Price increase on .com domain names starting September 1, 2021
news.gandi.net
news.gandi.net
Edited: in more detail from thread[0] last year:
Everyone holding a .com domain can't simply move its registration from Verisign to somewhere else.
(Moving to new gtld is not equivalent at all)
They're holding their customers captive and profiting from it.
13 year old me would disagree. A .co.uk domain at the time was if I recall correctly about £5/year, equivalent to a week's wages from my paper round. A .com was around £12-15/year which I found too expensive. I learned a lot hacking around with DNS, subdomains, etc. and I wouldn't want to price today's kids out of doing the same. Saying that, back then there were only a few TLDs to choose from. I guess if there are still at least _some_ super cheap TLDs available then I probably wouldn't mind if .com in particular got more expensive given it seems to suffer the most from squatting.
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/namezero
There's probably ways to monetize now that aren't trivially bypassed with a line of JavaScript. Think CloudFlare and their app injections. New Namezero could require you to use their ad-injecting/enforcing nameserver.
I don't think this is reasonable, even if you started working at age 20 at a FAANG, you're not going to work until you're 70.
Keep in mind this industry is very ageist, you'd be lucky to even get 30 years of high salary income if you're not exceptionally good. That's assuming you don't burn out.
I'm surprised folks still use unrealistic examples such as these to move discussions in a certain direction.
In the valley maybe, at a FAANG. In the regular world, esp F500 companies, there are lots of old folks. I work with several developers in their 60s. Could they get Google to hire them? Maybe not. They're still pulling down middle 100s.
> I'm surprised folks still use unrealistic examples such as these
You're referring, I hope, to the original comment that $3000 over 50 years was a deal breaker. I am not the one who thought that a 50 year time horizon made any sense at all for this discussion, I'm just playing along.
> I am not the one who thought that a 50 year time horizon made any sense at all for this discussion, I'm just playing along.
That's my bad, I thought you initially brought up the 50 years of working at a FAANG-level company to not care of TLD fees.
At some point the extra cost is no longer worth it, and the content either vanishes or it's moved to facebook/google/medium platform.
We're leaving the open internet and further into the walled garden
> besides this year’s price increase, Verisign has been permitted to increase .com prices up to 7% in 2022 and 2023 as well as between 2026 to 2029.
A lot of people have been very negative about browsers adding DoH but they're missing the big picture: We now have a real opportunity to create competitive roots/new DNS.
Browsers really need to look at allowing multiple DoH connections concurrently that resolve different namespaces. I'm legitimately surprised this hasn't happened already.
Is DoH browser-based. Optically, yes. Technically, no. I use it outside the browser every day.
No disagreement with rest of comment. FWIW, I have run own custom root for decades, creating new "TLDs" and "domainnames" as I please, but also I have experimented with a non-DNS naming system just using a proxy. Maybe this sounds too simple, but the thing is, it is just as fast as DNS, maybe even faster. If everyone runs the same proxy software, and we share the list of names, it just works. This is 100% outside the browser. No reliance on ICANN and no reliance on Google/Apple/Mozila/Microsoft/Brave.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Firefox and Chrome have an individual setting for DoH that doesn't depend on the underlying OS's DNS configuration/resolver.
Therefore, you can run multiple instances of either browser (using profiles) that point to different DoH resolvers or are different from the underlying OS.
This is very similar to using TOR in a browser instance but with even lower friction. Currently, the biggest friction is that one profile cannot point to two or more DoH resolvers at the same time, and instead you need two browser profiles for two browser instances that resolve to different endpoints.
I do understand your point, anyone can run a DoH server and could serve "alternate DNS" names. I just wanted to make clear that DoH is not limited to use with the popular browsers. It can be useful outside the browser.
.com is still $8.88 at Namecheap.
Is there a price level at which the nerds say "fuck this" and create new domain roots without ICANN?
> Is there a price level at which the nerds say "fuck this" and create new domain roots without ICANN?
One without ICANN but what about namesquatting?
Perhaps I'm misremembering but domain squatting was an issue for the last 20 years. Before "wall street" got a hold, I'm sure regular people like you and me just bought domains and sat on them for a while.
I know I used to try and guess which domains to buy and hold for some time but by the time I figured it out, those domains were already reserved.
It was also us engineers that figured out you can query ICANN for expiry information so you can catch domains that expire and steal them from other people. Not sure wall street had anything to do with that.
This is all a response to the question of what point squatting is too expensive to continue. I submit that it can’t be.
Namesquatting, ticket scalping, house flipping, Amazon book reselling, quant trading, etc. are all forms of arbitrage. There exist buyers who are willing to pay significantly more than sellers are willing to accept. Somebody gets to the seller first, buys the good, sits on it, and waits for one of these high-demand buyers to show up, then charges them the maximum that they're willing to pay.
If the seller just raised their prices, there would be no profit for the arbitrager. They would capture all the consumer surplus and deal directly with the buyer. If Gandi charged $1B for a .com domain, nobody's going to namesquat - they'd lose too much on the common English words to make it up from the major corporations.
I suspect a lot of the problem is the extreme power law in how much people are willing to pay for domains. Dropbox.com or Facebook.com is a bargain at $1M for DropBox and Facebook, but nobody is going to pay $1M for their personal homepage, and few local businesses are going to shell out more than a grand for a restaurant domain name. That indicates that perhaps some better pricing system (auctions?) is required. $16.99 is way low for a business domain name though.
The problem is that point is far beyond anything that resembles the Internet today. This is why the marketplace is administered by a non-profit for the benefit of the public.
•Renewal: $16.59 (current price $15.50)
•Transfer: $13.38 (current price $12.50)
•Restore: $139.10 (current price $130.00*)
I’ve never been able to secure a .com for a project, they are all squatted and being sold at a massive (like 1000x+) markup.
The problem is finding a suitable name for a project that also has an available domain. The easy ones are all picked.
But yeah, if you want a .com that's a single-word brand name without any prefixes/suffixes, basically everything's been taken for a long time.
Definitely, literally-literally, finite.
They were not expensive at all.
I'm trying [0] to fix that and hopefully be a part of the solution. Renewal price increases won't magically prevent people from squatting, so that's pure milking by the VeriSign monopoly.
Doesn't Lets Encrypt allow IP adddresses for the CN.
No:
https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/ssl-on-a-ip-instead-of-d...
But here's two more easy examples, InterNIC and NetBSD.
https://192.0.32.9/domain/root.zone
There are undoubtedly many, many more examples across the internet. FTP servers, along with HTTP mirrors of those FTP servers are some obvious examples where hostnames are often not required.
There seems to a web developer-driven, cargo cult mentality against use of IP addresses, but AFAICT search engines do not try to hide IP addresses; I sometimes get them in SERPS.
Historically IP addresses were supported in smtpd software, too. For example, qmail still supports IP addresses, if enclosed in brackets.