Even if they have a tiny margin on the domain costs, that means that they are probably a loss-making business. So they plan to just sell to Google, Amazon or Microsoft in the future, and we don't yet know which one of those it's going to be?
Even if they had a small margin, does that mean that there's poor quality support, despite domains being mission-critical to businesses?
Ever since I found out that Cloudflare does not charge any markup on the domains you buy from them, I've decided to buy all my domains from them. They are very transparent with their pricing, and also has a notice about this increase; in their case it will go up from $9.15 to $9.77 -- which seems to check out with the sum of the registry fee plus the ICANN fee.
Namecheap should use some of this new revenue to fix their UI.
Owning more than 10 domains on Namecheap is a burden. Trying to manage more than 50 is an outright headache [1]. I'm nearly to the point where I'm going to transfer all of my domains just to escape the poor management console. I've been giving them this same complaint for awhile [2].
I'm no fan of Godaddy [3], but they really did a good job with bulk management and organization.
Any recommendations for alternative registrars on the dimensions of price, security, TLD support, DNS, and bulk operation / organization features?
[1] I'm not a squatter. I own typos and alternative TLDs of my primary product domains, and I operate lots of websites for various side projects.
I literally moved away from Namecheap when they did a UI redesign many years ago. Their old control panel was ugly but functional. Their new one looked much more "modern", but was way less information dense, and they introduced jank and made stuff take more clicks and hid stuff behind collapsed-by-default menus iirc.
They also made their billing details UI no longer accept the letter "ø". The billing details UI which made clear the importance of making sure the name you enter matches the name on the card. And the name on my card happens to contain an "ø". That doesn't exactly instil confidence.
If their costs have gone up due to inflation they should be honest about that. Their blog post implicitly blames Verisign for the price increase, which is not the whole truth.
.com is the most desirable TLD by far and also one of the least expensive.
.io, .me, .shop, .info, .site are all more, often significantly more.
Like everyone else I would love less expensive .com prices but honestly Verisign could 10x the cost of .com and only lose a mild percentage of registrations.
It’s also the most exhausted. The min char available now is in the 7 range. Prefixes and/or suffixes and even hyphens are being used to find land. It’s brutal.
“I think calling them a monopoly at this point is an unfair comparison. Verisign is no more a monopoly than your Ford dealer is a monopoly,” Redl said. “It’s not the original days of the internet where that was the only top-level domain.”
It is bothers me that the monopoly is excused this way.
If you already have a .com domain that all your customers are familiar with, its not like you can just switch to a different domain. _Maybe_ I could excuse this if it was only for new registrations, but left the price for renewals the same, at least for existing domain owners.
When I live somewhere and the owner of the water company decides they need to increase prices 9% despite having lower costs, they are definitely exercising their monopoly, even when there are several other utilities coming to my home and so many other kinds of beverage I might acquire.
TLDs may sort of be fungible, but not really. No one looks at widgets.com and widgets.tube as identical, whereas no one really cares about one car versus another beyond feelings of personal worth.
When you have a monopoly, you spend all of your time explaining why you don't have a monopoly. When you don't have a monopoly, you spend all your time building toward a monopoly.
It is a monopoly. - .com domains have the brand-recognition and trust behind them. Other TLDs still feel 'knock-off' especially for lesser technically aware people.
Also are Ford dealers not doing very similar anticompetitive things? Demanding high markups over msrp for electric vehicles, or refusing to offer them altogether, for example.
Well, if you don't like Verisign's service, you can always move one county over, and deal with a different TLD domain registrar for .com, just like with your Ford dealer.
(As an aside, I'd pay for a better-curated DNS infrastructure. For instance, google's font domains of whatever could just resolve to something federated, and that has TLS certs that are trusted by the alternative infrastructure. Google's chain of trust could be on a certificate revocation list.)
If we're going to fix issues with domains I would like to find a way to ban domain parking and "premium" domain prices sold by registrars.
