Freenom, the free domains website, is a scam
daniel.is-a.dev
daniel.is-a.dev
B) The top-level domains offered here are absolute garbage and are generally seen as problematic. See A.
C) Freenom has a lot of power as the holder of its namespace. Don't like that? Bring it up with ICANN.
Because the Internet is built around a lot of abstractions that only make sense in light of the historical context at the time the technology was originally adopted, it really doesn't lend itself to being friendly to newbies. These people are actively preyed upon by a hostile industry full of shady operators.
I feel like 99% of .ly sites have nothing to do with libya
In my experience, outside the USA many ccTLDs are commonly used – including the "domain hack" ones, in their own country.
Any "privacy-oriented" registrar just hides that information from whois records, but you still share it to registrar, so in case of government requests or data leak your PII will be exposed.
There is no anonymity in internet, only pseudoanonymity.
Why would we switch over to primarily utilizing .us given the very early adoption of .com in the culture and economy? It would be nonsensical to do so.
You can see that early adoption well represented here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_r...
northrop.com 1985, dec.com 1985, att.com 1986, xerox.com 1986, ibm.com 1986, sun.com 1986, intel.com 1986, ti.com 1986, boeing.com 1986, alcoa.com 1986, adobe.com 1986, amd.com 1986, 3com.com 1986, tandy.com 1986, and so on.
In Canada, all our federal-government stuff is under .gov.ca, and all our provincial-government stuff is under .gov.[province].ca. But those .[province].ca domains can also be used by any org located in the province, that asks the province nicely. (Examples: http://www.bccancer.bc.ca/, https://spca.bc.ca/)
This same pattern is, AFAIK, followed by pretty much every other country. .gov.[province/state/region].[country] reserved for the regional governments; .[province/state/region].[country] available upon request to orgs that make sense to be nested there.
I understand that the US uses .gov for its federal-government stuff; but why is e.g. the Legislature of Idaho at https://legislature.idaho.gov/ rather than being at e.g. legislature.gov.id.us ? Why weren't swathes of the .us ccTLD reserved for this use, to mirror what basically every other country does with its ccTLD?
However, state governments don't have to use this if they don't want to, and they're allowed to have .gov domains. Different states made whatever decisions for whatever idiosyncratic reasons. I strongly suspect that .gov has better name recognition as "this is definitely the government" among the American public, so that might be a reason why state and local government entities might choose to use it.
(Most of your list are multinational corporations which is a perfectly reasonable use for .com).
Do you mean .com or the Internet as a whole?
Precisely because .com is used by all the world and his dog. It gives no indication where the organisation presents its home to be.
Lots of people, in fact the letters don’t even need to stand for anything they just become part of SV tech culture and spread from there. For example look at all the tech companies that utilize .io without any real reason. Or from an eastern perspective .cc (cocoa island) has become popular in China because 1. simplicity and 2. repetition is culturally meaningful.
.io is assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory
The point I was trying to make above ("who cares...") is that you can use any domain you want! You don't need to use a specific ccTLD (.ml would be the example I was referencing) in order to insinuate your machine learning applications.
Determined to get this domain back, I tried all email contact methods and this failed. Never once received a response to an email asking for help. However, I did search around and discovered a phone number.
This began months of me calling this number and speaking to the same Dutch woman asking about unsuspending this domain so I could purchase it. Every once in awhile I called her back during Dutch business hours (so late night for me) and had a conversation with her about it. Finally after around 4 months of persistence I got the domain back and was able to register it.
Edit: Found it: https://drimble.nl/bedrijf/amsterdam/k57803196/stichting-adm... which is owned by https://drimble.nl/bedrijf/amsterdam/15705528/cervesia-acida...
Now, where else can that business model be applied? You could let people post videos for free, and when they get enough traffic, ads are added. That might be a successful business.
1) On Youtube, you can opt out of ads for your own videos.
2) If you get enough traffic to where you can add the ads, you don't lose access/ownership of the video on your account. Youtube doesn't force you to pay to keep your own videos, either.
I've seen people not read the article when they post a comment, but it seems you didn't even read the part of the article you quoted before making your snarky allusion.
You can opt out of monetization, but I don't think you can opt out of ads anymore.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/youtube-will-put-ads-on-non-...
YouTube has had ads ever since shortly after it launched, and it never did anything like promise it would be ad-free. There's no bait and switch, nor is it anything like Freenom.
If YouTube acted like Freenom, it would wait until your video got popular, then remove it unless you paid YouTube a bunch of money. Which it doesn't do.
So how on earth are you trying to connect Freenom to YouTube...?!
Sort of like offering a free credit to use Google Compute Cloud, using opaque pricing, then once it gets popular, removing it until you pay Google a lot of money.
If you want that, that's literally why Vimeo Pro exists -- you pay Vimeo to host your stuff and they won't show ads on it.
