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The Ascendancy of .co

Posted by kdawson on from the milking-the-cash-cow dept.

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.

22 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. citibank.co by HongPong · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    --
    --hongpong.com
  2. It's not mined out. by bmo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    1. Re:It's not mined out. by Nursie · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:It's not mined out. by Kosi · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:It's not mined out. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

    4. Re:It's not mined out. by Raenex · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    5. Re:It's not mined out. by kyrio · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:It's not mined out. by John+Hasler · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

      --
      Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
  3. .co for company ? by whiteboy86 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    .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 ?

    1. Re:.co for company ? by nyctopterus · · Score: 4, Funny

      ...and .co.ck

      (Cook Islands, really, look it up!)

  4. Let's call it scam when it is a scam by Englabenny · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Let's call it scam when it is a scam by alphatel · · Score: 3, 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.

      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.

      --
      When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
  5. Re:Godaddy mistake? by RDW · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.'

  6. A money grab by KingSkippus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:A money grab by axx · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      No wit here.
  7. GoDaddy stories on Slashdot by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 4, Informative

    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."

  8. What registrar would you recommend? by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

  9. Vote with yr wallet. by windcask · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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...

  10. Re:The right question by windcask · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  11. Namecheap by KingSkippus · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  12. People may not be paying by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, 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.

  13. ccTLDs are Not governed by ICANN Policies... by Ron+Bennett · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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