I'm fine with an individual holding a handful of unused domains, but the legislation should eliminate anyone holding domains as their primary source of income.
> How is this anything but rent seeking on the part of Verisign?
While I generally agree with you --this smells like potential rent-seeking--, in order to be able to conclusively label it as such we have to know about the real cost structure that drives a company like Verisign. All of that information is here:
I wish I had the time to dive into this. I just don't. I generally try to avoid making assertions without having done some work in support of them. That's why I can't reach this conclusion --I can suspect it to be true though.
As a reminder, "rent" in "rent seeking" isn't the colloquial "rent", as in what you pay to rent a car or a house. Economic rent, as a term of trade, is related to financial gains obtained without increases in productivity. As such it has been "fuzzified" to make it apply to all kinds of things that have nothing whatsoever to do with economic rent-seeking. As an example of real rent-seeking, an article in Forbes describes how writing an essay in college to obtain a grant (and maybe even admission or tuition discounts) is classic rent-seeking. Same with a company lobbying government for subsidies --they didn't make their process or product better in exchange for the financial gain.
In other words, the question here is squarely centered around the real cost structure at Verisign. Frankly, I don't know everything they do and how much it costs to support the TLD's they administer. I still remember when domains were free --as a fool, I didn't register a pile of them back then.
It sure feels like rent-seeking. That doesn't mean it is. Without the proper analysis of their accounting this characterization might not be correct. In other words, it might be quite possible that they can fully justify the increase in rates due to increases in costs.
Not to go too far, wages have gone up across the board (in numerical, not real terms) and inflation has made everything more expensive. Power, taxes, food, transportation, labor, etc. Every single business has had their cost structure increase, in some cases dramatically so. Given this framework, I'd be cautious about ascribing nefarious intent to any business increasing their pricing.
Put a different way: A rent-seeking claim needs to include a "Minimum Viable Financial Analysis" in support of this conclusion. Prices going up isn't enough evidence of this at all. Not liking price increases is no evidence at all.
I have had a good experience with Cloudflare's registry service over the last couple of years.
I have taken to gradually pushing my registrations out as far as they can go. I just occasionally add years onto domains I buy, so as to lock in the $9 price for that term. Seems like an excellent way to avoid inflationary price increases, or general pricing creep.
I've been slowly migrating all of my domains over and have been very happy with them. Lower prices, faster website, almost ridiculously clean interface. Even has passkey support.
.XYZ domains were already too difficult to use for anything other than a regular site since they have such a bad reputation (however warranted it may be) as being used for spam. Not sure what the point is in paying even more for a TLD that's discriminated against by default.
.xyz is one of the most popular TLDs for crypto and web3, but it has a horrible email spam reputation and some gateways blacklist the entire TLD. With the exception of a16z, VCs aren't funding these businesses much anymore, either.
I've been using .xyz as my primary email address. Everything from banking to shopping, to governmental stuff. The number of sites that gave me problems is probably less than 10 that I can remember. I have around 700 accounts in my password manager so go figure.
It's not the receiving that's the problem, but the sending. Even with all necessary records in place and using a reputable email provider isn't enough in a lot of cases. You'll just end up in spam.
I wish there was some kind of bulk price increase.
I know all the issues but if you own 1,000 domains you're just sitting on, that 1,001th you're trying to snatch should be more expensive
Hoarding domains for ransom shouldn't be a business model
I guess another model is you could regulate the transfer and selling of domains to a certain cap. If the most you can legally get is say $5000, then people wouldn't collect and squat in such giant volumes
It wont. If anything it'll just consolidate the squatted domains into fewer hands.
Progressively increasing prices for each domain purchased seems pretty reasonable, but unless it raises very quickly it'll still end up being worth it to a wealthy few. Combining those raising prices with capping the resell price of domains seems like it would actually work! Someone somewhere might find it worth it to buy their 600th domain at a huge price, but if they can only sell that domain for a small fraction of what they paid for it they'll lose money if they aren't planning to use it themselves.
