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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

When .app was launched we saw a sustained 1,000 QPS of domain registrations through the first minute. We literally are not allowed by ICANN to prevent any valid registrations, as we must treat all registrars and registrants equally. Also, how would you do such a thing anyway? How do you possibly know what is a squatter and what is a 'valid' registration when you have basically no information to work off of? And do you really want a world where some domain name registrations are arbitrarily rejected like that? Better to have the situation where if it's available, and you can pay for it, it's yours.

Social Credit by Google.

Surely the next not-sure it's April fools not-sure it's real gApp

Squatters absolutely do. Why do you think Discord and Blizzard provide numbers at the end of your username? It's to provide uniqueness.

Basically every service that gets any traction on the internet whatsoever has a bunch of people running in and getting the tiny or interesting or unique usernames as fast as possible.

Many services like Gmail and Twitter to name just two prevent names to be shorter than X chars.

Releasing usernames is bad for impersonation, so we are stuck.

> 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,

They don’t charge you for Gmail addresses, yes this is true, but there is definitely a thriving aftermarket for people squatting on desirable “OG” email addresses and user names, just as an example -> https://www.playerup.com/accounts/gmailogusername/

Clearly $850/yr is a price people are willing to pay, since there are plenty of great premium names unavailable at these TLDs. Greed or not, people are complaining here about the fact they own hundreds of other names and don’t see these kind of prices, but to me the economics seem pretty straight forward. They just happened to price these domains better than other registrars in my opinion…

That website is surely for spam purposes?

There's definitely an aftermarket for emails I don't disagree, and in some parts of the world of you have a nice phone number you will be called asking to buy it frequently.

In countries where sanctions prevent access you can buy apple, Google, PSN etc accounts on scratch cards. Might be handy for privacy actually but not sure how effective that is or if sign up via VPN just as easy.

Gmail has a state-of-the-art abuse prevention system to precisely avoid account reselling, that leads to hijacking and SPAM.

Domain parking has been and still is a business model for so many people.

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.

Don't forget the time-value of money though. Not paying $XXXX now is worth a lot more than not paying $XXXX decades in the future.

It sounds like OP didn't spot that this was a premium domain and purchased it at a discount.

He says he has 100s of domains so presumably he's savvy to this and theres a dark pattern at play.

That or he's careless and someone has not realised many domains are cheap in the first 1-3 years then priced ludicrously.

It doesn't help that we have someone purportedly from Google trying to gaslight OP and us into thinking there's no way he paid $12 for the first year.

Okay he posted a receipt for the transaction and it was hundreds of dollars. I think they guy doesn't understand exchange rates.

The amount he paid for 1 year is worth about $120 today and then he's somehow dropped an order of magnitude AND forgot about the punishing inflation the Lira has seen.

I think I'd suggest OP is at fault.

> 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?

The registrar earns the delta between their retail price that they charge the end user and our wholesale price that we charge registrars.

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

How is this any different than any other digital asset? They are all, in one way or another, "created out of thin air."

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