No, Google did not hike the price of a .dev domain from $12 to $850

Also from Emir's own tweets we could see that he's part of the reason why there's any wind to the argument that premium pricing is justified -- he owns several hundred domains.

I don’t understand why a registrar would want to eat these costs at all. Just use a third party for currency conversions at the customers expense. If you’re big enough to do it yourself, you should do it as well as financial companies. Being a consenting victim of currency arbitrage is weird.

Most companies that don't update their pricing for FX don't do so because their margins are already huge. Domain names are basically a free resource.

One would think it would be fairly easy to restrict purchases denominated in Turkish Lira to people who reside within Turkey.

Premium domains are classified as premium by registrys. A registry owns a TLD, such as .love[1], and tells the registrars (Namecheap, GoDaddy, Cloudflare, etc) that it's premium either when they try and register it, or they keep an updated text file of them usually. ICANN decides which registrys own which TLDs.

When Namecheap tried to register your domain, they were told by Merchant Law Group LLP[2] that the domain you (the registrant) want is actually premium, and the real cost of it is $1,950. I assume Namecheap simply used the current normal price, and when they find out it's premium, they update the cost.

[1] https://icannwiki.org/.love [2] https://icannwiki.org/Merchant_Law_Group_LLP

While we're on the topic, it might interest you to know that ICANN actually has regulations preventing registrys, such as Verisign (.com, .net, etc) and Merchant Law Group LLP (.love), from changing the price of renewal from normal to premium. This is to prevent something like, a registry letting a registrar let you buy your TLD for $7.99, but then the registry arbitrarily tells the registrar "the domain is now premium and the renewal cost is $2,000."

Normally this would be prevented via ICANN regulations (that registrys agree to, otherwise they lose their TLDs), except there is a stipulation. The registrant (that's you, or whoever is buying the domain), can voluntarily forgo and surrender these rights in a written statement. Coincidentally, all the registrars (Namecheap, GoDaddy, etc) have this written stipulation in their contracts, that you must to agree to in order to be able to purchase a domain. This means that registrys can arbitrarily change an already registered domains status from non-premium to premium.

The real question is why do the registrars do this for the registrys? They are supposed to be separate companies and entities entirely and prevent things like this from happening. I imagine it's because registrys can pick and choose which registrars are able to sell their TLD. So if a registrar refuses to add this in their agreement with you, then the registry simply denies the TLD request by the registrar.

That's extremely frustrating. Unclear if that's the fault of Namecheap or the .love registry (Merchant Law Group LLP[1]), and whether it was intentional deception or just incompetence. In any case, domain registrants deserve better than that.

[1] https://icannwiki.org/.love

I used to love Namecheap but I went to login after not needing to for some time and they had automatically turned on 2FA and they had an old phone number on file which made it impossible to login. I had to contact them to turn it off and spend some time to be able to finally access my account and it left a bad impression. I’ve since started using porkbun and will transfer everything to them. They used to be great but their interface has changed horribly and I just don’t like them anymore or want to use them with all the changes they’ve made.

Did you contact Namecheap? What was their response?

Are there any practical ideas for ways HN can prevent itself from whipping up giant outrage threads based on something false?

As the article mentions:

> It's important to note that registries for country-code TLDs (which is every 2-letter TLD) do not have enforceable registry agreements with ICANN. Instead, they are governed by their respective countries (or similar political entities), which can do as they please. They can sucker you in with a low price and then hold your domain hostage when it gets popular.

The domain in question redirects to an entirely different domain. It doesn't actually seem to be used in any way other than for a quirky name.

Given that the domain has been registered for long enough to need renewal, I think this is just another domainer complaining that their scalper business model isn't working out. He got lucky Google messed up the conversion rate because of runaway inflation of the lira and he got a discount, had he paid in dollars this stunt would've cost him even more.

My five letter first name for some reason was not a premium domain (probably because it's not an English name and someone didn't do their homework) and I pay $12 / year. Of course the name would be snatched up quickly so I did buy it during the early access period when I had to pay $250 or so as an early registration fee.

It was taken by an annoying domainer, he owns several hundred domains and resells then, no?

Google simply captured the domain squatter market.

