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.

Comments

citibank.co

[HongPong]

now with moar than $100 billion in frictionless laundered money. That's what we call .colocation!

It's not mined out.

[bmo]

It's squatted, sniped, tasted, and front-run out.

When a speculator can register thousands of names and move them around for free by playing the system, is there any wonder that .com is "mined out"? When a registrar front-runs domain names (Network Solutions) and fills the space with reserved names for itself, is there any wonder that .com is "mined out"?

Get rid of domain tasting and other shenanigans and the problem will go away.

--
BMO

Re:It's not mined out.

[Nursie]

This.

Also 'investors'. A little while back I read an online article by someone congratulating themselves on investing in .com names. He was going through a dictionary, finding obscure words and testing to see if they were available, then buying them up. He had about 30 dictionary words and he was going to make money on the idea, also encouraging others to do the same.

It's one of those times when you wish you could reach through the screen and strangle the person on the other side. Squatters, 'investors' and other assorted asshats have between them sat on pretty much and word or word combination in existence, meaning that 99% of them just aren't used, ever.

It's a shame that money-hungry tools have been able to do this. Maybe the internet was better in the early 90s.

Re:It's not mined out.

[Kosi]

The easy solution would be a "use it or lose it" rule where the ownership of a domain that is just parked will be revoked when someone else would like to register it.

Re:It's not mined out.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can trivially set up a mail account, subscribe to a few newsletters and ignore any "use it or lose it" kind of rules. The internet is more than just the web, remember?

Re:It's not mined out.

[Hazelfield]

Yep. When you can type in http://slashdo.org/ and get to a junk "search portal", you know it's too easy to register a domain name.

Re:It's not mined out.

[Raenex]

Get rid of domain tasting

It's pretty much gone:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting

"ICANN reported in August 2009, that prior to implementing excess domain deletion charges, the peak month for domain tastings was over 15 million domain names. After the $0.20 fee was implemented, this dropped to around 2 million domain names per month. As a result of the further increase in charges for excess domain deletions, implemented starting April 2009, the number of domain tastings dropped to below 60 thousand per month."

I know from personal experience that a domain I had let lapse and was sat on for years became available again after the ICANN policy was put in place.

Re:It's not mined out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apologies in advance; this is going to be harsh... It's called capitalism - supply and demand, scarcity, etc. The hippielove ideal of the internet is long gone. These days it's nothing for a company to spend $5k, $50k or more for a generic domain that drives traffic to their site. A single magazine spread can cost that much for a month. It's not squatting or anything else you want to label it, it really is investing in a valuable asset.

What you're really saying is that you're jealous you didn't register these names. Out here in the real world valuable things have a price tag. If you're not aggressive enough to take advantage of it then the rest of the world will pass you by in a heartbeat.

Re:It's not mined out.

[kyrio]

If idiots stopped paying more than $10 for a domain then it wouldn't be a problem. Every time I've contacted a domain owner about a domain I laugh at them and re-offer $10 for their shitty domain when they tell me it "costs $595".

The problem is that you have idiots accepting ridiculous amounts for worthless domains when the domain doesn't even matter anymore. I've been to many a site with a meaningless domain or a domain that is very long or a domain with a random tld and they've had no problem with traffic because they have a good website or provide something that people need.

Re:It's not mined out.

[John Hasler]

I have a domain that I currently use only for email but it is still in use. The Web is not the Net.

And who is going judge what constitutes "use" anyway? Are you going to visit each of millions of Web sites and determine which are "real" and which are merely parked?

Re:It's not mined out.

[lwsimon]

In some cases, it makes financial sense to pay some. I was looking to start a gun reviews site a while back, and had a $500 budget for a domain name. I found one - I think it was gunreviews.org - and sent them an email offering $500. I got an automated response that they would not be accepting any offers under $2,500.

Meawhile, something like "buyviagraonline.com" would be worth thousands.

Re:It's not mined out.

[Rudolf]

Yes, its frustrating. I am trying to come with the a .com name and most of the a names are squatted (Registered but no website or godaddy.com website.)
The web is not the internet. There are many more things to use a domain for than just a website.

.co for company ?

