Slashdot Mirror
The Ascendancy of .co
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.
Yes, no mistake. They were pushing this even before it became available for sale:
http://community.godaddy.com/godaddy/co-claim-your-opportunity/
'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.'
Help those of us who have domains registered with GoDaddy. What registrar would you recommend?
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
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
The question we should ask ourselves is whether or not we should accept domain name registration as a commercial practice.
How about a resounding yes? The vast majority of sites on the internet are used for businesses. ".com" is short for "commercial," you know. If you want to talk about taking ".org" domains out of the commercial registration pool, there are practices that might be put in place to restrict their use in a way that ".edu" and ".gov" are used. I think you would be a little late to the party, though.
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.