Two companies, two business models, consumers (video creators) get to choose the model they like best.
This domain registration scam is more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_running and https://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/, i.e. inferring from the inside information you have as the market maker/platform that the value of something is going up, and using that knowledge to make trades or business decisions that are profitable to you, not something a platform is normally expected to do, and costly to the source of the information, i.e. your customers. These are considered unethical/illegal because the possibility they might happen is not disclosed to the user of the platform.
How does FreeNom know how much traffic your domain is getting, especially if you've set up your own DNS servers (which you can do on free domains)?
There are no particulars here and I am very curious to know how this popped up.
To reach your DNS you have to go through the TLD. On free domains, the TTL is set to 300 seconds (or 60 seconds).
So to reach your ns1.example.com, it goes through {a,b,c,d}.ns.tk first and refers to ns1.example.com.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tk
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ga
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.cf
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.gq
[4]: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130407005038/en/Mal...
Of course, such arrangements are not very reliable. The relationship between a sovereign entity and an individual, or even a small corporation, is unbalanced. The rules of the game are set by one party, and varied at their whim. "But that's not fair" might work in countries that pride themselves on fairness, such as the United States of America (though don't count on it) but it won't get you very far in Equatorial Guinea.
If these arrangements annoy the other sovereign entities, they might do something about it. For example, the Paris MOU (and subsequently similar Port State Control rules in much of the developed world) - is what happened when European states were annoyed that places like Panama were not pulling their weight when it came to safety and employment standards on commercial shipping, and operated Open Registers (which the Europeans argued were in fact mere "Flags of Convenience") to earn money without spending that money where it was needed.
But if they just annoy you, a mere individual with no rights on the world stage at all, you can go whistle. You are not even eligible to complain to most of the bodies that claim jurisdiction over sovereign entities, another sovereign entity would need to take up the complaint.
a.ns.cf has address 185.21.168.17
a.ns.gq has address 185.21.168.65
a.ns.ml has address 185.21.168.1
a.ns.ga has address 185.21.168.49
% Abuse contact for '185.21.168.0 - 185.21.168.15' is 'abuse@freenom.com'
% Abuse contact for '185.21.168.16 - 185.21.168.31' is 'abuse@freenom.com'
..and so on
Ah, that's the piece I was missing. I get how DNS works but I hadn't fathomed that FreeNom was the root for those TLDs they handle.
Still curious how / if / when they tell you about the thresholds.
Fortunately none of the domains I have registered there are used for anything important but it does hurt if someone does use one they register for something important.
Their DNS servers will collect all top-level DNS requests. When someone visits a given website, the TLD is queried for the authoritive nameservers for the domain if that information hasn't been cached yet. In practice, every ISP will end up sending a DNS request every once in a while when the cache expires. When loads of DNS requests come in from all over the world, you could flag a domain as high-traffic or high-value.
[0]: ---
11.2. Renewal
As long as you have remained in compliance with each of the terms of this Agreement from the date you agreed to be bound by this Agreement, including without limitation the minimum use requirements set forth in Section 10.1, we may elect in our sole discretion to (i) allow you to upgrade to the Paid Service at the prevailing applicable rate, (ii) automatically renew this Agreement for a term, determined by Freenom, from such date (the "Renewal Period") and (iii) continue providing you with FREE DOMAIN subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement (including a renewal of the registration of the domain name provided to you in connection with FREE DOMAIN).
---
In fact most of my domains I have upgraded to paid registrations.
I’d love to see these allegedly high traffic domains that were just taken and sold to 3rd parties. My guess is if there is any truth to the complain the free registration expired and the domain was scooped up.
I have a few Freenom domains, but they are only for short-term use (e.g. try out a new ACME client). Nobody should use a Freenom domain on a serious website.
So i ended up just prevent signed up with those tlds or add those tlds into our system
I have a .tk domain that I bought in 2008, never had a problem, and I've been using that for all sort of things (including running a mail server).
The thing is, you're supposed to read the terms and conditions before using something, AS FOR EVERYTHING.
When I registered (and later bought) the domain the terms and conditions clearly stated that you do not get legal ownership of the domain with the free offering (which is more akin to a lease than to a registration).
Doing it for everything is impossible. Reading it for critical things is fine and needed, but for everything I would need to hire several lawyers.
DNS, especially dealing in domain names, is a service. In this case, I'd say they provide you with free newsletters if you sign up. If you send out enough newsletters to others, they stop giving you free stuff and you have to pay.
