Premium .dev domain with Google costs $850 | Hacker News Reader

Premium .dev domain with Google costs $850

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As you know, domain extensions like .dev and .app are owned by Google. Last year, I bought the http://forum.dev domain for one of our projects. When I tried to renew it this year, I was faced with a renewal price of $850 instead of the normal price of $12.

Since I looked at it in Turkish Lira, I thought at first that Google made a mistake when converting the currency, but it turns out that was not the case. Apparently, they are renewing generic domains like the one I own for $850 under the name Premium domain.

I could understand if I were to buy this domain from scratch, but I have been the owner of hundreds of domains for almost 20 years and I have never faced anything like this before. Once again, I realized that it is foolish to trust Google on any matter. Thank you, Google.

Hi. I work on Google Registry. forum.dev is and always has been a premium domain name (and you paid that same premium price at initial registration). We price some domain names higher than others to help prevent cybersquatting, so that desirable domain names remain available for legitimate registrants rather than being sold for extravagant sums on the after-market. We have never increased the price of a single domain name after registration in our entire decade of existence.

For another example of a premium domain name that is still available for registration (in case people here want to verify the user experience), perform a domain name search for money.dev at your registrar of choice. It will be clearly marked with its yearly premium price. You would have seen this same information when you initially registered forum.dev.

> We price some domain names higher than others to help prevent cybersquatting, so that desirable domain names remain available for legitimate registrants rather than being sold for extravagant sums on the after-market.

It's hard to take this seriously when $850/year is still way higher than other registrars charge for new domains. Are "legitimate registrants" supposed to be comforted that their extravagant sum is being paid on the primary market instead of the after market?

> It's hard to take this seriously when $850/year is still way higher than other registrars charge for new domains.

That's actually a great price for a good domain name. If the name is already registered by a squatter looking to profit off it, you're looking at five figures minimum. I think the mistake you're making here is you're thinking it would be $12 vs $850, but it's not; it would be 'already registered by a squatter within milliseconds of TLD launch years ago and listed on a resale site for 5 figures' vs $850.

And to be clear, premium prices are set at the registry (i.e. wholesale) level, not at the registrar (i.e. retail) level. That means that these names are premium at all registrars. Premium pricing is not unique to Google (either the registry or registrar); it's used by nearly all new gTLDs.

> it would be 'already registered by a squatter within milliseconds of TLD launch years ago

That's an absurd false dichotomy. Gmail doesn't charge me $850/year for an email address, but somehow they managed to avoid people squatting thousands of addresses and selling them on the after-market at an exorbitant markup, and Google doesn't charge me $850/year to search things, and yet if I try to use `curl` to send a single search request it blocks it, but the Google domains team somehow doesn't think that it would have been possible to stop people from squatting thousands of domains "within milliseconds of TLD launch"?

Sorry, it's way more believable to me that this decision was made out of greed rather than a lack of imagination. Overcharging is may defensible position from a business perspective or even an ease of engineering perspective, but let's not pretend this decision was somehow made purely for the benefit of customers.

Well it depends on how long you own the domain for. A one time 5 figure price, then $12 each year after that will be cheaper than $850/year if you keep the domain for decades.

> And to be clear, premium prices are set at the registry (i.e. wholesale) level, not at the registrar (i.e. retail) level. That means that these names are premium at all registrars. Premium pricing is not unique to Google (either the registry or registrar); it's used by nearly all new gTLDs.

Does that money go to the registrar?

Only a sucker would pay 850 a year to a company that can invent any tld.

.sucks charges $2499 a year for premium domains.

Yes, well that TLD is basically an extortion scheme. "Buy this domains in this tld before someone else does and uses it to post disparaging content about your brand".

.art has the same model. Normal vs. Premium.

> and you paid that same premium price at initial registration

He shared the invoice: https://twitter.com/emirkarsiyakali/status/16014366748564643...

According to that, he paid 4360TRY last year ($300), and now asked to pay 13040TRY ($850). You can’t even make up the difference with the exchange rate changes.

The Turkish lira is currently experiencing ~85% year-on-year inflation. Our domains' prices are denominated in US dollars, not Turkish lira. This problem looks to be caused by currency headwinds. At the time of initial registration, the amount of Turkish lira paid would have been worth a lot more than it is now.

Also, 13040 TRY is worth US$700 at the current exchange rate, not US$850. That's actually a slight discount on the correct exchange rate, as another available domain name in the same pricing tier (e.g. 6b.dev) is showing as costing US$720/yr. So by paying in Turkish lira it looks like they're currently getting a discount of around US$20/yr, presumably because the prices displayed in Turkish are lagging the real exchange rate.

No, the exchange rate on Dec 6, 2021 was 13.67. Not even close.

EDIT: You edited your comment which made mine lose context. You had claimed something like “he had paid equivalent of $850 last year”. That’s provably not the case here.

https://www.google.com/search?q=what%27s+usd+try+rate+in+dec...

The amount of Turkish lira paid more than it is now but it's not $850. Here is the link you can get info about rates 6th of December: https://www.exchangerates.org.uk/USD-TRY-06_12_2021-exchange....

4360 TRY is equal to $313 USD using the conversion rate from 1 year ago.

you don't get to hide behind currency fluctation. as a customer he has all the right to be outraged. it's not like production costs had raised or whatever, google has chosen to put that price on that invoice when it could have chosen any other price or even to keep the old price

You're trying way too fucking hard. Give the guy a break.

This is the same crap allocation policy you had during the presale.

Money is maybe a sufficient discriminator, but it is not a good one. Money is very unequally distributed around the world and this basically presumes that the only legitimate use of such a domain could be in an enterprise in a first world country. Or someone rich enough to not be price sensitive at all.

Fun fact, I reserved tty0.dev as a "vanity domain" during the presale, but someone decided to pay $300 more for the joke than me. And that domain still doesn't do anything "useful".

There's no such concept of "reserving" domain names in a pre-sale. Either you own it, someone else owns it, or it doesn't yet exist and anyone could own it. I think you got confused by a registrar's "preorder" language, by that was never a guarantee; it was just their attempt to secure it for you when it became available. There was no guarantee.

I'm aware it's on a registrar level.

I just thought that it was a misguided allocation policy. Someone ended up buying tty0.dev at the $300 price point and uses it for... a fake `ls` output. This registrant wasn't more or less legitimate than any other. They just had more disposable income to spend on vanity.

