Hacker News Reader

Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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

> 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.

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 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com