I've found this in the terms and conditions:
---
11.2. Renewal
As long as you have remained in compliance with each of the terms of this Agreement from the date you agreed to be bound by this Agreement, including without limitation the minimum use requirements set forth in Section 10.1, we may elect in our sole discretion to (i) allow you to upgrade to the Paid Service at the prevailing applicable rate, (ii) automatically renew this Agreement for a term, determined by Freenom, from such date (the "Renewal Period") and (iii) continue providing you with FREE DOMAIN subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement (including a renewal of the registration of the domain name provided to you in connection with FREE DOMAIN).
---
This seems pretty clear to me. At the end of a term (which can be a month or a year) they can decide to require upgrading to a paid subscription. If you choose not to renew for the paid plan, your domain will be resold like any domain reseller will do.
The main problem I see here is the lack of a renewal notice. I've always received renewal warnings myself, but always with high spam scores (because free TLDs are often used for sending spam). This could be a problem with the customer's spam filter filtering out the right renewal notices.
This doesn't look as much like a scam as it looks like looking a gift horse in the mouth in my opinion.
> As a PAID domain name registrant, you receive the benefits of holding the legal license rights of the domain name.
That’s not a scam or fraud when the renewal period rolls around and the annual fee increases from the discount rate or you have to pay for the 1st time.
The scam/fraud seems to be the review alleging the reviewer had a high traffic domain name that was just taken without notice so Freenom could sell it.
However, they won't lock it up and demand payment. They simply just lock it up at the discretion of the company.
The digital bookshelf will record and analyze what you read which is a bit of switch-and-bait tactic.
If I give you a free car under the pretense that I'm a cool guy who gives away free cars, and you use that car to get a job delivering pizza, then I take back the car unless you give me money, that's a scam. You've been scammed. I've committed fraud to make money from you after I've put you in a vulnerable position.
In Freenom's case, you are giving the domain name value by using it and driving traffic to it. It didn't have value to begin with. The same thing isn't true in the car analogy.
If you replace the car in my analogy with a house, it's even clearer. It's hard to change where you live for a ton of reasons. Demanding unexpected payment is a scam, because I wasn't anticipating paying under the agreement, and I'm left with little choice in the matter (lest I become homeless).
If I start a profitable business with a domain that's taken from me, I'm either forced to pay this ransom or start my business from scratch.
> It didn't have value to begin with
But your use of it created value, with the expectation that you would be able to keep that value. The deception that the value is not actually yours to keep makes it a scam. It's especially scammy, since they seemingly only do this to domains valuable enough to extract meaningful value from: they're selectively targeting valuable properties to extort.
The car analogy seems questionable-at-best to me though, yeah it doesn't have the same elements. A car isn't hard to switch out, and you're not adding any value to it by using it. At worst you're right back where you started. The house analogy does seem better because it's hard to switch.
Realtor gives you a great deal on a nice location in downtown. You spend months putting it together, making it look good, advertising. Opening Day comes around, and if more than 100 people come he tells you you now owe him 10x the rent or he's kicking you out.
When I register a domain with Godaddy and they charge me $12.99 for the first year and then $18.99 for subsequent years it’s not a scam.
But when Freenom give you a free domain registration for up to 12 months and then makes you pay for it to renew after the free registration period or to transfer to 3rd parties it is a scam?
Note, I do actually think the Tesla thing was a scam and fraud because they never disclosed to buyers certain software features were temporary as part of a trial period and would cost thousands of dollars after the trial period. Freenom on the other hand discloses the limited free registration period and the $10 annual registration fees, like Godaddy discloses the 1st year discount.
When the company literally has FREE in its name, and their site is covered with ads boasting “FREE DOMAIN NAMES”, I don’t think that disclosing the true nature of their offer in the fine print legitimizes their business model. It’s a scam, because people didn’t have informed consent, and I don’t care about the legalese.
If it’s a scam why do they have sections explaining “paid and free domains” why do they have a “price chart”.
Free is in their name because they offer a free 12 month domain registration unlike other domain registrars which typically all offer discounts for the first year.
"Our mission is to bring people online and help countries develop their digital economy."
"Pricing: FREE!"
"Payments: No payment needed"
This sounds a lot like a scam if they are later charging for those domain names.
I ran into this in the 1990s. I had to basically arm-wrestle one of these organizations to get a domain released. I think they gave it to me, because I made such a pain out of myself, that it wasn't worth it.
Interestingly enough the domain is online again with apparently legitimate (no spam or adds) content.
They're an option for fun projects that you don't expect to last a year and don't care about, definitely not for anything serious.
> Several systems which exhibit all three properties of Zooko's triangle have now been created, including:
> Computer scientist Nick Szabo's paper "Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority" illustrated that all three properties can be achieved up to the limits of Byzantine fault tolerance.
> Activist Aaron Swartz described a naming system based on Bitcoin employing Bitcoin's distributed blockchain as a proof-of-work to establish consensus of domain name ownership. These systems remain vulnerable to Sybil attack, but are secure under Byzantine assumptions.
