The 1.111B class of $0.99 .xyz domains white paper
aydacfu.xyzIt's an interesting proposal (make 0123456789.xyz available for cheap and thus allow more widespread use of custom domain names for various applications), except for two things:
1. This is basically just a strategy for XYZ to generate tons of new revenue from otherwise junk domains ($0.99 * 1.11B names = $1,098,900,000)
2. We don't need to charge for domain names to allow a wider array of applications to communicate using personalized global addressing.
E-mail is the standard example: throwaway984393@mailprovider.com does not cost me anything at all, but it's personalized. Mail provider has to pay for a domain, but nobody else needs to. This kind of free personalized addressing is a design choice. In fact, you don't even need to use DNS at all, as many peer-to-peer networks (Bitcoin, IPFS, BitTorrent/Gnutella/Napster, YaCy, Usenet, etc) have shown.
A 3rd potential problem with this proposal is that if it were expanded to other TLDs, it may generate significantly more traffic for the DNS root.
To me it's not interesring because it suffers from the same issue all the alternatives have.
Getting a domain is not prohibitively expensive if you have low standards for the url (which presumably you do if "93736474.xyz" works)
So the inevitable result is that a large number of applications using these will be so low effort they couldn't get a much better domain for barely more money, and that will probably end up being a mix of spam, malicious applications, and questionable content.
And the end result is everyone blocking traffic from .xyz. Just like someurl@extracheaphosting.com is.
>Getting a domain is not prohibitively expensive if you have low standards for the url
finally every famous fake phone number could have a domain https://www.steveharveyfm.com/content/2017-05-30-12-songs-wi...
Why would someone want this? If I need a database of devices in DNS I can just buy one domain and create subdomains for each device myself. It'll cost way less than $0.99/device/year.
I searched for the word "subdomain" in that PDF and got zero results; it's not even addressed.
In developing countries at least it seems like it could be a really big deal. When a daily wage is $5 USD, making a domain $0.99 is much more friendly and encouraging, the difference of two days wages vs. a fifth of a day
There are loads of free DNS services that hand out subdomains at no cost.
Free subdomains and domains out of your control like tk/cf/ga are somewhat different from a full domain subject to registrar rules.
I've seen some cc TLDs with a USD price for foreign buyers and a local currency price for local buyers where the foreign price converts to 10x the local price.
The .xyz registry is under no obligation to you to continue your registration. In a year they could refuse renewals and reregister (at no cost) the domains to themselves.
The counterpoint to this is that it's exactly the same for free domains and free subdomains but you get even less rights/privileges/whatever
.onion domains are free.
Yes... in the same way that you can set up a street food cart in the middle of nowhere without needing special permits. But good luck making any kind of meaningful change in your life with that unless your food cart happens to sell meth
Its a shave "ice" stand and its going to be in the 50000.xyz range, thank you very much
LOL point taken.
A multi-page PDF of monospaced green text on black, looking like it escaped from an Apple ][? I found this literally unreadable on mobile, and would appreciate it if somebody has a pointer to the content in a sane format.
OK, that's less bad, although formatting a press release as a scholarly paper typeset with LaTeX is still weird.
Yeah, calling it a "white" paper is a bit of a stretch. I kind of want to try printing it, but toner isn't cheap.
Invert the colors and print. qpdfview can do that, for instance.
Better than RFCs with their 80-char monospace with explicit newlines and in-source page headers and footers.
Those have the excuse of being written 40 years ago. Modern RFC are much better:
It's barely readable on desktop...
I bought an xyz for a throwaway project a couple of years from NameCheap. They renewed it at 10/year, although I could swear it didn’t say “first year only” (I’m used to the special first year pricing scams from GoDaddy and 1and1, and I passed on a similar first year special for other gTLDs from NC so I really don’t think that was the case.)
I’ve been purchasing with namecheap for several years, and I swear it’s gone downhill recently. Things like you have mentioned, I’ve also recently had bugs during domain purchase that fail to secure the actual domain while charging my card (on multiple occasions) - then support not refunding the money back to the card and instead insisting namecheap credit is suffice. It also feels much more like godaddy (or similar) then they used to with all the up-selling they have in the checkout these days.