As a third world resident, I don’t see any solutions to this problem. You can’t give discounts, as that will enable arbitrage.

Hello. I am happy that I caught the attention of someone from the Google team. Let's do it this way. I shared the invoice in the link. You are asking me to pay three times that amount today. Is this normal? To be honest, I am not familiar with the annual payment you mentioned. I expected to pay the price I paid the first year, and then continue with the normal -$12- renewal price. Is there a way to solve this confusion? Could you talk to the team on my behalf? This pricing is different from what I am used to with other tlds, but at least I am willing to pay the price I paid the first year.

Last year's invoice and Google Domain dashboard screenshots: https://twitter.com/EmirKarsiyakali/status/16014366748564643...

Renewal prices are also much higher on premium domains. It's actually the contrary, they're often sold for cheaper through some discounts and the price for the second year is the actual price.

I got a premium domain for $20 and paying $260 every year to renew it (but I knew it'd happen).

No, I didn't have a discount. Google employee proved me right about that first-year fee. I paid the normal price for this domain. But, now, they want me to pay 2X for renewing.

Why do you claim that renewal price is $12? How did you come up with that number?

Can you comment on a reply below that claims there was promotional pricing in 2019 at launch?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33929132

I think they're referring to the Early Access Program, which was a one-time pre-launch Dutch auction in advance of general availability. Note that that is orthogonal to a domain being premium or not. During the last day of EAP, you might have seen the price of a non-premium domain be something like $130+12/yr. Whereas for a ~$70/yr premium domain, it'd have been something like $130+70/yr.

Regardless, forum.dev was registered in 2021 (you can confirm via WHOIS), which was long after the Early Access Program for .dev ended in 2019.

You stated here that they paid $850 to initially register the domain name.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33929354

Do you have proof of the initial price paid for registration or is this in some part speculation?

Around here Premium usually means "cheaply brewed with adjunct grains."

What's so premium about a domain? You're just pretending it has artificial scarcity and desirability. It's one step removed from NFTs in terms of fake value.

There's real scarcity. There are only so many five letter words with a strong relevance to the internet, and only so many tlds. Only one entity can control example.org at a time, so there you go.

Would I pay for a premium domain name? Probably not. They might make sense for some uses though. I'd rather them be available at a public price than through someone who bought as many five letter words as they could and then sells them privately.

Hi, offtopic question: I tried to register a .app domain on namecheap which suddenly became unavailable once I tried to add it to cart and is still unavailable. It was a strange coincidence that someone would buy that domain name at the exact same time as me, but Google Registry also says it's no longer unavailable, so I wanted to know who bought it. The weird thing is the Google Registry WHOIS page says "Domain not found" for the 3rd day in a row, which I find bizarre - the domain name is not available but also not registered. Any thoughts on what might be happening?

(I am omitting the actual name because HN is a public forum)

If you send me the domain name in question privately (use my HN username here @gmail.com), I can dig into it further. I suspect it's either an issue with the domain name registrar, in which case you should try out some others, or it's a case where the name is reserved and is not available for registration by anyone. If it is reserved I can find that out very easily. Note that it would not have been reserved as a result of a domain name search; it would have been reserved years ago, and perhaps the registrar you attempted to use didn't handle it well.

EDIT: The user reached out to me privately and the domain name in question is indeed reserved (because it is a Google trademark), and has never been available for registration. Looks like the registrar did not correctly display it as unavailable for registration.

Thank you! I emailed you from my @proton.me email (in case it went to spam).

Pre-reserving domains that have been searched is a common business practice. Some domain brokers implement this at scale IIRC.

Unethical & Predatory? Sure, but it's not illegal.

GoDaddy did this. Good domains registrars don't.

They didn’t claim it was illegal? It makes it less economical for someone to hold a domain they aren’t planning to use for 20 years. The squatting just gets more expensive.

Yes it’s a common business practice. Doesn’t mean google has to encourage that industry.

I just love the concept of a “premium” database entry. Domain registries are such a goddamn rent seeking middleman scam.

It's to stop squatters from buying 10000 common word domain names and trying to sell them for crazy amounts.

... by letting the registry sell them for crazy amounts instead, and letting them continue to overcharge the owner on an ongoing basis.

So, following the logic, the NYC should charge crazy extra tax on properties to 10x the prices to make the market, hm, more affordable?

Clearly it’s become much more than just that.

i HaVE nO cHoIcE bUt To ReNt SeEk MySeLf.

Yep it’s nonsense and a complete racket. It should just be first come first serve, for the initial registration and for lapsed renewals. Like it used to be (forever ago, but still).

Worked at a registrar before. This is the standard for how a lot of registries work.

The only thing that doesn’t seem great is that in the invoice shared by OP, the domain isn’t designated clearly as a premium.

This is straight up rent seeking behavior, and despicable.

Aaaaand the truth comes out.

The story is actually more nuanced than your knee-jerk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33928717

That post links to a query for a non-premium domain name. Of course forum.dev is more valuable than asdfggg.dev. If you query a premium domain name that is available for registration (e.g. money.dev), you'll see that the listed price is higher than $12/yr.

The "more" is surely whether they're premium or not, which is what Op was responding to.

I was bitten by this too. Why doesn't your team include the renewal price for domains in the 30-day autorenew notices? This whole class of problem would disappear if you did.

To be clear, I work on Google Registry, not Google Domains. I don't particularly know anything about Google Domains other than basic generic information that applies to all domain name registrars. I can't even say that I know what most parts of the Google Domains UI even look like, let alone the 'why' behind them.

The renewal fee is on the domain management panel.

Not the question. Why is the information behind several clicks in a settings panel and not in the renewal notice?

No you price some domains higher because you can and you want to make more money.

This is why I always purchase my domains for ten years up front, and top it up to ten again each year after.

This way if the renewal fee increases beyond what I’m willing to pay after I’ve already got infrastructure running on the domain, I have a whole decade to migrate to a better (cheaper) name.

$120 is a larger investment than $12 which means I buy fewer domains overall, but the stability benefits are worth it for me.

I do the same for anything I consider important, but max out at 9 years. If you want to transfer to another registrar you need to be able to add 1 year. That means transferring a domain that has over 9 years remaining can fail because of the 10 year max. If you get in a dispute with your current registrar you'll want to be able to transfer to another one without waiting to get under the 9 year mark.

That’s a great tip!