There's a balance I'm trying to strike. If you're sitting on say, news.com then I get it, that's a good asset to have.
It's those other groups that throw combinatoric dictionaries at the registrars that force the latest round of startups to have a bunch of letters smashed together for a name, they're the problem.
I've got half a mind to just go with katakana for my next company, register a domain like ツイッター.com and just say "well, there's 46 characters. You can memorize it in like 2 weeks. Not my problem!"
> It wont. If anything it'll just consolidate the squatted domains into fewer hands.
This is actually great if your end is to get rid of squatting, consolidate the market into a number of throats that's feasible to choke and then do it via regulation.
> If the most you can legally get is say $5000, then people wouldn't collect and squat in such giant volumes
Quite the opposite. They squat on giant volumes so they can stick ordinary people for $2500 instead of $10.
They should just prohibit selling domain names. It would solve 99% of the problem because then they couldn't use domain parking pages or otherwise openly offer them for sale.
Someone would still manage to sell million dollar domains by some subterfuge where it's claimed to be part of the sale of a company, but that was never the problem and has enough overhead to make it uneconomical for the low value domains that cause them to register every plausible variant of English text.
So Joe Squatter will retain ownership, but permits company.com to use it for 99 years for the same price as he would have sold it for.
Or something like that... I don't really disagree with you as such, but where there's a will, there's way, and never underestimate the creativity and twattery people will come up with to make a buck. Banning this will be hard, and I'm not sure it's worth the downsides.
I appreciate the ideals. I'm entertaining the idea that there's a non-asshole way to do domain brokering that's more like a store and less like a hostage negotiation. Maybe that's not possible.
Does ICANN have a position on whether domain name prices should be high (e.g. to discourage squatting), or low (e.g. to avoid being a rent/tax)? Because the price seems entirely driven by whatever ICANN wants it to be (by virtue of assigning the monopoly to Verisign, with an ICANN-defined cap on price rises), rather than any market mechanism.
For example, if a startup approaches ICANN saying they can manage the .com registry while charging only $1 per domain per year, is that attractive to ICANN?
I think ICANN would not entertain a startup taking over registry operations for .com or .net. ICANN recently defended their no-bid contract renewal for .net with Verisign:
> If ICANN were to put every TLD out for bid every renewal cycle to give it to the lowest bidder there would be no incentive for registry operators to invest in long-term stability and growth of the TLD(s) they operate.
I find it odd that "growth" is a justification. I was unaware that ICANN has a mandate to promote growth of specific TLDs.
These justifications, especially of "stability", make more sense to me in the context of the root DNS server that Verisign operates. Verisign would not agree to run a critical part of DNS infrastructure without a big TLD contract. I'm certain that maintaining and running those DNS servers with 100% uptime is an engineering accomplishment and its stability requires safe hands.
Readit News
Edit: fixed error in Namecheap's markup - thanks everyone for pointing that out!
https://porkbun.com/tld/com
Even if they have a tiny margin on the domain costs, that means that they are probably a loss-making business. So they plan to just sell to Google, Amazon or Microsoft in the future, and we don't yet know which one of those it's going to be?
Even if they had a small margin, does that mean that there's poor quality support, despite domains being mission-critical to businesses?
Shamelessly been using Namecheap for a while now... their UI is a bit old school but they have some of the best prices around (at least did)
Owning more than 10 domains on Namecheap is a burden. Trying to manage more than 50 is an outright headache [1]. I'm nearly to the point where I'm going to transfer all of my domains just to escape the poor management console. I've been giving them this same complaint for awhile [2].
I'm no fan of Godaddy [3], but they really did a good job with bulk management and organization.
Any recommendations for alternative registrars on the dimensions of price, security, TLD support, DNS, and bulk operation / organization features?
[1] I'm not a squatter. I own typos and alternative TLDs of my primary product domains, and I operate lots of websites for various side projects.
