[HN Gopher] No, Google did not hike the price of a .dev domain f...
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       No, Google did not hike the price of a .dev domain from $12 to $850
        
       Author : arkadiyt
       Score  : 134 points
       Date   : 2022-12-13 21:27 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.agwa.name)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.agwa.name)
        
       | pfoof wrote:
       | So the best way is to buy the domain for 10 years upfront as long
       | as the year prices are equal and not like first year for $5 and
       | each subsequent for $150.
        
         | notpushkin wrote:
         | 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).
        
           | cmeacham98 wrote:
           | Has the renewal price of any popular TLD _ever_ gone down? I
           | guess you could argue that it has effectively gone down when
           | staying the same due to inflation.
        
             | yakak wrote:
             | The original price of .com, .org, .net, etc was $50/year,
             | then $35, then network solutions lost its monopoly and
             | today you still pay less..
             | 
             | Of course the other issue is the future popularity is
             | unknown. I think a lot of the first wave of new TLDs are
             | not so hot today, but maybe they aren't lowering their
             | prices if their last cash is from domain renewals of those
             | reluctant to move on.
        
           | abruzzi wrote:
           | my personal domain is a ccTLD domain and has gone down over
           | time. I know it's a bit iffy, but I like my ultra short
           | domain, and if they take it from me...oh well.
        
         | skybrian wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | mromanuk wrote:
       | > It's true that most .dev domains are just $12/year. But this
       | person never paid $12 for forum.dev. According to his own
       | screenshots, he paid 4,360 Turkish Lira for the initial
       | registration on December 6, 2021, which was $317 at the time. So
       | yes, the price did go up, but not nearly as much as the above
       | comment implied.
       | 
       | Alright, so it went from $317 to $850.
        
         | tourist2d wrote:
         | You might want to learn about currency exchange rates.
        
           | shkkmo wrote:
           | While the point you are making is correct, your comment comes
           | across as unnecessarily condescending and snarky in a way
           | that doesn't embody the guidelines for commenting on HN:
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        
         | walrus01 wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | lern_too_spel wrote:
         | According to TFA, $317 was a limited time deal created by
         | Turkish Lira inflation and Google being slow to update prices
         | in Lira.
        
       | orangepurple wrote:
       | I move all new registrations to the least criminal registrar I
       | could find: porkbun
        
         | agwa wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | EGreg wrote:
         | Why that one
        
       | plesiv wrote:
       | Domain squatting should not be a thing. Domain name prices should
       | be such that squatting is unprofitable.
        
         | encryptluks2 wrote:
         | I'd say for $10 per domain that it actually surpasses the price
         | of Twitter Blue which Musk claims will prevent bots.
        
         | lolinder wrote:
         | Doing so would price most individuals out of owning a domain,
         | unless you tried to have separate pricing for individuals
         | (which is messy).
        
         | teddyh wrote:
         | 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?
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Recent and related:
       | 
       |  _Premium .dev domain with Google costs $850_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33928399 - Dec 2022 (436
       | comments)
        
         | jeffbee wrote:
         | Are there any practical ideas for ways HN can prevent itself
         | from whipping up giant outrage threads based on something
         | false?
        
           | dang wrote:
           | > _giant outrage threads based on something false_
           | 
           | I think preventing those is impossible, because (a) human
           | nature loves outrage, and (b) we don't have a truth machine.
           | But it would be good to find ways to mitigate it. For
           | example, it's useful to be able to put "[fixed]" or
           | "[resolved]" in titles while the original thread is still
           | active. "[refuted]" would be too provocative though.
           | 
           | Building software to let the community make the call might be
           | a good idea. Currently the moderators have to do it and
           | that's risky enough that we end up being pretty conservative.
        
             | saagarjha wrote:
             | Would that help in cases like these? It's been several days
             | since it was first posted.
        
               | t-writescode wrote:
               | People with industry knowledge in that thread, certainly
               | like the writer of this new, much more verbose post, were
               | very aware of how FUDy the original outrage article was
        
           | akiselev wrote:
           | Replace all the humans with ChatGPT bots?
        
             | smegger001 wrote:
             | you assume that the rest of the internet aren't just chat
             | bot instances talking mindlessly to each other?
        
