The Ascendancy of .co
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An anonymous reader tipped the fact that, with the .com namespace getting pretty well mined out, GoDaddy.com's front page for domain registrations now defaults to .co instead of .com. The article claims that GoDaddy registers about half of new domain names. Neither the article nor GoDaddy makes it explicit that .co is a ccTLD belonging to Colombia, or that registering one costs about three times as much as a .com, at $29.99 per year. And if you select a .co domain name from GoDaddy's front page, a number of TLD variants are presented alongside .co — but .com is not among them.
Re:citibank.co (Score:0, Interesting)
Godaddy mistake? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Let's call it scam when it is a scam (Score:3, Interesting)
agreed. just another way for godaddy to profit from the clueless or too-lazy-to-read-what-they're-doing... which is a pretty large percentage of their customer base.
Re:Godaddy mistake? (Score:3, Interesting)
I use Godaddy almost exclusively for my many (too many) domains... that said, let's be honest.
It's not a mistake. Their checkout process is designed to wave as many unnecessary - yet seemingly useful - options as possible in front of novice domain customers, in hopes that one or two will fall into their basket by mistake. No doubt their logs are full of new customers landing and searching for an unavailable .com domain, repeat, repeat, repeat, give up.
Now by defaulting to .co and hiding .com they can sell a shit ton of Columbian domains like "smithfamily.co" to unsuspecting customers, and at a higher price, too!
Re:Godaddy mistake? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, no mistake. They were pushing this even before it became available for sale:
http://community.godaddy.com/godaddy/co-claim-your-opportunity/ [godaddy.com]
'Pre-registration is now open for the newest truly global and recognizable domain name extension to come along in years: .co -- It's used everywhere as an abbreviation for Company, Corporation, and Commerce. Let it vault your company into the global Internet marketplace!
Here's your chance to grab domain names that have been taken for years with the .com extension. Pre-registration includes application periods for trademark holders and others.'
What registrar would you recommend? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Let's call it scam when it is a scam (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a scam to sell off .co domains as .com domains, and it should be outed as such by slashdot.
I smell lawsuit. Unwary and dumb users expect to have their hands held in this day and age.
.COM domain - .CO domains are from COlumbia!" you are automatically setting yourself up for a class-action suit which you will assuredly lose or settle.
.com price. In which case, we are the sheeple and will be eaten soon by the GoDragon.
This is a really uninformed error by the world's largest registrar. If you don't have a big blue banner that says "This is NOT a
But maybe the GoDaddy lawyers already figured out the cost of the suit, the settlement and the legal fees, and the 90% markup still leaves more on the table than an ultra-competitive
Re:What registrar would you recommend? (Score:1, Interesting)
I've never had a problem with Namecheap (an Enom reseller). For weird domains, I use OVH. For really weird domains, EuroDNS.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What registrar would you recommend? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What registrar would you recommend? (Score:1, Interesting)
People may not be paying (Score:5, Interesting)
The squatters may just think people will pay. Remember that for something like this to happen there doesn't have to be an actual worthwhile market, just the perception of one. You get all kinds of dumb, greedy, people who get in to shit.
A great example is back in the day when eBay was young and some domain squatters decided to buy up domains they thought might be worthwhile and try to sell them. So the funniest one I came across was a guy who had registered generalmills.cc and wanted to sell it for $10,000,000. That's right, ten million dollars. His sales pitch was you could buy it and then "Make them pay whatever you liked for the rights." Of course General Mills happily owned generalmills.com at the time and didn't seem to have an interest in others. What's more, a company can nab a domain name that is their trademark if they wish (these days through ICANN, back then through the courts). I e-mailed him calling him an idiot more or less and got one of the most caustic, hate filled responses defending his business claiming he made millions "regularly" on sales. I pointed out to him that he had no sales on eBay thus far, and got more hate in response.
It was quite clear that he though he'd got a brilliant scam, which was successful only in his own mind. He was just waiting for his big payday... Which of course never came.
"Domaining" may be on the way out. (Score:3, Interesting)
With the October 27th change to Google web search, "domaining" may be on the way out.
Google made huge changes when they merged "Google Places" (which is really Google business search") results into their main web search results. Search for DVD player [google.com]. There are almost no "organic search results" shown. At the top, there's "Related searches for dvd player - Brands, Stores, Types". There are two "organic" results from Amazon and Best Buy, both Google advertisers. Then a big block of "shopping results" A right side column of ads.
