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Comment by ralmidani | Hacker News Reader

I checked for cod.ing and they said it was available. I got my hopes up and went to Godaddy. It costs over $38,000. I guess in some ways that’s good because the purchaser would more likely be someone who wants to launch a legit business or project rather than a squatter. But as others have pointed out, this whole thing is a blatant money grab.

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Conspiracy theory here: if you go to a big player like GoDaddy they'll sell their queries and some party will see the domain you want and squat it unless you register right away. Just use the whois command in your terminal.

They claim they don’t but you know they ABSOLUTELY DO

Networksolutions does this, godaddy doesnt.

so does namecheap.

This is the only conspiracy theory I subscribe to as well, and will never be convinced otherwise.

Are you the one person that believes Epstein killed himself?

I remember some claim that whois servers were doing this.

Unlike most conspiracy “theories” which are unfalsifiable, this should be pretty easy to prove or disprove. Just search for some random plausibly appealing domains and check to see if they’re registered 24-72 hours later.

It’s not a particularly difficult or clever test to run, so I’m definitely not the first person to come up with it. It’s the kind of thing that’s big news if true but a non-story if false. The fact that no one has found it to be true suggests to me that it’s not happening.

Fwiw I literally did this and within a few days the domain was registered before I could

Well, fuck.ing costs only $12,999.99/yr.

Not joking I seriously considered snagging that. Reckon I could turn a profit.

The I realised I'd have to deal with the people who'd want to buy it and they are mostly scum.

Sounds like the perfect group of people to take financial advantage of.

That is fine until they make much more money exploiting people than I did exploiting them.

snagg.ing

hope no one is squatt.ing on it

I prefer the term Scalping, it’s much more accurate.

You could always settle for eff.ing, for a mere $116.99/yr.

or f.ing for $129,999/yr

I know one-letter domains are popular, but honestly this doesn't seem worth 10x fuck.ing at least to me

You might settle for squirt.ing ....

Electronic-Frontier-Foundation-ing?

Something I should probably do more of...

…and then sell wooden furniture there :D

https://wiki.lspace.org/Effing_Forest

Not only furniture. Also proper carpentry. Remember the Effing Stairs.

Remember when fuck.yu became fuck.me ?

I remember clearly the irony back then!

Did domains from parts of Yugoslavia have to migrate to Montenegro? :P

clusterfuck.ing though is $27/yr

For phase 9.

Getting it now costs $1.1m/y.

A complete non-brainer for $13k. If you could get it for $13k, you'd already be far too late. I don't see how it's not at least a high 6 figure flip.

I miss the early days of the internet when the playing field was level. You could actually get a really cool/good/interesting domain just by thinking of it first, not by being rich.

There should be some system in place like you can only have X% of domains not being actively used for a legitimate purpose. And if you fall below, you will need to pick Y domains to relinquish or they will be randomly relinquished for you.

Well there are annual registration fees and those add up quickly if you are squatting on 1000's of domains for 10+ years.

Define legitimate. There are plenty of domains that point to simple images.

I'm with you in spirit, but this is a hard problem to solve.

I'd at least define it as "not just parked for profit."

But it's trivial to just put something on these domains like Wikipedia picture of the day or whatnot, and who's to say that's not "valid"? It's just that no one bothers now because they don't need to.

In principle I agree, but I don't really see how it can be solved in a practical way without a lot of collateral damage.

Lots of domains don't necessarily point to anything as obvious as a website for perfectly normal reasons, either.

There isn't remotely any possible way to enforce this. There are thousands of registrars out there and there's no way to know all the domains owned by a single person or company. Even if you solve that problem, now you'd just have domain squatters spinning up shell LLCs.

Also you have no way to properly define "legitimate".

I hate the premium domain concept.

It is worse than that - it costs $38,000 if you pre-register to buy it in December. It costs $1.3 Million if you want to snag it today.

This is beyond a money grab.

It's called a Dutch or descending price auction and it's a commonly used price-setting mechanism.

Damn. I wanted to buy it today for $10 and sell it for $100,000. How dare they take that from me?

> Starting today, you can register .ing domains as part of our Early Access Period (EAP) for an additional one-time fee. This fee decreases according to a daily schedule until December 5

> this whole thing is a blatant money grab.

Well, Google has to diversify away from being a glorified ad agency. And they are becoming so detached from the reality that more and more people are starting to see them as complete scumbags.

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