This is a really good idea. Never thought of it via the cost high now so think well before buying angle. I own more 100+ domains and every year, I had to let go because they no longer sound cool.

I didn't realize registrars let you buy for 10 years. The best I have seen are discounted pricing for 2-years.

A lot of registrars will let you "renew" at any time, even months/years before the expiration date (and "renewing" a domain basically just means adding a year).

> I didn't realize registrars let you buy for 10 years. The best I have seen are discounted pricing for 2-years.

I only have experience with Namecheap. They typically only offer discounted pricing for the first year, but you can pre-purchase renewals at the full price for several years (maybe up to 10, haven’t looked recently)

Even for bargain prices I’m glad I don’t own 100 domains! That’s probably more than I spend on delivery fees for tangible goods in a year.

LOL! Early on I had some unexpected luck selling some of my domains for low-ish thousand of dollars. That encouraged me to kinda just buy domains when I have an idea or stumble on a thing that I believe I might do some day or let someone do some day.

For example, I sold hackathon.co for good money (I even gave them the GSuite at that time). I also sold html5.in to Microsoft sub $10,000 (via a broker, unfortunately, which I realized way later) still for a pretty good sum. I have also sold quite a few more for low $100s.

And I donated thus.org to a Texas university for zero dollar and gave them the GSuite too. I'm happy that an educational institute is using it and the domain is alive.

I own nsfw.in, which was "a link shortener to warn you that it might not be Safe before opening". I got lazy and is on sale and I keep getting regular emails/contacts to buy it.

>"This is why I always purchase my domains for ten years up front, and top it up to ten again each year after."

I do exactly the same. I also always stick to com. I leave "coolness" factor to other parts of the domain.

I find only ".com" names cool.

All other are cheap, junk or designed to extort.

I really like my .net names, but since the recent drama... I think I just hate dns in general.

I think the coolest TLDs are .edu, .org, .gov, and .com, in that order, because that’s ordered by likelihood the content (not design) will be good, knowing nothing else about the website.

Nah, .net and .org are the coolest.

name.info/.dev and the like are pretty cool for personal pages though. People always design them really well because it's about them personally.

that's cute, not like they cant hit you with extra "unforeseen" charge and hold domain for ransom until you pay up, or just drop you as a customer based on some arbitrary reason, refunding full 10 years and putting domain for an auction

you have just as much real control over domain as you have over entire DNS — zilch and a half — it all holds on trust and good faith, until greed comes into play

Is this for real and you are not kidding? Can you please share examples/incidents?

namecheap dropped entire population of russia and belorussia as customers

https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/1/22956581/russia-ukraine-na...

sure, an extraordinary example, but what stops anyone from wording their ToS ever so slightly vague, that any domain is held by a shoestring

Check out section 2.10(c) of the registry agreement for .dev [1]. If you registered the domain when it was a non-premium domain, and you haven't agreed to a price increase, you might have a valid complaint with ICANN.

> The parties acknowledge that the purpose of this Section 2.10(c) is to prohibit abusive and/or discriminatory Renewal Pricing practices imposed by Registry Operator without the written consent of the applicable registrant at the time of the initial registration of the domain and this Section 2.10(c) will be interpreted broadly to prohibit such practices.

I've been watching for it to happen to someone for years because I own a domain that would be at risk of getting reclassified as premium if it were allowed. I've been monitoring the same word as my domain on 300+ TLDs for about 2 years. I've never seen one get reclassified as premium without being dropped first.

Are you positive yours wasn't classified as premium with a huge discount for the first year?

I think the new TLDs would do much better if they'd quit with the pricing games and strengthen registrant rights instead. As a registrant, I want predictability and minimal risk when I register a domain. The only way to get that right now is to stick with .com AFAIK. It's too bad because I'm a huge fan of using 'somecompany.tech' plus 'somecompanytech.com', but, in my opinion, most of the new TLDs are too risky to depend on.

I'm really interested in any updates you would have because I always considered .app and .dev to be "safe" domains in the sense that I thought Google would always have transparent, uniform, predictable pricing without any exorbitant increases.

1. https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/registry-agreements/dev/d...

> Once again, I realized that it is foolish to trust Google on any matter. Thank you, Google.

Yep, that is a great takeaway. Another important example is GCP pricing, and their habit of killing off products and services as fast as they build them.

What Google is doing or charging today is not a reliable indicator of what they will be doing or charging tomorrow. AWS may have its own problems, but at least they don't do much bait-and-switch pricing, and they tend to support services for a while after they launch them.

Except that OP is full of it.

Yes, marking domains as "Premium" is very common, it's not just Google that does it.

I registered a .sbs domain for a couple dollars the first year, and they want $200-300/yr from me now.

Can you transfer it to a less greedy registrar? Or is it always a TLD-wide issue?

This is highway robbery.. maybe even worse than being robbed.

Imagine if your mobile phone plan rate could vary on a floating basis year by year depending on how "premium" the carrier decides your number is. Gross.

Chinese mobile carriers used to (and may still) do exactly this. Numbers with multiple 8’s were more valuable because 8 is lucky, whereas a single 4 (a homophone for “death”) meant a reasonable discount.

It's also a thing with US-based numbers, e.g. repeating digits. However, the pricing not variable year over year, and may even be only a one-time fee if at all. Once you are assigned the number, it's yours and the annual reservation price doesn't change significantly.

This instance is straight up Google acting in bad faith with the bait and switch. Are they really that desperate to make a few extra bucks? What PM decided this was a good idea?

Day by day, Big-G is burning every ounce of public goodwill they ever had, speedily on their way to sinking down to FB Meta territory.

I'm pretty sure it's TLD-wide basically all/most of the time.

It's usually a choose your own frontend registrar for the TLD. Whether that is Gandi, Namecheap, Google Domains, Cloudflare, etc.

But the TLDs fix the price underneath, registrars are just resellers.

One can argue scalpers expecting 3000 for a domain means the domain is premium-enough to be worth that renewal.

ICANN could have just prohibited registrars from doing this, but it seems like the neo-TLD thing is just a cash grab for them so they probably don't mind.

I don’t exactly like it, but isn’t it an effective measure to reduce scalping? So many .com domains are owned by entities who bought piles of dictionary words just to slap them on a SEO ads page, only willing to part with them for exorbitant prices. What better means are there to fight these people who insert themselves into the internet namespace to siphon money while providing zero value?