If it is domain that you are going to use for something that would not be easy to change it is a good idea to not only get it for 10 years, but also every year add another year so that expiration is always 9 to 10 years out.

That way if there ever is a big price increase sufficient to make you switch domains you've got at least 9 years to execute the switch.

Unless the prices go down! You never know.

But if you see some promotional pricing on renewals or transfers, remember that you can add a few years anytime and not just on your registration anniversary. And when you transfer a domain, most of the cases it extends by a year too (although for some very rare ccTLDs that might not be the case I think).

This is especially true if you're paying with a currency that's experiencing high inflation and the price hasn't been adjusted yet. You can get a very good deal, so might as well buy all you can.

Consider using 9 years instead of 10. The reason is that if you want to transfer your domain to another registrar, it will often result in a +1 year bump because a transfer usually acts as an anticipated renew.

If your domain is already expiring in 10 years and you want to transfer out, you're stuck for a year.

ICANN's standard registry agreement for gTLDs does not allow this, as explained in the article:

> This means that Google is only allowed to increase a domain's renewal price if it also increases the renewal price of all other domains. If Google wants to charge more to renew a "premium" domain, the higher price must be clearly and conspicuously disclosed to the registrant at time of initial registration. This prevents Google from holding domains hostage: they can't set a low price and later increase it after your domain becomes popular.

I tried out the test domains mentioned in my blog post and Porkbun does a pretty good job disclosing the renewal price, except for the aftermarket domain where the renewal price is not listed. But at least in this case the renewal price is much lower than the initial price. So yeah, Porkbun looks a lot better than some of the other registrars out there.

Can anyone rate Porkbun vs Gandi?

Why that one

I've come to the conclusion that hackernews is mostly programmers and not sysadmins. This crowd is just not that savvy with these types of things. I could be wrong, but that's the vibe I get. There's always a ton of bad information when infosec comes up.

As someone who worked at a registrar for a few years, it's incredible how opaque the domain name industry is for customers. Even on highly technical communities like HN, people say completely false stuff about domain names, registrars and registries all the time.

Every time I see a post about "xxx registrar scammed me" or "yyy lost my domain" I'm sure the OP has no idea what actually happens, and the top comments will be people saying stupidities because they think they understand something they don't.

It's whatever the registry wants.

Typically, it will be domains that they expect a lot of people would want, like very short domains or domains for common English words.

It looks like the registries are trying to create more demand by making them seem more special then they really are....

.imo isn't a TLD, but if you mean .im, then yes, moving from the Isle of Man's ccTLD to a gTLD was indeed a good move.

If you did that, you would effectively ban domain name ownership from everybody who does not make a lot of money from their domain. Is commercial activity the only thing which should have domain names?

Jumping to a drastic policy position without understanding the basic trade off involved should not be a thing.

Doing so would price most individuals out of owning a domain, unless you tried to have separate pricing for individuals (which is messy).

I'd say for $10 per domain that it actually surpasses the price of Twitter Blue which Musk claims will prevent bots.

> the author writes "If you register your domain in a banana republic because you think the TLD looks cool, and el presidente wants your domain..." with the implication that Spanish speaking countries are (more likely to be) corrupt.

Well, first, that implication is obviously true if the comparison group is English-speaking countries.

Second, the phrase "banana republic" refers to a set of countries that all spoke Spanish...

the reason a country may be corrupt isn't really that relevant if all you care about is a country's likelihood of being corrupt.

According to TFA, $317 was a limited time deal created by Turkish Lira inflation and Google being slow to update prices in Lira.

You might want to learn about currency exchange rates.

now google "turkish lira to USD exchange chart"

This is actually an astonishingly good time to buy products which are manufactured in Turkey for export, if you're a foreign customer.

Is it? Premium domain names have genuine scarcity and $850 is nothing to a company making productive use of it. Better than having them all squatted and resold for tens of thousands.

On other popular registries it would cost you thousands of dollars, or for .com tens of thousands of dollars, as a squatter would have picked it up instantly. By charging a high price for rental, Google ensures that it's unprofitable to squat on it, and legitimate owners get it for much less.

Why is that an issue?