[whiteboy86]

.co.uk
.co.jp
.co.nz

are already in use as a company designator so why not ? but what about the collision with the Colombia state domain ?

Re:.co for company ?

[nyctopterus]

...and .co.ck

(Cook Islands, really, look it up!)

Re:.co for company ?

[SteveFoerster]

In return, let Canadians use the ccTLD for Western Sahara.

The right question

[geogob]

The question we should ask ourselves is whether or not we should accept domain name registration as a commercial practice. The moment we say 'yes' to this question, and it seems to me that this was the general answer since very early in the life of the DNS, we shouldn't neither be surprised nor shocked to see common commercial practices being used by these registrar.

If you buy the nice looking shirt for twice the price right at the entrance of the store, it's your problem I guess. But still, there's a difference. Most of us are aware of common commercial practice to lure clients into more expensive product. We sometimes choose to ignore or forget them, but we still are globally aware of them. But, somehow, we forget that similar rules apply to online businesses as well, probably due to the lack of personal interaction.

Re:The right question

[windcask]

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.

Re:The right question

[Tacvek]

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.
--
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.

Godaddy mistake?

[wlad]

Is it only GoDaddy doing this? In which case it might just as well simply be a mistake. Who, in their right mind, would choose the Columbian domain instead of one of the many new top level domains as new default?

Re:Godaddy mistake?

[amaupin]

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?

[RDW]

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.'

garbage domains

[newviewmedia.com]

No different from .tv or any other new top level domain. It is currently possible to open up any tld you want now (.city .dog .etc) if you have around $100,000 and the capabilities to manage a registrar through Icaan. However, .com, .net .org and country tld will always be king in people minds. .travel has been around forever and nobody uses it. Expect more of the same with all these new domains coming on the market.

Let's call it scam when it is a scam

[Englabenny]

It's a scam to sell off .co domains as .com domains, and it should be outed as such by slashdot.

Re:Let's call it scam when it is a scam

[sdnoob]

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:Let's call it scam when it is a scam

[alphatel]

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.

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 .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.

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 .com price. In which case, we are the sheeple and will be eaten soon by the GoDragon.

A money grab

[KingSkippus]

Disclaimer: I loathe GoDaddy.com. Their commercials are downright offensive, their service is expensive crap, and I've known many people burned by them.

Having said that, I can't imagine that this is anything but a money grab by GoDaddy.com. When I read this, two thoughts came to mind.

First, they'll probably catch a lot of people who are not technically savvy enough to noticed that they're registering a .co instead of a .com. I know, how can someone be technically savvy enough to know they need a domain name and go through the process of registering it, but not know they need a .com? The easy answer is marketing goobs. Where I used to work, the marketing decided that .biz would be the next "hot" thing, and changed all of the company letter head, business cards, and ad copy to [company].biz, even though we still owned our .com name. It was a dismal failure, of course. We even got complaints from employees and customers because e-mails were bouncing due to spam systems and/or software that didn't recognize .biz as a legal address didn't work with our domain name. Eventually, the powers-that-be finally made the marketing department relent and they changed it back, but it was still an expensive, needless, unmitigated disaster.

Second, even for technically savvy people, if .co becomes a popular alternative, it's yet one more TLD that competent businesses will have to register. Any business worth its salt now has to register [company].com, [company].org, and [company].net. I run some hobby gaming sites, and even I register those three for my sites to make sure that no one tries to squat my site names. It seems painfully obvious to me that GoDaddy wants to add another TLD--and another $30 to their coffers for every domain name registered--by "legitimizing" .co domain names. If I were dumb enough to use them as a registrar, that means if I don't want someone squatting my site name, now I'll have to register [site].co as well. Worse, I really need to make double sure that I register that one because it's so easy to mistype .com as .co.

So no thank you. As far as I'm concerned, unless you run a business out of Bogotá, having a .co domain is like having a .biz domain--kind of stupid, and any non-Colombian business or organization that tries to use one instead of .com will be treated as fly-by-night by me, most likely a scammer or spammer.

Re:A money grab

[axx]

Small thing: many people don't even type in the domain name in full, with the TLD.