Unless the money goes to help the Internet somehow, it is still going to scalpers, but only a few billionaires instead of anyone who is willing to speculate.

I would rather pay a once off high price to acquire a domain than randomly have a domain I have owned for some time get marked as premium and now the price is high every year and I can’t move it around anymore either.

Predatory, abusive price increases are forbidden by section 2.10(c) of the baseline registry agreement. It applies to pretty much all of the new gTLDs. It's no different for .sbs [1].

From what I've seen, people typically tend to be confused about what they bought when you see threads like this. In the past several years I've never seen anyone produce documentation or screenshots that show they registered a non-premium domain that was reclassified as premium while they had it registered.

1. https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/registry-agreements/sbs/s...

My lastname.sbs was a dollar or two for 1st year. $200 2nd year. Understandable, but still its bad. Good thing I didn't use it for something big, being lazy paid.

I hate the practice, it’s scummy behaviour.

One of my domains got hit by it and now I can’t even move it because it’s market as premium.

I've never heard of .sbs. What does it mean? In junior high after P.E. class we would joke that we had SBS - sweaty ball syndrome - that acronym has always stuck with my friends.

"Special Broadcasting Service", belongs to the "Special Broadcasting Service Corporation"

Hah. Wow. At this point I feel like we should just do away with new TLDs altogether and let anyone register any domain with any ending they want, if it's available. The idea that you can buy a TLD and then dole out domains if you have enough capital just seems antithetical to the ideal of an open internet. Unless you're a country, I guess.

As someone who is all in on .app and .dev, wtf. I build a brand using these domain names and Google is going to sell them to the highest bidder??

You bought a short-term lease on the domain names.

Why should any TLDs at all, like .dev and .app, be owned by Google?

They shouldn’t be owned by any or even exist at all. The entire new TLD ecosystem was a disgusting cash grab.

Not sure about Should but, with enough money you can make your own TLD. G "just" paid some big bucks to "own" them.

This is pretty low behavior. I've registered a few .dev names over the years, I'll let them lapse. I'll stick to .com.

What did you pay for the first year? $12 or $850?

They paid $850 for the first year.

To clarify, they paid a premium price for the first year. Had they been paying in USD it would be the same initial price as the renewal price, but apparently they're paying in Turkish lira so exchange rate changes come into play. What I know for sure is that, from the registry side, the wholesale USD-denominated premium price has remained consistent over the length of the registration.

Please don't call TLDs domain extensions.

Actually « extension » is more specific than TLD. .co.uk is a sold extension but it’s not a TLD, even though it works as what we usually call a TLD.

Maybe if you said "more general", but TLD is definitely "more specific" (which is why co.uk is not considered a TLD).

Referring to TLDs as extensions is a telltale sign of someone who is semi-technically literate enough to have heard of file extensions but not enough to know why it's incorrect when talking about domains, nor that it outs them by making them sound silly.

> domain extensions like .dev and .app are owned by Google

Why are domain extensions like .dev and .app owned by Google?

Because ICANN will give a gTLD to anyone who pays them enough.

Any gTLD whatsoever owned by some for profit corporation is not acceptable.

You're about a decade late. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain#New_t...

.com has been run by Verisign since before the gTLD nonsense

ICANN allows anyone to create a domain. You need to pay a bunch of fees to register it and service it but it is not that much. In this case I believe Google created these domains for internal tools and they have owned them ever since.

You also need a time machine as they're not currently accepting applications.

according to tld-list you can renew .dev domains on porkbun for $10.87.

There are price tiers for different domains. If a domain has been classified in a premium tier, then its create and/or renew price is significantly higher.

Price tiers are generally controlled by the registry (Google Registry, in this case.)

This is going to happen to .tv too: sometime in January 2023 GoDaddy Registry, which just took over the .tv tld from Verisign, is adding premium price tiers when no such tiering had already existed.

Isn't .tv a country code TLD?

Yes, a registry just manages TLDs. The registry Verisign, for example, manages .com, but it's not the owner.

In this case, Tuvalu owns .tv and they contracted with GoDaddy Registry to manage it [0].

It can be confusing because the lines are blurring. For example, Google has considerable vertical integration: they operate a registry, a registrar, and they own a few TLDs too.

[0] https://registry.godaddy/blog/dottv-contract-signing-release

Bet you can’t move premium domains there.

You can move premium domains there, you'll just pay the appropriate price for them.

Google currently says .dev domains are $12 per year with no fine print about renewals.

https://domains.google.com/registrar/search?searchTerm=asdfg...

I think there's more to the story here.

They classify some domains as "premium" and raise the price to make squatting (and ownership) more painful.

the "more" is that it depends on the actual term.

For example, setting.dev is $180/yr https://domains.google.com/registrar/search?searchTerm=setti...

It is likely that there was no premium pricing in the beginning. It was established after the initial lease

> It is likely that there was no premium pricing in the beginning. It was established after the initial lease

The premium pricing was there in the beginning. We have never increased the price of a single domain name after it was initially registered.

I remember my desired domain being premium at launch. What happened might’ve been the premium list was expanded, but it’s bad to apply that list change to renewals that previously weren’t considered premium.

I can't believe asdfggg.dev is still available - I'm taking that!

Ah, crap, taking sdfghhh.dev then.

How you know my password bro?!

Congratulations on your bargain $12 domain... although you'll be faced with the difficult decision of paying google $850 next year after you've invested in the name building up a site and a reputation on that domain.

No they won’t.

Totally worth it!

Google charged me a couple hundred to renew a .dev domain. I was under the impression that I was paying a premium to register the domain a few days early and that the renewal price would be lower. I was mistaken, but, the renewal price was behind a few clicks in a settings menu. My fault, but I still wanted a refund.

After weeks of going back and forth with Google support I ended up initiating a chargeback.. They locked me out of my account and I lost access to all of the domains tied to it.

It took weeks to unravel the whole thing.

If Google would make the renewal prices available in the 30-day renewal emails this class of problem would go away. Omitting the price is a choice.

I mean, with the reputation that Google has in regards to customer support, you were definitely whacking the beehive by doing a chargeback to them. Wish it wasn’t this way, though.

I hadn't had any experience with Google support before this. I was spoiled by Apple and Amazon.

I mean. I won so..

This is pretty disgusting on Google's part if true. It sounds like they're only letting people rent domains then acting like a landlord who increases rent to match "market rates" when you renew the lease. Hopefully this is some sort of error, but somehow I doubt it.