           | akira2501 wrote:
           | I wonder if the ratio of misplaced outrage threads to useful
           | ones makes the idea itself something to be done away with
           | entirely. There's seemingly little space between curiosity
           | and full blown outrage, an no natural mechanism for the
           | community to more deeply and openly investigate and report on
           | these issues before taking an over sized and possibly wildly
           | unjustified stance on it.
        
           | PascLeRasc wrote:
           | A Firefox extension that replaces the word Google with
           | Microsoft would get everyone to calmly explain Hanlon's razor
           | to each other and say that whatever's wrong is acceptable
           | because they were worse in the past.
        
           | ryanobjc wrote:
           | This is the purpose of HN imo lol
        
           | kodah wrote:
           | $850 for a domain is quite outrageous. Directing that outrage
           | to the right places is a challenge in discipline. Working on
           | frameworks to help people dissect something logically when
           | they discover something outrageous would probably be the most
           | helpful.
        
             | cxr wrote:
             | Community self-policing. Be skeptical of submissions making
             | bombastic claims, flag the ones that are untrue, and punish
             | commenters that take untrue claims at face value and are
             | whipping up other people, especially when something's
             | already been debunked.
             | 
             | HN used to be better at the punishment part. It seems like
             | nowadays there are a lot more sympathy upvotes--you can say
             | whatever untrue thing you want, and as long as you seem
             | polite about it or it's in support of the right side of
             | some pet issue then you won't be discouraged, even if
             | you're being reckless.
        
           | shkkmo wrote:
           | There were a number of skeptical commenters that raised
           | various issues at the time. I definitely came away from
           | reading that comment thread skeptical that the issue had
           | happened exactly as described. We eventually had
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CydeWeys come in a
           | confirm that the domain had always been premium.
           | 
           | I'd say that HN did a pretty good job of pushing back on the
           | outrage machine and correcting the misinformation. We even
           | get a follow up article clarifying things.
           | 
           | What we can do better is to continue to downvote and
           | constructively respond to comments that jump the gun and use
           | the current topic to push outrage over broader unrelated
           | issues. As we train and remind each other to read more
           | carefully and critically, the quality of HN comments will
           | match that effort.
           | 
           | Edit: If I had a personal hot take, it would be that twitter
           | threads in general seem to prompt this type of outrage
           | bandwagon behavior more than other mediums and perhaps should
           | face ranking penalties for appearing on the front page. (But
           | I'm biased here because I simply hate reading them.)
        
           | fncivivue7 wrote:
           | Hn isn't the problem, Google has repeatedly rug pulled the
           | community. Outrage by default is the outcome of that.
           | 
           | Said it here before and I'll say it again, if you have your
           | online life tied to google in anyway you're setting yourself
           | up for a shit time.
        
       | novateg wrote:
       | The domain names are rented. I remember $12 .com renewals on
       | GoDaddy, now it's $18, Cloudflare charges about $8 for renewals.
       | The registrars always use dependent customers and play with
       | pricing.
       | 
       | I have got a domain hack hal.al last year from host.al, the
       | payment for the registration was done, and I got a confirmation
       | for the domain ownership. After 2-3 days I got an email saying
       | that it is a premium domain and I need to pay $2k to get the
       | ownership. So it's always tricky to purchase a domain, you never
       | own it
        
         | behringer wrote:
         | https://www.gandi.net/en-US/no-bullshit
        
         | pie_flavor wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | staunch wrote:
       | It's worth considering the fact that this being a "premium
       | domain" is the only reason it was even available register in the
       | first place. If it had been a $12/year domain, some annoying
       | domainer would have snatched it up on the first day it was
       | available.
       | 
       | Premium domains really do seem to be a win-win for registries and
       | regular buyers.
        
         | verst wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | t-writescode wrote:
       | I'm glad someone made this post. There was so much misinformation
       | and uninformed discussion and misuse of terms in that thread that
       | I was astounded.
       | 
       | This person seems to have done a great job of breaking everything
       | down.
        
         | alar44 wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | behringer wrote:
       | The issue is that Google's charging for any domain at $850
       | dollars. It's absurd.
        
         | mrunkel wrote:
         | Why is that an issue?
        
         | pie_flavor wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | Gigachad wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | silisili wrote:
       | Ooo glad to see this follow up. I remember reading the original
       | and knowing that probably wasn't right. I worked for a registry
       | for many years and premium domain names were never part of GA for
       | the normal price. We also never moved a GA name to premium later,
       | but I can't speak for other registries.
        
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       (page generated 2022-12-13 23:00 UTC)