A *lot* of people type in “facebook” to go to facebook.com, or even “facebook login” to login to facebook, completely unaware of the magic that happens behind the scenes.
Do you remember what happened on that ReadWriteWeb article about Facebook's new login page ? The comments are unbelievable and yet. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php

Also, this is why Google knows that bit more about what sites people visit. Everytime people don't enter the TLD, their browser does a swift “I'm feeling lucky” search and takes them to the result.

So the .com vs .co problem might not be that much of an issue these days.

Re:A money grab

[KingSkippus]

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:A money grab

[dveditz]

Actually, the reason Google knows that bit more about sites people visit, is that Firefox, Chrome and Safari all send each and every domain you visit to Google's Safebrowsing servers before they connect to it.

That is not how SafeBrowsing works. Firefox downloads a large database of hash prefixes. If the hashes of the domain and url are not in the list you go to the site and nothing is sent to Google. If the first bit of the hash matches an entry in the list Firefox asks Google for the list of complete hashes that start with that prefix. If the site's hash matches then you're blocked, if it doesn't you're not, but nothing more is sent.

To further obfuscate things, when Firefox finds a prefix match it doesn't just ask for the hashes matching that prefix, it also asks for the hashes matching a couple other random prefixes from the list.

Google may still know all the sites you visit through cookies on google-analytics or AdSense, but they're not getting that information from SafeBrowsing.

GoDaddy stories on Slashdot

[Futurepower(R)]

Here are stories about GoDaddy on Slashdot, in order by date, to 2010-09-11:

Go Daddy Usurps Network Solutions (2005-05-04)

GoDaddy Serves Blank Pages to Safari & Opera (2005-12-08)

GoDaddy.com Dumps Linux for Microsoft (2006-03-23)

GoDaddy Holds Domains Hostage (2006-06-17)

GoDaddy Caves To Irish Legal Threat (2006-09-16)

MySpace and GoDaddy Shut Down Security Site (2007-01-26) That incident prompted this web site:
Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names.

Alternative Registrars to GoDaddy? (2007-02-03)

GoDaddy Bobbles DST Changeover? (2007-03-11)

850K RegisterFly Domains Moved To GoDaddy (2007-05-29)

According to this March 11, 2008 story in Wired, GoDaddy shut down an entire web site of 250,000 pages because of one archived mailing list comment: GoDaddy Silences Police-Watchdog Site RateMyCop.com. See below for Slashdot's story about RateMyCop.com.

GoDaddy Silences RateMyCop.com (2008-03-12)

ICANN Moves Against GoDaddy Domain Lockdowns (2008-04-08)

GoDaddy VP Caught Bidding Against Customers (2008-06-29)

KnujOn Updates Top 10 Spam-Friendly Registrars List (2009-02-06, 80 comments) GoDaddy is on the list.

R.I.P. FTP (2009-07-13, 359 comments) The GoDaddy web site is extremely complicated. Quote: "In that case, why don't more people switch to administering their sites via SFTP instead of FTP? Here are the steps it took me to enable SFTP on my GoDaddy hosting account. Feel free to use this as a reference, but the obvious point is that as long as this many steps are required, it's safe to say that most users won't be switching: 1) Go to the 'Hosting' menu and pick 'My Hosting Account.' 2) Next to the name of your website, pick 'Manage Account.' This will open the Hosting Control Center. 3) In Hosting Control Center, click to expand the 'Settings' options. 4) In the 'Settings' control panel, click the 'SSH' icon. 5) You will see a page saying 'SSH is not set up', and prompting you to enter a phone number so that their automated service can call you with a PIN number. After you enter your phone number, the phone rings a second later, and you enter the PIN in a form on the GoDaddy website. 6 ) You will then see a page which says: Current Hosting Account Status: Pending Account Change -- Your request to enable SSH is being processed. This upgrade may take up to 24 hours." [Punctuation and emphasis changed for clarity.]

Registrars Still Ignoring ICANN Rules (2009-07-22, 122 comments) Quote: "GoDaddy (and their reseller arm, Wild West Domains) have a different problem: They still block transfers for 60 days after a registrant's contact update, even after the ICANN update specifically prohibited doing so. They freely admit it, too."

What registrar would you recommend?