Isn't it how every market works?

The DNS namespace is global and shared. There's only one, really; I don't know if it is the best place for a [free] "market", as it isn't really free. Within reason, I can't start a competing DNS. The best I can do is choose another name … and still pray the price jacking doesn't happen.

The incentives here are perverse: the registry knows that changing domain names has a high switching cost; we should not have the "market" dynamics encouraging them to start, effectively, extorting domain owners. "That web presence you built up? It would be a shame if anything were to happen to it…"

I actually thought there were ICANN rules against this sort of thing.

Imagine you’d have to pay $850 next year to keep your phone number.

Not everything is rented.

Yes, which is why markets need a land value tax paid out to the public.

What's being produced and who are the market actors here?

How does Google "own" this "market"?

Almost every registry does it (Google is one of them).

What other registry does this? I've never heard of this behavior before.

Typically the registry won't arbitrarily increase the renewal price of specific domains during a period of time where the domain is owned by the same individual. That seems like an incredibly scummy practice.

Domain names aren't something you can just "move out" of like housing if your landlord decides to increase the price one year by over 6000%. They represent identity, discoverability and trust. By arbitrarily increasing the renewal price like this, the registry is constructively repossessing your online identity. It's the same as if they suddenly took your domain from you and put it up for auction for their own benefit.

Registrars (not registries) can get away with increasing their prices, but that's different because you can always switch registrars to one that charges a lower markup over the registry. You can't switch registries without switching your domain name entirely.

> like housing

… uh, it's not even possible to move out of that that easily, either. (Although a 6000% increase would certainly do it.) I think landlords are (also?) very much aware of switching costs in their yearly price uppings.

Nsmecheap does with these new domains like .party etc. Not sure who is responsible for it, namecheap or whoever runs these new TLDs

Namecheap does it, happened to one of my domains with them and now I can’t move it.

Amazon and Cloudflare does not as far as I know.

This game is as old as domains, or at least I knew it since 2005s.

.sbs registry has done it with my domain in 2021.

.xyz has done it another one of my domain few years ago.

None of my regular old tld domains, and cctld domains experienced it.

-footnote- I used to buy domains for my own use only, my family names & stuff, never for resale or business or anything.

GoDaddy never did this to me, I used to own a single keyword domain name which would definitely be considered "premium" and never paid more than ~$10 in renewal fees per year. GoDaddy has plenty of problems, but they never shook me down on domain renewals. I wouldn't expect it from Google, but I guess I'm just naive.

Google has a monopoly on the .dev domain. GoDaddy doesn't have a monopoly on .com, .biz, .net, etc.

This is an apples to oranges comparison.

Every TLD is operated by a registry that has a monopoly over that TLD. .dev's registry is Google. .com and .net's registry is Verisign.

GoDaddy is a registrar which resells domains from the registries. You can register .dev domains on GoDaddy just like you can register .com and .net domains.

The bulk of the registration fee goes to the registry. What keeps .com and .net prices reasonable is not that there's no monopoly - Verisign totally has a monopoly - but that Verisign's registry agreement with ICANN forbids this kind of pricing shenanigans whereas Google's registry agreement for .dev doesn't. But I'm sure that when Verisign's registry agreement is up for renewal they will try to renegotiate this.

GoDaddy is a registrar (facilitator of domain purchases), not a registry (owner of a TLD).

For those who do not remember, Google did an auction for .dev domains when it was first released in 2019. I think it was something like that every week the price was halved until it reached the $12/year.

I bought a .dev domain from Google, when the auction was at $200/year. Every renewal period has been $100/year. If there is a way to decrease it to $12/year, that would be great.

EDIT: Looking at other comments on this thread, looks like that Google is dynamically price adjusting renewal costs? I am sad that yet another pillar of the original free internet seems to be falling even further pray to capitalism.

What is that pillar? Google was never a pillar of free Internet.

Cheap DNS registration, and being able to keep it at the same price.

What I am wondering right now is if there is any regulation about buying a domain, building a popular product on top of it, and then having your registrar keep increasing the renewal cost. (Something that I never considered, but now looks possible)

Domain names used to be cheap and accessible to everyone. Now DNS makes me wish Tor would replace this rotten web with hidden services.

They price some names as premium and charge a specific amount for them, they seem to have a number of different tiers.

I bought a Premium domain from them during the auction, and still pay for it. They've always been very clear about the renewal cost both before I bought it in the auction and every year on renewal.

My outrageous renewal price for a .dev only kicked in after I failed to renew it before expiration because I could not find the right website to login to (whois showed both tucows and hover but the site was actually enom).

topic-starter clearly mentioned that the domain was purchased one year ago, not in 2019.

That doesn't sound anything like an auction...

Price decreases as time passes? It is called an Dutch auction. [1]

The most famous example I can think of is the flower auction/Amsterdam clock.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAdmzyKagvE

It's a Dutch auction.

It irritates me when people talk about "owning your own domain". This is great example of how "having" a domain does not at all match up with ownership as we commonly know it...

You can never truly own anything. Even a hut in the forest will have property and municipal taxes attached to it. With domains it's really about who you are "renting" it from. For example many country TLDs are run by government-affiliated organizations so you can feel pretty safe that you can at least get a fair treatment in any dispute. With generic TLDs I'd generally try to stay away for serious projects.

you can truly own bitcoin.

Not really, because a consensus may be reached by others that your Bitcoins will be blacklisted.

HN often suggests having your own domain so you own your presence (instead of having a gmail.com address or a blog on medium.com). So it's a lost cause?

.com .org and .net are all very safe. If a registrar starts screwing you over you can switch, and the actual governing entities don't play these kinds of games.

They are not "very safe"

.org was very nearly stolen by its operators.

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/org-domain-registry-sale-...

The more traditional your TLD the less the risk but there is currently no option with 0 risk. At the same time not being able to reach 0 risk doesn't mean pursuing less risk is just a lost cause.

I mean, I've got 2ish domains for self hosted stuff, 3 for public projects – they're rentals that I get enough value from to be worth it, and I'd recommend having a domain to a lot of people who don't currently have one. But they're rentals, and I think it's important to remain clearsighted about it.

Stick to .com domains

Or country domains of your own country.

Perhaps a better solution would be owning your own TLD?

If you can burn a cool $185k into brand awareness...

