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

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.

[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.

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.

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.