[Futurepower(R)]

Help those of us who have domains registered with GoDaddy. What registrar would you recommend?

Re:What registrar would you recommend?

[cjcela]

I use dreamhost for both registrar and hosting. So far it has been excellent.

Re:What registrar would you recommend?

[characterZer0]

gandi.net

Re:What registrar would you recommend?

[PopeRatzo]

For weird domains, I use OVH. For really weird domains, EuroDNS.

What do you mean by "weird domains"? Are you referring to something like "ifuckfishinmydreams.com" where the name itself is weird or "nationalreview.com" where all the writers are weird, or "lookbook.nu" where the idea is weird or...?

(Note: "ifuckfishinmydreams.com" is not a real website. But it you're interested in owning that domain, drop me an email. We can talk.)

Re:What registrar would you recommend?

[kyrio]

Try Dynadot at www.dynadot.com

Vote with yr wallet.

[windcask]

If you disagree with Godaddy's business practices, vote with your wallet and use other registrars and hosting services. What could possibly be gained by trying to force them back into defaulting to .com again? There's no guarantee that .com will stay the de facto standard for domain names in the future. My money is on .us domains, personally. But I don't see it happening, sadly; people would rather spend hours whining at lawmakers to litigate other tech companies like Facebook and Google into shape than actually stop using their services...

Re:Vote with yr wallet.

[windcask]

I got rid of my Facebook and GMail accounts because I disagreed with their policies and their business practices. I had over 300 Facebook friends and my world hasn't come crashing down around me. People sometimes confuse what they need with what they want.

Re:Public needs to learn not everyting is dot com

[wlad]

Indeed. Nowadays, people just type what they want on Google. They don't type URLs anymore at all.

Namecheap

[KingSkippus]

I've been using Namecheap for years, and they've been pretty awesome. They have a nice set of DNS management tools, they notify me of all important things, and as their name implies, they're inexpensive.

Another thing I like about Namecheap is that you can delegate control over your names to other people. I run a suite of hobby gaming web sites, and I've made contingency plans in case I get hit by a proverbial bus. (Or a real one.) I've given one of the other site admins permissions over the names so that if need be, he can manage them or even move them to another registrar. Obviously, I trust him implicitly, but the point is that if something happens to me, the names aren't just up for grabs once the registration expires. They may exist, but I don't know of another registrar that allows you to delegate permissions like this.

I can't speak about their technical support; I've never had to use it.

Just to prove I'm not a shill for the company (I'm only affiliated with them as being a customer), if there's one thing that's stupid about them, it's their name. I mean, "Namecheap"? Makes them sound so, I dunno, Wal-Martish, especially given what has been a good record so far with me.

Re:Namecheap

[n2art2]

You would make more money, if you just went to enom and got your own reseller account to manage all of your domains.

That's what I did, and now my company provides and sells domains to all of our website design customers as a part of our packages.

Why go to a secondary reseller, when you can become one yourself and take out a middle man.

People may not be paying

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

[Animats]

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. 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.

ccTLDs are Not governed by ICANN Policies...

[Ron Bennett]

Many people, are not aware that country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) are NOT governed by ICANN policies.

ccTLDs are a whole different breed with their own unique rules and policies. The ccTLD delegated country, which in the case of .CO is the country of Columbia, has total control - the registrant has little to no recourse; ICANN likely can't help.

Most .CO registrants don't fully realize the risks with the biggest ones being:

* The country of Columbia could change policy at any time and take away many domains - it's happened many time before in numerous ccTLDs, including with .TM, such as Sex.TM, and even with .US as in the case of FuckCensorship.US that was retroactively deleted - google for more details.

* Can charge any price they want - so that .CO domain one registers for $29.95 today at GoDaddy could potentially cost far more in the future to renew; no rate caps nor restrictions on variable pricing - .CO can raise prices to whatever it wants anytime for all or selectively (ie. own a real nice .CO and you could be looking at a huge renewal bill; not unheard of either - read up on .TV variable pricing practices).

Bottom line is ccTLDs (.CO, .TV, .US, etc) are not the same as gTLDs (.COM, .NET, .ORG, etc). Buyer beware!

Ron