What irked me the most in that post is that dude clearly knew he didn't pay $12 initially but tried to hide this fact.
As for forex, at least he's actually from Turkey. People around the world have been abusing Turkey currency exchange rate for these online service fees for years (Google and Steam are notable ones, but there are quite a few others like Spotify, Netflix..).
I don't know the technicality about this, but most, if not all, of these non-financial companies seem can only update their exchange rate once in a while (not to mention there is also regional pricing involved). So as soon as some violent exchange rate change happens, there are often days or even months to grab some sweet discounts by simply switching currency.
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.
Last month, Namecheap allowed me buy¹ a .love domain name for $9.98, and then seemingly intercepted the hand-off to me in order to re-classify the domain as a "premium" domain and kindly re-offer it to me for only $1,950.
I've never experienced anything like it. I remain horrified about all the times I've recommended Namecheap in the past.
¹ By "buy", I mean that I received an email confirming the $10.16 charge (including ICANN fees) with transaction and approval IDs.
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.
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.
> 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.
Could you cite the language in the Base ICANN registry agreement that allows registrants to waive the need for "clear and conspicuous" disclosure of the renewal price at time of initial registration?
> 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.
Likewise, could you cite a registration agreement that waives the need for "clear and conspicuous" disclosure of the renewal price?
> 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.
The Base ICANN Registry Agreement doesn't allow registries to "pick and choose" registrars, see 2.9(a): "Registry Operator must provide non-discriminatory access to Registry Services to all ICANN accredited registrars that enter into and are in compliance with the registry-registrar agreement for the TLD; provided that Registry Operator may establish non-discriminatory criteria for qualification to register names in the TLD that are reasonably related to the proper functioning of the TLD. Registry Operator must use a uniform non-discriminatory agreement with all registrars authorized to register names in the TLD (the “Registry-Registrar Agreement”)."
I think you may be misunderstanding the registrant right I'm talking about. ICANN regulations state that a registry cannot arbitrarily change a domain status from non-premium to premium and start charging a renewal price of thousands versus the normal usual price that's tens of dollars.
The ICANN Registry Agreement[1] sets the rules and regulations that a Registry has to abide by in order to be able to apply for the rights to a TLD. Section 2.10(c) states that the Registry must charge a renewal price that is the same as they charge every other domain registration on the same TLD. Meaning that they can't suddenly decide your domain is premium after you've already registered it. The renewal price must always be the normal common price.
But, further down the section you'll see that
>"2.10(c) shall not apply for..."
>"The parties acknowledge that the purpose of this Section 2.10(c) is to prohibit abusive and/or discriminatory Renewal Pricing practices imposed by Registry Operator without the written consent of the applicable registrant at the time of the initial registration of the domain and this Section 2.10(c) will be interpreted broadly to prohibit such practices."
In summary, the point of this section is so that unless you explicitly agree to it in written statement, Registries cannot change your domain status from non-premium to premium after you've already had it registered as non-premium.
However, Registries have bypassed this section by (speculation here) requiring Registrars to have Registrants waive these rights granted by ICANN, otherwise Registries simply deny access to their TLD.
I believe all of the Registrars have this hidden somewhere in their agreements last I checked. Here's Cloudflare as an example. Their Domain Registration Agreement[2] Section 8.6. You agree to waive section 2.10(c) by allowing variable and non-uniform renewal pricing.
The relevant text, which was elided from your quote, is (emphasis added):
"The foregoing requirements of this Section 2.10(c) shall not apply for (i) purposes of determining Renewal Pricing if the registrar has provided Registry Operator with documentation that demonstrates that the applicable registrant expressly agreed in its registration agreement with registrar to higher Renewal Pricing at the time of the initial registration of the domain name following clear and conspicuous disclosure of such Renewal Pricing to such registrant,"
So the registrant can waive the right to uniform renewal pricing via text in the registration agreement, but only if there is "clear and conspicuous disclosure" of the renewal pricing. You haven't cited any text that would waive away this disclosure requirement.
The issue isn't with disclosure, as it's up to the registrant to read the contracts they agree to, and it's clearly disclosed in every agreement. You also don't waive the right to disclosure, you waive the right to uniform renewal pricing, but the point is that it's supposed to be optional for the registrant.
Registrants aren't given the option, Registrars force them to agree to a contract that waives this right.
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.
If you're already building on AWS or Google Cloud, you should use Route 53 or Cloud Domains, respectively, so you can leverage your existing IAM policies and avoid putting trust in other organizations unnecessarily.
From another perspective, decoupling your domain from your cloud host means if things go wrong with your hosting you can still migrate to another host with a DNS change. I feel like I'd be more likely to have an issue with a hosting provider than a DNS registrar, but maybe that's a bad assumption.
Sounds like Amazon's relationship with Square. For the use cases they havent had their own engineers write integrations with their primary payment processor to cover, lean on the work of a payments focused company.
I use them too. Great customer service with a real and competent person on the line right away. Decided to go with them after some searching. I was getting off Google and they had an actual office and pictures of the people who worked there on their website. Some of their marketing is a bit corny but have had great service over the past few years.
support isn't that good if you ask me. when I had a problem with my account and they couldn't resolve it, it took quite some time to get my domain back under control.