You can effectively own .com and a few other domains because you can swap registers and sue for control if someone else fucks up. Without that you are just at the mercy of the monopoly.

.com is operated by just a single registry, Verisign, which has just as much of a monopoly over .com as Google has over .dev.

The difference is that Verisign's registry agreement with ICANN prohibits this kind of pricing shenanigans whereas Google's does not. Expect Verisign to try to renegotiate this when their agreement is up for renewal.

Verisign’s role is that of registry operator which is different from that if a domain name registrar.

It’s a very different relationship with ICANN and domain name owners and has basically zero leverage to set prices beyond what it costs them to operate the service and have some reasonable profit.

when is the agreement up? We really ought to tell ICANN to not do that. There should be domains that can owned for every as long as we pay the fee.

Is there a mailing list to sign up for to be notified of ICANN events like these renewal agreements?

Never thought about it, but can you sue from outside of the US ?

Feels to me like it would be a lost cause depending on where you are.

All TLDs have a single registry.

I'm sorry but this is a non-story. gTLDs have been working this way since before Google got into gTLDs. Don't get me wrong, they're making bank on this stuff; but frankly, they're just beating domain scalpers to the punch. Compared to what domain scalpers try to charge... $850 just isn't much.

If this is the first time people on Hacker News are hearing about premium domains, gTLDs and asymmetric renewal prices, color me shocked. There are even ccTLDs that have asymmetric renewals.

> they're just beating domain scalpers to the punch

Not quite the same punch. A domain scalper can only demand a premium price once (when they sell/transfer it to you.) But, a registry may charge you a premium price every single year.

That's why I only own .com domains. net and org are probably fine too. You're free to move the domain you own to a different registrar at any time (I'm all on cloudflare now which has no markup, it's great).

Google runs the .dev gTLD but isn’t the only registrar. Google lists the many other .dev registrars here: https://www.registry.google/register-a-domain/

Presumably you can freely move your .dev domains between those registrars?

So if you register a .dev with say Gandi, will Google be able to pull these shenanigans on you, or do they have to honour the standard renewal price?

Yes, they can pull the shenanigans.

Registries (like Google for .dev, Verisign for .com/.net) set the pricing for domains under their TLDs. Registrars like Gandi add just a very slim markup.

If I'm reading the Gandi cart right to renew "fly.dev", yes they can pull these shenanigans. It's showing $780 to renew. I can't tell if that's one year or not.

How much is Gandi’s markup? I’d bet it’s the same couple of dollars they charge for regular domains. I suspect Google is pocketing 99% of that price hike.

Presumably fly will be keeping `fly.dev` around? Perhaps you're in a good place to make a fuss about this given your commercial usage of a "cool" .dev domain.

I have some .dev with namecheap, and it's showing me $16.98 to add a new year for all of the ones I have, and I can go up to 9 years (only 8 for one of them interestingly), so I don't think this is all .dev domains, likely just premium ones.

I agree that the custom TLDs should be used with care (a lot are owned by single registrars, such as name.com owning a TON of them) but some ccTLDs can also be trusted, as well as .eu . I'd say .org is technically the most trustworthy until isoc try to pull that shit where they try to sell it to a private equity firm again.

…”but I have been the owner of hundreds of domains for almost 20 years and I have never faced anything like this before.”

Well fuck you and your squatting and how does it feel?

I don’t think that’s fair.

Why not? A major reason that premium domains even exist is because the second-hand market for squatted domains meant that some domain names have sold for literal millions of dollars; and otherwise that domain is sitting as a dummy advertiser page trying to sell itself.

Old registries weren't able to participate in that process themselves without also owning a registrar that participated in the same competition; but, a few decades of hindsight means the newer TLDs are going after potential earnings that Verisign never got a chance to have.

Do you think that a regular developer pays thousands of dollars every year to prolong hundreds of domains?

To confused and/or alarmed people: if you don’t have a premium domain (like forum.dev here) you’re fine. Anyone who has researched domain registration for five minutes probably has realized <common-english-word>.tld usually costs a lot more. They’re usually clearly marked from initial registration, though.

Why would you build value into something that can be so arbitrarily changed though? Let's say I build my company "beyondfoobar" to the #1 company on the planet, and therefor make my website beyondfoobar.dev extremely valuable. Why would I trust that Google won't jack the rates on that domain since it's now premium? Like it's said above Google has demonstrated that they deserve zero trust, and when building value into a domain you have registered, you kind of want to trust the registrar and tld owner. My company publishes our phone number, and we don't have to worry about how much we pay for our phone number each year based on 'popularity' metrics. We expect the same for our domain name.

Verisign is entirely able to change the price of .com domains if they want, as far as I understand it.

They just did. Due to their contract with ICANN, it is a political, negotiated process. The newer gTLD registries have a freer hand.

Edit: "contact" to "contract"

> Due to their contact with ICANN

All registries operate with ICANN. It's probably more due to their age and the contracts they have with ICANN given that age and ubiquity.

edit: nit: all registries that operate within the shared DNS the majority of the internet operates under

You can buy an IP address and keep it forever.

According to the author's previous tweets, this domain wasn't premium when he purchased. Google decided to make it premium AFTER purchasing.

The author is confused

As an early fan of Google's Cloud Build service I was overly enthusiastic when I discovered `cloud.build` was available and quickly set about registering it.

After a few years of paying the £500+ annual renewal due to its Premium domain status, my enthusiasm has waned somewhat...

I've personally learnt long ago that accidental premium snipes don't last. If it looks like premium it will be premium. Get a not-desirable-word.tld and acquire a premium one if your endeavour ends up very successful.

The problem is Google didn't make this domain premium until after he had built up a brand around it.

Yeah, no you are not safe. They can mark your domain as premium after you got it and they realise it’s valuable because you made it valuable.

I don't know it has become out of fashion these days but as an Internet veteran-ish (started Internet journey late in the 90s), I believe one should get a .com domain. This is especially true when you are going to run a business and grow it.

Get a .com domain, preferably no-hyphen, and no_underscore.

If you have something like mydomainis.cool, then try to get mydomainiscool.com too. You can redirect mydomainiscool.com to mydomainis.cool.

As someone who started using the Internet in the early 90s, I still unconsciously rate .net, .com, and .org (as well as some associated ccTLDs) as more reputable than all the other .randomletters domains that seem to show up in search results these days; probably because the majority of sites I see in the latter are SEO spam.

