Mixed views on new DNS top level domains
utcc.utoronto.ca
utcc.utoronto.ca
That is probably just as well, because a year later, it had been reclassified as a "premium" name. The renewal fee was over $400,000.
The fact that the owners of gTLDs can set pricing arbitrarily is the biggest problem in all this. A given domain name usually has no intrinsic value. What gives it value is the effort someone puts into marketing it.
With the new gTLDs, the domain operators are free to offer useful names that aren't trademarks, but are unavailable as .com or similar. Then should anyone build a successful business on that name, they are free to seek arbitrarily high rents.
There is no sense in which you can buy a domain name outright. Nor do the new gTLDs have any form of rent control. That is a fundamental problem with the system as it stands.
I don't thing it's a good idea for anyone to use a gTLD for anything serious. Even without the prices being uncapped, there's no guarantee that a gTLD will stick around. Would be crappy to lose a domain because the company who owns the gTLD went out of business or just didn't want to deal with handling domains anymore.
Actually, there is a guarantee that a gTLD will stick around. ICANN correctly determined that this would be ruinous to the health of the Internet as a whole if entire TLD's worth of domains could simply disappear, hence they set up procedures to guard against it, including a required daily data escrow deposit from all TLD operators that can be used to spin up the TLD by another registry operator if the worst catastrophe were to happen (which, it should be pointed out, has never happened). For more info see:
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/ebero-2013-04-02-en https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/data-escrow
The only TLDs that have ever ceased operation entirely, like .xperia in the linked articles, are closed brand TLDs that were never used for anything, were never available for external registration, and that the company in question (Sony here) simply got tired of paying the annual fees on given their lack of use of it. These TLD discontinuations don't threaten anything.
I have a benign gTLD that went from $10 -> $30 next year... I shudder to think what it will be in 5.
EDIT: Also I just looked, and most are doing a thing were the y will let you get the first year for $12 or so, and then every year after is $25+.
Which TLD went from $10 to $30/yr? There's a lot of missing info in these comments!
On the other hand, first year discounting is (as you're seeing) quite common. So just treat the 2nd year price as the actual price for the purpose of deciding whether you're willing to pay it. The key difference here is that you know the price schedule up front.
I do like this quote from the article:
> In this case, ICANN said that Atgron had failed to provide Whois services as required by contract. The threshold for Whois triggering EBERO is 24 hours downtime over a week.
> However, the situation looks to me a lot more like a business failure than a technical failure.
> Multiple sources with knowledge of the transition tell me that the Whois was turned off deliberately, purely to provide a triggering event for the EBERO failover system, after Atgron’s back-end contract with CoCCA expired.
> The logic was that turning off Whois would be far less disruptive for registrants and internet users than losing DNS resolution, DNSSEC, data escrow or EPP.
It sounds like they creatively used EBERO as the most expedient method to be able to cease hosting .wed, which they had been unprofitable to them owing to the mere 40 total registrations that they had. And they did so in a way that would minimally disrupt their users.
Overall, seeing that EBERO was successfully used strengthens my confidence in the overall safety of new gTLDs. There's way too many of them out there, and they're way too important now as a whole, for anyone to simply just let them vanish out from underneath their users.
At that price it may be cheaper to simply create your own TLD.
For infrastructure, I can imagine this being a case a single colocated server rack would work great, especially if you don't expect your TLD to be super popular among other people (SaaS likely wouldn't be suitable due to the high industry bandwidth costs).
It may be prudent to have some of your own distributed servers act as hidden masters, and then use a DNS anycast service for the publicly listed servers.
Thanks for the warning.
That violates the registry agreement AFAIK. They’re not allowed to arbitrarily change the price for a registered domain. Can you give more detail?
Purely a money grab by everyone involved. In what I'd consider a more normal fashion, ICANN could have slowly picked and rolled out sensible new TLDs to operators interested.
Instead, it was a free for all where you had to pay an insane fee to ICANN mafia to even apply, and get in bidding wars if multiple applications existed.
If you won, you had to go find and pay your own registry, too. So, you had registries preemptively spamming local businesses convincing them to buy a tld and use that registry.
Many thought they were gonna make a fortune. The only one who made a fortune was ICANN and to some extent, registries. That's probably why owners keep trying to jack up prices, they still want their windfall.
Don't even get me started on how terrible ICANN is organized. The whole digital archery fiasco should be enough for nobody to ever put any faith in them. Anyone with a quarter of brain function would realize how terrible that idea is.
We live in a world where everybody is complaining about censorship and nazis, but one of the best new TLDs for an independent forum is prices out 99% of the market!
Of course, there are plenty of TLDs in the $5-$20 range, which are great, but this will cause cheap TLDs to become crowded and .forum will be a ghost town.
Forums generally don't make money. Any forum making money, probably isn't making enough to budget $500 extra in another domain. Any company that would say "wow, $2000/year is acceptable" would already have something like {forum,community}.acme.com.
This might be only one managable issue, but these things add up, and the more they add up, the more facebook becomes the only website people use.
Which is all very unfortunate because some of those TLDs are quite nice, like .forum. What a mess we've gotten ourselves into.
Should have been kept as a public service, but no putting the genie back in the bottle now. Only way out of this mess is a distributed system, but I can't imagine what that would like without a massive proliferation of competing services.
I think it was nice that it was easy to recognise website.com was a website too, whereas website.wtf is less easy to identify, but then now there are more available to makes it easier to get a shorter, better name and can make the pricing more competitive, hopefully driving it lower for everyone.
At the beginning internet was based on a kind of democracy or gentlemen's agreements. Now, the one that has the most cash to spend, like Google or Apple or Amazon or some scammer, ça. Grave what you want. Like if it was their internet.
The example of the ".dev" is good. Google can easily unilaterally decide to take over a domain that was used largely and internationally by individuals. And they are allowed to do that because they can afford it, but you, the individual, you are considered like horse shit in this system. And so you are not allowed to complain.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...
Note that IDN TLDs are presented in punycode in that list (the XN-- ones), so you'd want to convert them to Unicode to see what they actually look like (e.g. many are Chinese characters).
Trademark violations would be handled as they are today.
The current mess is an embarrassment.