My limitation for domains is SRS, I need to be able to redirect email to my inbox without paying for an additional service and without emails arriving as spam because of DMARC. Because of this I ended up at Google, which I don't really like because of their nonexistent support.
Dynadot is who I use, prices are just as cheap as NameCheap, but they have a much better website and allow you to "name taste" - return the domain name within 72 hours if you change your mind for a refund.
I've been using PorkBun for a couple of years now. It reminds me of Namecheap in their earlier years. A much simpler UI, great support and decent/fair prices.
Used to talk to the guy that founded them, he was a stand up chap. Great to see they're still around. They used to be a ResellerClub/DirectI reseller but like me (also ran a registrar) they were moving away due to the crappy service being provided.
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.
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.
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
Sure, you can prevent it, just hire journalist to vet every story.
It's not cheap, and we're not paying for HN -- so yeah, we get what we pay for :)
And even when you hire journalist, they are then skewed towards allowing click-bait and false outrage articles, because that drives user engagement.
And it's hard to find a to finance journalism without revenue being linked to user engagement (whether ads or subscription).
It's kind of sad, because low credibility news stories is why many corporations are careful about how they communicate; indeed the advice the PR department can give you is often to not reply -- because replying keeps to story alive longer, even if it is all false nonsense outrage over nothing.
</rant>
I have no solutions, it's hard to change incentives for journalism in a capitalist system, and while "independent" state-sponsored media (NPR/BBC) may be complement, we probably don't want to rely state-sponsored media :)
It's not much, but we can take comfort in the fact that this is not a new problem: click-bait is as old as newspapers; I'd even dare to wager we can find cave paintings exaggerating the size of the game that was hunted.
Some people would get pretty upset even with that. Maybe if it were a community assessment it would be ok, but I don't think mods could get away with it.
$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.
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.)
I posted one of the earliest comments saying forum.dev is obviously a premium domain. IIRC I was immediately downvoted to -1. To be clear I don’t care about losing some karma, I have enough to burn on 2000 -4’s. The point is if you try to pour cold water on an outage without hijacking a top thread, you’re likely going to sit at the bottom of the thread for a long time.
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.
Prevent posts about any topic within a certain period of time (a week or so). The truth will hopefully have come out before that period and people can address that in the comments or by flagging the post.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
All common first names for .dev were listed as premium at the time!
I once spoke to someone in charge of the .ink gTLD and they made all animals (among other things) premium domains, but forgot some. For a while I had "sloth.ink" or as I called it Slo(w) Think.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Does anyone happen to know if gTLD operators are allowed to make price hikes targeted at a specific premium domain name? For example if the operator noticed that the product/brand/company/site associated with some domain had suddenly become extremely popular, thus posing a potentially much higher reward than the initial annual renewal fee.
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.
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.
Yeah, clearly they didn’t change the price.. But they did offer to allow you register .dev domains a few days early for an extra fee. Many people were unaware of the concept of “premium” domains (domains that would renew at a rate other than $12) and Google didn’t go out of their way to remind people that the high rate they paid when first registering the domain was going to be closer to the eventual renewal rate, not a one-time fee.
The biggest takeaway from this is DO NOT BUY domains that are offered with a suspiciously low first-year price, and then can and do get jacked up to some ridiculous price per year ($85, $150, $300, whatever).
the new gTLDs approved by ICANN are the worst.
If you want a reliable domain name that you can trust to not cost more than $12-20 per year, go with something like your local country code, or .net, .org, .com, etc.
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?
Not necessarily, though there may be other tradeoffs depending on the approach. E.g. you could make the price base*registeredDomainCount^2 instead of base at the cost of registration privacy or you could have the max sanctioned transfer sale price capped (relatively) low at the cost of risking high demand domains be under-utilized or maybe something more inventive. After all if you can only squat a handful of domains before it becomes a loss or not worth waiting for it sure beats squatting hundreds or thousands being a valid business model.
I don't necessarily prefer any proposal I can think of I just wanted to highlight "Domain name prices should be such that squatting is unprofitable" can be taken in much more interesting ways than "make owning a domain outrageously expensive".
It bothers me that 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. Remember that the first banana republic was a result of deliberate colonialism from the USA.
> 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...
> 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.
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
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.
Premium domains are just domains which contain a common single word. Basically just the ones likely to be squat. You were never going to get tech.dev for $12 anyway. Would you rather pay a squatter $20,000 for it or have it sit unsold until someone actually wants to use it and then it costs ~$800.
Premium domains save real users money and make squatting unviable.
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.
As for forex, at least he's actually from Turkey. People around the world have been abusing Turkey currency exchange rate for these online service fees for years (Google and Steam are notable ones, but there are quite a few others like Spotify, Netflix..).
I don't know the technicality about this, but most, if not all, of these non-financial companies seem can only update their exchange rate once in a while (not to mention there is also regional pricing involved). So as soon as some violent exchange rate change happens, there are often days or even months to grab some sweet discounts by simply switching currency.