I had numerous spars with Namecheap CEO over the years and I continue to stand behind my words: 1) the site is extremely buggy and I been charged multiple times and had to dispute through payment processor since they didn't even believe me that I was charged twice. 2) they claim to be great for hackers, but there are stories over the years how easily bullied, they gave out all your info to even unlawful request from LE; surprisingly GoDaddy stands much tougher, but funny thing GoDaddy didn't advertise themselves as being hacker-friendly registrar. 3) their customer support is in south Europe. Since you can turn on auto-renew I am sure they store your credit card info on file. I read stories from someone using unique card number only with Namecheap and getting it used somewhere else, which they found impossible. It also hurts their "Made in the USA" image, since the owner bluntly said using European based customer support save him tons of money.
I believe it wasn't that NameCheap was giving you an introductory rate, but rather that the .xyz TLD itself has special first-year pricing as part of its structure.
This is so stupid.
If you want to assign IoT devices unique domain names, don't start with someone else's TLD. Provision your own and assign based on a database.
Imagine ".device" as a TLD, where every domain maps to a device. You could sell them at $0.01/domain and let the registration last forever.
Provision entire blocks of them, even.
This has (sort of) been tried - .xyz were available for a penny each at some point. https://medium.com/@DarrylLopes/why-i-registered-20-000-xyz-...
Numbers?
Does that not defeat the purpose?
I mean an IP address is numbers too. Who point of url names is to make it more human readable
DNS does more for Internet services than making names pretty. Raw IP addresses don't get CNAMEs, or multiple A records, or TXT records like SPF/DKIM. If you move to a new hosting provider, you can keep the same domain name, but you can't keep the same IP address. Etc.
Ah yes, my AIM font and colors; I have missed you.
"recommended retail price of $0.99"
Am I getting cynical? Seems like no businesses are going to use this recommended price.
As a teenager making $5.50 and later a whopping $5.75/hr working in retail, I never bought a domain or hosting, as they were outside of my budget. At the time (late 90s) domains were $14.95 on sale, and regularly $19.95.
It wasn't until college that I had enough available resources to buy a domain, and at the time I went ahead and bought 5 years. I probably missed out on 3 or 4 years of my life when I had virtually unlimited time to work on things like programming. Had $1 domains existed in 1997, I'd probably have ended up as a PHP/Perl guy, and gone on an entirely different life route.
Nowadays I have six or seven domains, two for public facing stuff, and the rest are for a rotating cast of personal projects where subdomains don't make a lot of sense. But my life wasn't always like this where I can afford multiple vanity domains. For big chunks of the world, $10/year is a significant startup cost when AWS and GCP have free tiers.
It was worse than that. I recall domains being $70 for 2 years. This is confirmed in the Wikipedia page for Network Solutions, who held a monopoly on registration at the time.
“Following the acquisition by SAIC, the NSF gave Network Solutions authority to charge for domain name registrations. Network Solutions imposed a charge of $100 for two years registration. 30% of this revenue went to the NSF to create an "Internet Intellectual Infrastructure Fund." In 1997, a lawsuit was filed charging Network Solutions with antitrust violations with regard to domain names. The 30% of the registration fee that went to the NSF was ruled by a court to be an illegal tax. This led to a reduction in the domain name registration fee to $70 (for two years).”
I paid something like $79/year to register steve.org.uk via network solutions. My memory is that I struggled for a while in registering it, and I had to find a local fax machine to send some kind of "proof" to them too.
Wow! I never heard about this. It happened only a few years after I was born. Back in '97, probably only the nerdiest of nerds would have cared about it, so I'm surprised that the judge(s) over this case ruled correctly given how new the technology was. Is there an article about it? Seems like a fascinating topic
I think the case was fairly straightforward as it was more about established business law than technology.
The internet was already getting rather important by 1997, but true that it was a couple years away from the general public’s consciousness.
As a teenager back in 2000 I got my .com domain for free from namezero. When I got into university and got my first credit card, the first thing I used it for was to buy my domain out to own it myself (I think it was like $20-$30 from Network Solutions)
These days there are so many free DynDNS services out there that I don't know if a $1 domain on some weird TLD is that enticing.
domain registrars are a pretty competitive business, so I'm pretty confident that at least a few would offer it at that price.
That's approaching credit card transaction fee. What do you get in turn? Identity verification? Nope. Broadcasting your personal details to every spammer on the internet? Yes.
You can buy abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvw.xyz for only $63K USD!
I guess they're betting on it being bought by Alphabet.
how's that easier than just using the IP ?
IP addresses often change and are typically not owned/controlled by the person who is using it.
Usually you get a static IP when you're hosting a server, and it does not change often, I've only ever had two, the one assigned to me when I got the ADSL and the one assigned to me when I got the fiber.