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100-Year Domain Renewals?
Ryosen writes "I received an email this morning from Network Solutions. Seems they are offering their current customers the ability to renew their domain names for 100 years. Is this is a realistic investment considering most companies don't last 100 years? Given that the Internet is a recent phenomenom, is it realistic to expect it to be the same in 100 years? Will Verisign be around that long? Does this make sense?"
The submitter makes valid points. On the other hand, for a large company, we're really talking about very little money here and the internal administrative costs of dealing with a renewal are probably fairly significant. So , for a Ford or GM or whatever, it may well make sense to pay the few thousand dollars for their various primary domains and then not have to worry about it.
Just before the Nationalists fled mainland china to Taiwan, they pre-charged everyone something like 50-years worth of taxes.
Let's just say that for everybody that paid, it wasn't a very good investment.
(That said, it's not that people had a choice in the matter or anything)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
You have godaddy.com which is alot cheaper. Others maybe cheaper...
:)
With godaddy, you can subscribe for a few years, I know at least 6 years in advance. I can't remember if it's more.
With the money you tie up, you can invest, use the investment earnings to pay for more years or hosting. Or even better yet, free beer for your friends.
I'm not affiliated with godaddy, they're just my domain name registrar.
Money cannot buy happiness, but can buy something soo darn close, that you can't really tell the difference
I would be very surprised if Network Solutions can report this as lump-sum revenue in the quarter received. Like any subscription, I would assume that it has to be spread out over the length of the registration. If so, they're actually potentially giving up some nearer-term revenue for this (because there's a discount involved)--even though they're getting cash in hand.
For those of us with Family names as domain names, holding that domain name for 100 years.. while debatably evil.. does become a viable use. It can be passed on from generation to generation. A legacy kinda thing.
"If you are falling off of a mountain, You may as well try to fly." -- Sheridans Father
In 1759 Arthur Guinness, rather speculatively, took over a deserted brewery at Dublin's St James's Gate, moreover he leased it for 9,000 years at a rent of 45 per annum - obviously intending on staying awhile.
Source:
I guess he made a great deal don't you?
I only read slash. for the articles...
I don't think the problem is whether or not my company will last 100 years (or, for that matter, whether I will last for 100 years). I would ask whether Network Solutions would last for 100 years.
The max term of a domain name lease is 10 years. Network solutions provide this 100 year lease by automatically adding an extra year to your lease on a yearly basis. If Network Solutions suddenly disappear, then your lease it left at 10 years, and you loose the other 90 years that you paid for.
T.
Really? Tell me, who exactly is working at IBM, Apple, Ford, Xerox, Boeing, etc who is the single person responsible for making sure that the domain gets re-registered say 10 years from today? Such a person might lose his job and/or be easily lost in the system by that time. Constructing an internal system to keep track of this costs well more than $1000, and in fact it costs probably a minimum of $200 of people-time to do such renewals even in a medium-large sized company.
Frankly, for all the stupid and evil things that NetSol does, this is a brilliant marketing move and more power to them. Not only does it get them desperately needed up-front cash, but they get paid above the odds and lessen the chance of some embarassing squatter incident involving a medium-large company in the near future.
in one century I do not think my corporate maintenance procedures created today will be available / archived
in one century I do not expect to be working any more, so procedures & knowlegde will be lost
in one century I do not expect to be able to find my Verising login/password neither my bill to renew my corporate domain name for another century
when you do not regularly work with nor do you maintain something it disapears from your thoughs.
In one century many corporations (if they live that long) will just forget to renew.
What happens if they do not renew in 100 years ? Do they disapear from the internet ? What can Verisign tell us ? Noone at verisign will be there in one century. There is really no engagment from a corp that will probably not be there in one century.
Besides, would you dare give your provider the responsability of calling you in one century to remind you you must pay ?
I would not dare that.
That total nonsense.
moreover, who can say if domain names will not be free in 30 years ? Therefore you would have paid 70 years more, will Verisign give you change ?
If that's serious news, it's probably more some kind of advertisement from Verisign than a real product. It means "we are confident we will be there in 100 years, you can trust us to register for any length of time".
Sorry mister VS I do not trust you.
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
In the United States, long-term structural businesses leases -- typically for an office or shop in any structure from a one-story to a skyscraper -- top out at 99 years, oftentimes because of state law. For instance, Alabama limits leases to a maximum of 99 years. So the 100 year domain name extension is in line with that rule-of-thumb.
You have to keep in mind that even at a paltry 6% return rate, the value of money doubles every 12 years - or about 8 times by the time 100 years rolls around. That's why these company's love these long-term domain renewal options - even if they charge you one half of what you'd pay over 100 years, they'll still, in the long haul, get 4 times as many real dollars out of you.
In business, it's always better to get money sooner over later. 100 years early isn't a "trick", it's almost theft.
paintball
Imagine the problems they will have after 100 years. Do you think anyone will remember to renew the domainname 99 years from now?
Good point. DNS will likely be replaced by a huge globally distributed Active Directory implementation by then.
So when I read about the 100 year domain thing, I thought, "that would be pretty great." Just pay a relatively small amount of money up front, and you're set for life.
But then I realized that there's a pretty big anti-social aspect to allowing 100 year domains. It may not be totally fair that the dotcom domain name ownership thing was a first-come, first take lottery. But we're stuck with it, and, fortunately, nobody owns a name forever -- they have to reregister each year or two or ten. If you can't make a go of flowerpots.com, then it won't be long until it goes back into the pool of unclaimed domains for somebody else to take. Well, that's sort of true anyway. I know at least one company has arrangements with a registrar where expired names fall directly into their hands.
But anyway, my point is that there ought to be some mechanism where the scarcest property in cyberspace, dotcom names, falls back into the hands of the public if they are not being put to full use. And it's not in the public interest to allow 100-year domain names. All sorts of people will register all sorts of useful domain names, fail at making them profitable, and give up on the domain name. However, like neglected inner city property, the domain name will stay in their possession for a friggin century, and deprive the Internet community of using it for any value.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
This is something I've pondered often. I think the DNS model will only persist as long as the impression that a website must be a .com does. This is fading, but I remember a long time ago when people thought there was a mistake if there was no www. on the front or it wasn't a .com.. Granted, the tech public knew better, but the average joe had no idea. (im talking back when = 6), eventually it will just make more sense to have sort of a distant cousin to a search engine type DNS system. Or maybe websites will be more or less a sentence (company slogan) or word pair (company name)? Who knows, but I agree, machine naming is going to change drasticly someday.
Heck, what if there was enough IP space such that the ASCII codes for the letters in your site name somehow made up the actual IP. That would eliminate the need for a DNS system altogether, but would waste a lot of IP space as we think about it in our current paradigm of fixed ip lengths with groupings etc etc. Perhaps future systems will not need fixed length, perhaps not. Who knows.