically speaking the spec allows for up to a 99 year registration period, though I'm not aware of any TLDs that support that. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5731#section-2.5
For example, pitch a solution that doesn't just make squatters upload some bare bones index.html. Or check a registrar's checkbox to park the domain somewhere with content. Or, well, upload the minimum amount of substance that you think is necessary.
And now imagine the public outcry that can happen every time people have their domains taken from them (rightly or wrongly).
No, no registry wants to be in the business of doing that. You continue to pay for the name, it's yours.
We wouldn't need such a profusion of TLDs (most of which are awful: .dev is an exception) if real domain squatting was made feasible.
It's a nifty business hack actually, as unlike a 3rd party squatter, the TLD itself has no financial risk in upmarking domains.
I'm not trying to be snarky and thanks foe answering questions but this particular comment was a non-answer.
I've heard that if you call during the day you get someone who's actually competent, not just some T1 support person.
While I agree with him taking the domain down, but what about the next CEO?
I personally don't use CF for various reasons, but this site take down is not one of them.
Their UI is dead simple and gets things done well and fast.
Meanwhile someone got their Adsense account banned and in those cases Google refunds the allegedly fraudulent revenue to the advertisers and do not pay you the non-fraudulent revenue. The person who got banned went to court over it because it looked like Google schedules these things to maximize how much they could keep, Google fought for four years to conceal where the non-fraudulent revenue went and then settled for $11 million to keep that shrouded in mystery.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/adsense-lawsuit/248135/
Note the nobody who will say what happens to your domains when your account is banned despite relevant Google personnel participating in this page, but they have time to detail how we're covered by ICANN if Google with $106+ billion in savings goes bankrupt in thousands of years...
They designed this awful system exactly the way they wanted it to work and they choose to keep it this way, everyone else should probably not use them for domains or web hosting in case yourself or someone associated with your account is irreversibly judged to have committed a TOS transgression somewhere within their empire.
I also have some on Namecheap, are those safe?
So, please do not over generalize or compare apples to oranges.
Comparing Google products to Google products should not be comparing apples to oranges. If Google is frustrated with customers assuming they don't support their products, maybe they should support all of their products, not just a select few.
I was serious, though. People would be less frustrated if they had that helpful reminder on sign up.
Obfuscating that GMail isn't a real product is just another one of their sleazy business tactics, I guess.
- For Verisign with .com, they don't care if you're really a company or not.
- With Minds & Machines and .law, they only want qualified lawyers, courts, legal schools, etc. using the TLD.
Keep in mind that the registry and registrar are different things.
In this case, Google is the registry and thus the supreme court of who can and cannot be on this domain and there is no recourse if they yank your claim on the domain?
Is it more nuanced than that?
IME you're much more likely to be banned by the registrar than the registry itself. Registries want people to use their TLDs, so they're not going to reject post-registration unless you've changed how you're using the TLD and it's violating the rules they originally laid down. Registrars are much more consumer facing and will act accordingly - i.e. GoDaddy banning Gab.
Really not at all impressed by this, and it only serves as a stark reminder of the failed state of TLDs.
Re: price, say the .dev registrar decides to offer domains for a hobby-dev-friendly $1 flat fee, first come first served. Wouldn't that just immediately lead to a resale market where predatory squatters register all the domains and extract the market price from anybody who wants one?
I think it would be cooler to have programming challenges or something neat.
But a cash grab just seems kind of, lame I guess.
I wouldn’t say I have bile, but I went from “this might be cool” reading the headline to “this is really stupid.”
Because the problem of resellers buying up TONS of domain names is a real one, and thus far a dutch auction style seems to be one good way to combat that (since buying 10000 names and selling 10% of them for an overall profit is a LOT more risky when getting them first means shelling out a LOT more money).
A challenge or something would probably drive costs up across the board, and it would still exclude those who want to use the domains that might not be able to complete the challenge (IMO a worse situation), and other methods of "verification" would either be gameable or would exclude many devs.
I don't know of any more "fair" way of allowing people to buy domains. Why should a hobbyist be able to buy "paypal.dev" when potentially thousands of devs could use that domain at paypal, and similarly "klathmon.dev" would be awesome to have for me, and it's pretty unlikely that someone will buy that out from under me with this scheme.
Not to mention that the timeline here is literally half a month. After Feb 28th, there is no additional charge. So we are talking about 2 weeks of waiting.
Literally: "We will create monopolies and increase competition."
Unbelievable.
Except if your website was the daily stormer.
/remindme! 2 years
[1] see financial report of the last year (10K). Search for "We operate our business in multiple operating segments. Google is our only reportable segment. None of our other segments meet the quantitative thresholds to qualify as reportable segments" and "How we make money" (Source: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204419... )
I am not accusing them of it. Just stating facts.
Hosted services like Drive, Photos, and GSuite are also entirely in-house.
Maps - in flux like you said.
Phones are more than hardware sales. They also run an app store and license their own ecosystem.
This isn't useful, because everyone knows that argument already. I'd rather know what Google's track record is specifically having to do with DNS (or fundamental Internet infrastructure).
Back in highschool (15yrs ago) pinging a DNS server was something I sometimes did when fixing people's internet, always used 212.142.28.66. No idea why it's still in my head so much later, 8.8.8.8 sure is a lot easier to remember.
think of the bright side. they might be willing to buy your neato .dev domain name back ... for $12.