And that's a non-local search. On searches which imply some location ("london hotels" is a good test case), Google displays a map. For a few days, they displayed a big map in the main search area; today it's on the right, above the ads. Between the big ad block at the top, the map at the right, the ads below the the map, and the links in the main search area to the map, only a few organic results are squeezed in.
Google's organic search isn't any better than it used to be at filtering out the bottom-feeders. Down below the fold on "dvd player" search, there's still a result from "bestsoftware4download" (which tries a drive-by install of some .exe). In the "london hotels" search, there are a few junk entries. Most of the stuff visible on the first screen isn't organic search results, though. This makes "domaining" futile.
Google is still fooling around with their layout after their big change, and it hasn't settled yet. (Also, Google's layout changes if you're logged into Google and allow "personalization". The results mentioned above are not "personalized".) The trend, though, is clear. The primary results for a search with commercial intent now come from Google advertisers. Google is pushing advertisers to buy ads directly from Google, not from the "bottom feeders".
So buying up large numbers of ".co" domains may be futile. I expect we'll see many junk domains in ".com" expiring, with nobody picking them up.
Re:A money grab (Score:3, Interesting)
It's the manner in which the girls are selling domains.
I don't mind girls in commercials. Even sexy girls in commercials, if it's appropriate for the product. For example, beer, which is traditionally a "macho" drink, or Axe bodywash, or Victoria's Secret (who, contrary to common sense, are targeting their ads mainly at men that buy those sexy clothes for their girlfriends/wives).
GoDaddy's commercials pretty much tell me that they're positioning their services as a "macho" service, and it simply doesn't make sense. Their ads come off as, "Here's some gratuitous sex, now go pay us money." For one thing, it's demeaning to any woman who wants a domain name, and there are a lot of them out there. There's not even an alternate "Clydesdales" or "dalmation" ad campaign with a unisex appeal to it. For another, it's treating me (a guy who should be the target demographic for those ads) like I'm an idiot who is completely uninterested in the technical merits of one registrar over another; that if you show me a picture of a sexy woman, I'm such a dumb hairless ape that I'll be forced to buy their product.
I understand the adage of "sex sells." Their ads say to me, "we're really desperate to make a buck off of you," and that's not the attitude I want from a domain registration provider or web host, because it makes me think they're going to try to screw me over (which GoDaddy has indeed done to several of my friends). I would much rather have a registrar that has the attitude of, "we're really smart and really good at this stuff."
It's too bad, too. I used to have a lot of respect for Danica Patrick for the barriers she broke through in competing in an almost exclusively man's sport and becoming extremely popular and maintaining her integrity. Now, though, I think of her more as a sell-out, and I wish that a better role model had done so instead. Oh well, she's still a good race car driver, so whatever. It's just a shame that GoDaddy was there to exploit her. It's a little bit like if Rosa Parks had done a Playboy spread. Sure, she has every right to, but I just think it's a bit vulgar to exploit someone's historic significance like that.
Re:The right question (Score:3, Interesting)
Real eastate is an extremely good model for how the DNS system should be run.
In places with significant unused land (for our purposes preserves and protected wilderness would be considered used) it is often possible to obtain ownership of such land by simply claiming it, and using it. (Law varies by nation, but this still occurs, and was far more common in the past).
In all other cases you buy land from an existing holder.
Regardless of one one obtains the land though, one must still pay any property tax, or forfeit the land. Tax is payed to the Sovereign entity that controls the land.
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That maps nicely to the domain name system. Unregistered domains can be obtained freely, but one must pay the annual fee which is equivalent to a fixed fee property tax. Since the TLD's Registry would be the closest equivalent to a government, they would get the fee.
Of course if one wants a registered domain (inhabited land) one can always obtain it by uying it from the owner. That is still true of the DNS.
Notice though that the real estate system does not have anything remotely like the registrars. They just don't fit in correctly. They serve absolutely no purpose. The whole thing came from other companies wanting a slice of Network Solution's domain registration profits. The whole problem is that they should never have been making a profit. They should having been charging only what it took to maintain the registry, including the TLD's main DNS servers.
Let the free market operate for DNS just as it does with real estate, where the market is between (current and prospective) owners of land, not been prospective owners of land and for-profit pseudo-governmental entities.