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29406698
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32470260
They also made their billing details UI no longer accept the letter "ø". The billing details UI which made clear the importance of making sure the name you enter matches the name on the card. And the name on my card happens to contain an "ø". That doesn't exactly instil confidence.
Edit: this is possible with Namecheap as well, see https://registry.terraform.io/providers/namecheap/namecheap/....
Presumably their employees need to be paid more to keep with inflation and all.
Deleted Comment
.io, .me, .shop, .info, .site are all more, often significantly more.
Like everyone else I would love less expensive .com prices but honestly Verisign could 10x the cost of .com and only lose a mild percentage of registrations.
Edit: not surprised how this got regulatory approval... https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/09/website-domain-more...
It is bothers me that the monopoly is excused this way.
A real-life "we have TLDs at home" from someone who has probably never seen the related meme.
Would you trust myshop.com or myshop.xyz more?
All TLDs in this case would be equivalent to all car brands.
(As an aside, I'd pay for a better-curated DNS infrastructure. For instance, google's font domains of whatever could just resolve to something federated, and that has TLS certs that are trusted by the alternative infrastructure. Google's chain of trust could be on a certificate revocation list.)
What has it got to do with namecheap when they dont own the registry of .COM or .XYZ?
Deleted Comment
I'm fine with an individual holding a handful of unused domains, but the legislation should eliminate anyone holding domains as their primary source of income.
While I generally agree with you --this smells like potential rent-seeking--, in order to be able to conclusively label it as such we have to know about the real cost structure that drives a company like Verisign. All of that information is here:
https://investor.verisign.com/financial-information/annual-r...
I wish I had the time to dive into this. I just don't. I generally try to avoid making assertions without having done some work in support of them. That's why I can't reach this conclusion --I can suspect it to be true though.
As a reminder, "rent" in "rent seeking" isn't the colloquial "rent", as in what you pay to rent a car or a house. Economic rent, as a term of trade, is related to financial gains obtained without increases in productivity. As such it has been "fuzzified" to make it apply to all kinds of things that have nothing whatsoever to do with economic rent-seeking. As an example of real rent-seeking, an article in Forbes describes how writing an essay in college to obtain a grant (and maybe even admission or tuition discounts) is classic rent-seeking. Same with a company lobbying government for subsidies --they didn't make their process or product better in exchange for the financial gain.
In other words, the question here is squarely centered around the real cost structure at Verisign. Frankly, I don't know everything they do and how much it costs to support the TLD's they administer. I still remember when domains were free --as a fool, I didn't register a pile of them back then.
It sure feels like rent-seeking. That doesn't mean it is. Without the proper analysis of their accounting this characterization might not be correct. In other words, it might be quite possible that they can fully justify the increase in rates due to increases in costs.
Not to go too far, wages have gone up across the board (in numerical, not real terms) and inflation has made everything more expensive. Power, taxes, food, transportation, labor, etc. Every single business has had their cost structure increase, in some cases dramatically so. Given this framework, I'd be cautious about ascribing nefarious intent to any business increasing their pricing.
Put a different way: A rent-seeking claim needs to include a "Minimum Viable Financial Analysis" in support of this conclusion. Prices going up isn't enough evidence of this at all. Not liking price increases is no evidence at all.
So far I've seen them hand waive about inflation and "demand for domains".
As of 2022, their operating margin was about 65%... That doesn't indicate a company that needs to increase prices.
[1]: https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/registry-agreements/com/c...
https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/
Are you saying that it's not possible to use your own nameservers for domains purchased through Cloudflare?
I have taken to gradually pushing my registrations out as far as they can go. I just occasionally add years onto domains I buy, so as to lock in the $9 price for that term. Seems like an excellent way to avoid inflationary price increases, or general pricing creep.