> Several platforms implement refutations of Zooko's conjecture, including: Twister (which use Swartz' system with a bitcoin-like system), Blockstack (separate blockchain), Namecoin (separate blockchain), LBRY (separate blockchain and peer-to-peer file-sharing), Monero OpenAlias and Ethereum Name Service.
The content policy bans domains that show errors (last bullet point): http://www.freenom.com/en/dottk_contentpolicy_version21.pdf
So if the DB behind your CMS crashes and you don't notice it quickly, bye-bye domain. I believe a variant of this is what happened to one of my domains (just a joke/toy project, and was able to re-register it once I noticed).
The TOS itself http://www.freenom.com/en/doc_tcfree_freenom_v0110.pdf basically says they can do whatever they want (removed some of the redundant legalese):
> you ... agree that if we determine in our sole discretion that you have violated any of the terms of this Agreement ... we shall have the right, which may be exercised in our sole discretion, to terminate this Agreement ... in such event you will forfeit to us all of your right, title and interest in and to the domain name ... we may hold, cancel, sell, transfer or otherwise assign or dispose of such domain name at our sole discretion.
Honestly though I have to admit that I wasn't surprised and I didn't go posting on the internet about it. I already knew that it is impossible to get something for nothing these days. Especially domain names! These days if I want to throw away domain name I'll go to name cheap and spend $0.88 on one.
In my experience it is not a total scam at all, rather they offer a freemium business model which is unique in the domain space.
Like many other freemium services the free tier is limited and just a means of getting you to upgrade. For example the free domain registration is limited to a maximum term of 12 months, they do not allow you to transfer ownership of the free domain registrations and they even froze my account after registering maybe a few dozen single character emoji domains in rapid succession.
I was actually so please with registering single character country flag emoji domains I paid the fee to upgrade and unlocked all the features.
I don’t think I can use emojis on the HN comment but for reference I registered (all .gq extensions): Cuba Flag, Israel Flag, Palestinian Flag, Ireland flag, South African Flag, Nigerian Flag and a few other middle eastern county flags.
As a side note the Mailoji service used the official Kazakhstan (.kz) registrar and I was interested and registered two single character country flag emoji domains with them (including Russia Flag) and they took that domain from me and gave it to a Developer in Kazakhstan that is clearly connected with employees that work for the registrar.
The part that makes it a scam is that the trigger to start extracting money from you happens once you have something to lose by not doing so. Think about cloud storage providers with a 2GB free tier. Now imagine if instead of just forbidding uploads that would put you over your limit, that once you hit your limit, they held all of your existing files hostage until you paid them $100. Wouldn't you then consider them a scam?
Also in my opinion Freenom makes very clear disclosures about the differences in the paid and unpaid features and rights. Just like Dropbox.
To say Freenom is defrauding people would be more on par with saying GoDaddy is defrauding customers when they offer a discount on the 1st year registration and then they “extract more money” subsequent years after I have invested in the domain and have something to lose.
The complaints against Freenom are clearly manufactured as well, and my guess is people like you calling it fraud haven’t used their service or customer service.
But a Dropbox account isn’t an asset anymore than a GoDaddy/Namecheap/Freenom account.
A domain name on the other hand is an asset, of course like any asset (including Dropbox contents) some are more valuable than others.
They are not making it clear.
> would be more on par with saying GoDaddy is defrauding customers when they offer a discount on the 1st year registration and then they “extract more money” subsequent years
If it is not made clear to user - then yes, it is a fraud.
I guess what everyone is arguing here is that they shouldn’t allow any free registration but charge a discounted rate the first year like every other domain registrar.
In the page I linked for you which is available on their homepage menu and footer on every page the chart explaining the difference between the free and paid domains contains at least 3 rows on point:
> Legal rights:
Free: Registrant acts as user of domain name, not as licensee
> Transfer rights:
Free: None
> WHOIS:
Free: Freenom or one of its subsidiaries appears as the licensee in the WHOIS
Disclosures aside it is immaterial to the more important point, Freenom is not going into user account and taking domain names (free or paid) and selling them to 3rd parties. The review complaining that this happened is fake, hence why they can’t establish this actually happened. Freenom is a legit company with real assets, they are a ICANN licensee of its own TLDs and official servicer of a few country TLDs, if they actually stole someone’s high traffic or high value domain name and sold it to a 3rd party as alleged in the fake review, then the user could sue for damages and specific performance to get the domain back just the same as if Godaddy or Namecheap or any other registrar were to just steal user domain names.
Since I paid it I technically own them like a normal domain, but I just don't want to deal with them and their broken UI.
Trying to register a throwaway domain on Freenom a few months ago (trying over several days) it was impossible. Quite literally impossible, not from UI, it just didn't let me log in.
If you want something just buy it.
it's 2021 are we still doing the FUD thing here?