Following your rules, in 2022, you're just left with made up words for .com domains.

Not exactly https://sive.rs/com

underscores aren't valid in dns

.com is a US TLD, for better or for worse. US got the original "cool" TLD names.

That's why I only use .com (strength in numbers, historical precedent) or the appropriate country-level domain so local politics and laws can get involved if need be.

Most of the even half usable pronouns.com domains are long gone. Usually squatted, sometimes actually used. But gone nonetheless. That’s why people try to use other tld. Though I personally picked .net for my personal/name domain as .com is squatted.

Bait and switch. It is indeed foolish to trust Google. I moved my .com domains to other providers without waiting for Google's switch. The only thing I trust about Google is their intention to deceive in future.

A Google employee is in here saying that they've never raised the price on any registered domain in their decade of existence. So far it seems to be a credible story so I'd wait for further development. Also the OP claims to own hundreds of domains, so this "premium" pricing seems quite relevant to the discussion of squatting.

I think this is fine. Too many good domains are held by squatters. Domains should be put to productive use, not speculation. I don't know what forum.dev is used for, but when I visit it, I get a Cloud Flare error page.

Yes, squatting should be mitigated and is worth some collateral damage. OP mentions having owned “hundreds of domains” and the domain in question appears unused, so my sympathies are… let’s say low. It’s a widespread problem that that squatters can sit on good domains for years, at a very low cost, waiting to extort someone who wants to use it for something productive. That could potentially be fixed with higher fees for popular words and names. Changing the price at renewal time is deeply problematic though, since it increases the surface area for extortion (by a different party).

However, why should Google or Verisign make money from selling names? Other than operational costs, it would be better to auction off domains fairly to extinguish the squatters and use the surplus for non-profit internet infrastructure work.

I don't think Google is really making money here. The amount of money they collect for the registration is surely a rounding error to Google. Rather, the high price must be to deter squatters.

Oh boy. I own a $98/yr {firstname}.dev domain, and can renew for up to 9 years at a time. Now I have to debate whether I should renew next year at whatever price it happens to be, or lock in 9 years now at $98/yr to fend off the risk of google potentially price-gouging it.

Bail now. You think they won't raise it again after 9 years?

Or buy a domain with a tld not owned by Google and tell them to jog on

I believe Google is pretty transparent if you use Google Domains. For example if it's a premium domain it'll have the price per year, and a different price per year if it changes. Quick example:

trouble.dev is $180/yr... meaning it's going to be $180 each year to renew

trouble.art is $10,764 for the first year, and then $36/yr for renewals.

There's plenty of non-premium .dev domains that are $12/yr.

I do agree that charging premiums every year is a shitty move, but I don't think they're being overtly shady about it.

According to the author, they changed it to premium after the fact:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33928401

I'm not sure that's the case. I assumed the author bought the domain initially for $850, thinking that at renewal it would go down to $12/yr, like most .com, .net, .org, etc. do, but was surprised to find out that the .dev premium domains charge the higher fee every year.

I doubt forum.dev would have ever been $12/yr. Most single word .dev domains are marked as premium and vary from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars annually. I know because I had speak.dev at one point and it was $350/yr and renewal was $350/yr as well.

Now if by some chance they initially paid $12/yr for it and now it's $850, then that is not ok and means that any .dev domain is at risk of dynamic pricing, which I feel like would kill the whole TLD forever for me.

I got bitten by this also. I registered a .dev domain thinking the ~$200 price tag was one-time only during the initial bidding phase when the registrar was opening. However it turns out that is a yearly renewal. I think it's a bit scumbag but I also like the domain so I guess they are just charging what people can afford.

.sexy increased their price from $25 to $2500. For now, domains registered at the old price can continue to renew at the old price. But they could easily cut that off at any time.

I guess https://privacy.sexy/ (featured in HN) might end up changing domain, if this happens... that's the only useful .sexy domain I know

gTLDs are a lovely combination of vanity and cashgrabs.

They cost what at the least 200k a year to run. And then just think how many times you seem actually used.

Never heard of that tld, but "thats.sexy" is available for the bargain price of $250,000! What a world.

> Once again, I realized that it is foolish to trust Google on any matter.

We can make this into a proverb at this point.

A century from now the verb “google” won’t mean “to search,” it’ll mean “to cock something up so badly no one trusts you ever again.”

In my work team everyone universally calls a product getting axed "getting Googled", and there's no confusion on meaning. I suspect as Google loses market share to other search engines over the next few decades, we'll start to see a real mix up of what the word "to Google" means.

How does this work for .com? Can I just get extorted for more money once my business becomes successful?

Legacy is bit different place. There would be enough players hitting hard in various ways both ICANN and Verising running it that it won't happen.

Technically they could, but it wouldn't end up well. Probably even nation states would have a word or piles of paper.

gTLDs on other hand are owned by likes of Google so they can do just about anything.

No, because for .com there is a free market and you can take your domain to another registrar.

Google owns and operates these tlds and is effectively a monopoly

Afaik, other registrars service the .dev TLD as well. The problem is that Google is the registry, and it seems that their contract with ICANN lets them charge more for premium domains and mark domains as premium as they see fit; but I didn't look up the contract to check.

With .com, the contract between Verisign and ICANN specifies a maxium price and that price descrimination is not allowed.

Edit: I found the gTLD base agreement[1], but didn't go looking further. It says, the registry needs to charge everyone the same price unless the registrant agreed to higher renewal pricing at the time of initial registration. I didn't look to see if there is any more specific agreement for .dev. But it seems like if this wasn't disclosed and explicitly agreed to during registration, the registry is in the wrong. However, a lot of people agree to things without paying attention. Would be good to check original paperwork and then see about how to get the registry's attention.

[1] https://newgtlds.icann.org/sites/default/files/agreements/ag...

How is Verisign any less of a monopoly than Google?

If you transferred to a different registrar do they have to follow Google's pricing structure for existing domains? Would that not be price fixing?

Google owns those TLDs. they have no incentive or even any reason to allow anyone else to co-manage those TLDs.

edit: as seen below, I'm wrong

Sounds a lot like he is just lying. Inflation is in play here and that's it

It's such an odd valuation. It's neither high enough to reflect imputed exclusivity which would put in $100,000 class nor low enough to reflect some real world cost.

It appears purpose designed to exclude only the low end indie and freemium developer.