.com (9.73USD): https://porkbun.com/tld/com
.xyz (9.92USD): https://porkbun.com/tld/xyz
"We expect our pricing to change from $9.73 to around $10.37 on September 1, so don't wait to lock in our low rate today!"
Porkbun doesn't make money when you buy a domain name, but they may make money when you do not renew it:
> At about 21 days into the Auto-Renew Grace Period, the expired domain will be submitted to third-party auction services.
https://kb.porkbun.com/article/37-what-happens-after-a-domai...
Other registrars, like GoDaddy, do this too.
Registry is like verisign owning .com
Registrar is all of the people who sell you .com domains, by having a contract with the registry.
The announcement page might be behind a login, couldn't seem to link it directly
.com (9.15)
.net (9.95)
.org (10.11)
.xyz (9.33)
https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/28/wtf-is-xyz/
The biggest user might be block.xyz.
.io, .co, and .ai are still the most popular alternative TLDs for startups.
is there a good link for this ranking? i'm curious as to 4th place and below too. what position does .app or .tech or .cloud come, etc.
I wish there was some kind of bulk price increase.
I know all the issues but if you own 1,000 domains you're just sitting on, that 1,001th you're trying to snatch should be more expensive
Hoarding domains for ransom shouldn't be a business model
I guess another model is you could regulate the transfer and selling of domains to a certain cap. If the most you can legally get is say $5000, then people wouldn't collect and squat in such giant volumes
It wont. If anything it'll just consolidate the squatted domains into fewer hands.
Progressively increasing prices for each domain purchased seems pretty reasonable, but unless it raises very quickly it'll still end up being worth it to a wealthy few. Combining those raising prices with capping the resell price of domains seems like it would actually work! Someone somewhere might find it worth it to buy their 600th domain at a huge price, but if they can only sell that domain for a small fraction of what they paid for it they'll lose money if they aren't planning to use it themselves.
It's those other groups that throw combinatoric dictionaries at the registrars that force the latest round of startups to have a bunch of letters smashed together for a name, they're the problem.
I've got half a mind to just go with katakana for my next company, register a domain like ツイッター.com and just say "well, there's 46 characters. You can memorize it in like 2 weeks. Not my problem!"
This is actually great if your end is to get rid of squatting, consolidate the market into a number of throats that's feasible to choke and then do it via regulation.
Quite the opposite. They squat on giant volumes so they can stick ordinary people for $2500 instead of $10.
They should just prohibit selling domain names. It would solve 99% of the problem because then they couldn't use domain parking pages or otherwise openly offer them for sale.
Someone would still manage to sell million dollar domains by some subterfuge where it's claimed to be part of the sale of a company, but that was never the problem and has enough overhead to make it uneconomical for the low value domains that cause them to register every plausible variant of English text.
So Joe Squatter will retain ownership, but permits company.com to use it for 99 years for the same price as he would have sold it for.
Or something like that... I don't really disagree with you as such, but where there's a will, there's way, and never underestimate the creativity and twattery people will come up with to make a buck. Banning this will be hard, and I'm not sure it's worth the downsides.
Dead Comment
.com (9.73USD): https://porkbun.com/tld/com
.xyz (9.92USD): https://porkbun.com/tld/xyz
For example, if a startup approaches ICANN saying they can manage the .com registry while charging only $1 per domain per year, is that attractive to ICANN?
> If ICANN were to put every TLD out for bid every renewal cycle to give it to the lowest bidder there would be no incentive for registry operators to invest in long-term stability and growth of the TLD(s) they operate.
https://domainnamewire.com/2023/08/16/icann-says-putting-tld...
I find it odd that "growth" is a justification. I was unaware that ICANN has a mandate to promote growth of specific TLDs.
These justifications, especially of "stability", make more sense to me in the context of the root DNS server that Verisign operates. Verisign would not agree to run a critical part of DNS infrastructure without a big TLD contract. I'm certain that maintaining and running those DNS servers with 100% uptime is an engineering accomplishment and its stability requires safe hands.