When I've looked at domain names e.g. on Namecheap, you often see a much higher cost for the first year for premium domains, presumably because someone is squatting it, but then it usually says "renews at $8.95" (for example) which I always took to be because the registrar is just acting as a registrar and once you own it, treats all domains the same.

If the information in this post is correct, it looks like google is just shaking down people who registered domains they control

Every registrar does this. Premium names get premium fees, either in initial payment, or for the renewals. Most likely the author just didn't know that renewals can be significantly more costly when they bought the domain.

I suppose you could argue that its an anti-squatter price. Not very much for commercial use. A little pricey for hobbyist use but also achievable. Enough that you can't easily speculate on dozens of domains.

To what end, I wonder? It's not like domain names cost much money to issue.

> To what end, I wonder?

Increase revenue.

> It's not like domain names cost much money to issue.

You charge what the market will pay, not how much it costs to produce.

One way to screw them back is trademark law

poison pill the domain

file a trademark asap while you still have the domain, then when you lose access, sue them to prevent them from selling it to anyone else

(ideally bundle this with everyone else affected by this sort of price change)

(I'm not a lawyer)

...the domain in question is forum.dev

You can always put your site behind a Handshake[1] or ENS[2] + Limo[3] setup.

[1] https://handshake.org/

[2] https://ens.domains/

[3] https://eth.limo/

We should not tolerate this rampant monopoly based rent seeking.

Even if there is an argument to be made about supply and demand on names... at least it should be easier to agree that private entities shouldn't be allowed to profit from it; distinct from charging a reasonable service fee.

only .com .org and .net for me.

whatever happened to Google's Don't be evil? $850 for a .dev domain?

I think it's due to the domain name. They charge a premium for some of them. OP got lucky they didn't charge the premium price from the beginning. I looked at mine and they're still charging $12 for it.

Does anyone want to buy forum.dev for $10.000? I can make it happen for you, just let me get on twitter...

And my fee is morally justified. Finding compensation for a guy that was the victim of an injustice.

Am I an hero? Just doing the best I can.

I learnt this lesson early with another tld (and that wasn’t even this steep a raise). Since then I decided to keep my personal domain as .net since.com wasn’t available.

I noticed a similar thing using enom, but the high price only came into play if you let the domain expire before renewing it.

I buy all of my domains from Namecheap. I'm not 100% how TLDs work or who owns them or whatever... but just to be safe, I bought another 8 years of my .dev email address. Fortunately, the renewal rate was something like $17/yr. Jusr posting this in case anyone else is concerned about renewal prices on Namecheap; they appear to be stable, and you can still buy .dev domains from them.

They lost several k$/sec yesterday with the ads downtime and are now trying to make the losses back.

At this point, even blockchain-based names command higher trust than Google.

Doesn't this pretty much fulfill the requirement for counting as racketeering?

EDIT: Realized racketering isn't the right term here I think but I don't remember the right term and need to go do bed.

Guessing you mean rent-seeking, and I'd argue yes.

Just high enough to be a total bullsh*t scam, just low enough that it'd be easier and cheaper to pay them instead of sue.

Easier said then done, but if you choose to sue them over this you have my respect.

We NEED laws against dirty dark pattern business practices like this.

Sue for what?

Bait and switch? I dunno. If retroactive “your domain is now premium, pay up” is legal, it shouldn’t be.

Price gouging.

Antitrust?

Sorry friend, but I don’t think these change after the fact.

If you paid $12 the first year, it would have been labelled as a discount, with the renewal price being listed separately. It’s crappy and misleading, but it’s not retroactive. I sometimes explicitly filter out “discounted” TLDs so I don’t get distracted by listing like this.

Edit: I'm wrong. Many domains say "renews at $xxx", the .dev domains say "retail $xxx" and offer some small discount. I can't see what they renew at.

Original post:

I'm looking through namecheap now, and all the available .dev domain I can find say they renew at (Canadian)$20.37 per year. Can anyone find listed ones that say they renew for way more?

This feels like outright theft. Given that you can’t transfer the domain away (correct?), I think you could argue that it is.

> This feels like outright theft.

Theft of what? You never really 'owned' a domain there in the first place since Google outright owns the TLD and can increase / decrease prices at any time.

It always has been 'rented', meaning you never truly owned it.

What are you paying for when you buy a domain name? Isn't it essentially just a rental for a year? How is this any different than a landlord increasing rent after a rental agreement is up?

It's a bad thing for Google to do, but let's not act like it's illegal.

You're working under an inaccurate mental model of the web...or at least how the web used to be.

The OG model here is one of decentralization. In this model, the registrar (Google) isn't the owner of the domain. They're just a business that deals with the annoying details around registering a domain on your behalf, and you pay them a small fee to do so. Once again, the registrar can't sell or rent you anything, because they don't own anything to sell you. The registrar only sells the service of acting on your behalf.

Premium domains were originally seen as a shitty thing to do, because it put the domain registrars in the business of acting against their customers. Instead of registering a domain on behalf of their customers, they instead would buy the domains for themself, so they could then sell them at huge markup to their customers. Some registrars then took things further and pre-register domains their customers searched for, even if they never had any interest in buying the domain originally. Extra shitty.

The current .dev (or similar) situation once again feels really dirty to people thinking of the web under this traditional mental model. Domains aren't supposed to be just GIVEN to a single company to then charge whatever price they want. The web is supposed to be decentralized, and instead...we're here.

There should be regulations around this for single entity/registrar-owned domains. Otherwise it’s exactly the same as a monopoly. I’m sure Google won’t get away with this for long.

p.s. and no, I sure wouldn’t like my landlord to 70x my rent. Like from say 1,000/mo to 70,000/mo ? That’s like totally cool then right? How about let’s act like it _should_ be illegal, and then make it so.

I would say the expectation is that you're paying for the initial rental and the option to renew at around the same price/year (subject to promotions etc, and reasonable annual increase). Of course, the contract at the time of payment may say otherwise.

Sorry. It's Google registrar service and they own .dev and .app and can increase and decrease prices whenever they want. Just like how Donuts owns .io and has increased renewal prices a while ago. [0]

Don't expect Google to care since they are after your money.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29403773

.io is a country-code TLD that uses Afilias as a backend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io

That a bunch of startups and small companies use a trendy .io suffix to their domain is entirely by the grace of the British Indian Ocean Territory's permissiveness on the matter.

CC-tlds are owned by their affiliated sovereign nation.

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