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First Domain Registration Competition Goes Online
Asher Lev writes "The first competition for domain name registration is now online. They aren't offering any deals, but you can check it out anyway at register.com. "
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I know "first post" is supposed to be met with vicious down-moderating and collective disgust....
but "firstpost.com" was pretty funny.
no, you were not. I thought so too. I even looked around the site for the rules.
And what is a "Forman Interactive Corp"?
So what your saying is NSI wins?? :)
hoo boy, does that strike a chord. "accounts payable", anyone?
I interviewed with register.com a few months ago and didn't get a good impression about the whole operation. Not to mention the fact that their office was rather... dingy. Although I guess I just could be used to working in a clean environment where the toilet works correctly.
[Author of the url above]
If more companies do in fact get access to selling domains then your completly right, prices should in fact drop to competitive levels. I was unaware that 30 companies were lined up beyond the test phase. That does change the situation considerably. It would appear then that register.com is attempting to excercise market power while it still can.
I stand corrected on the number of sellers. If indeed, as you say, 30 will be selling domains prices will fall significantly...
I wonder if NSI will attempt to vertically integrate..
What's better, a few caustic remarks or loads of registered dimwits writing reams of electronic excrement to support their misguided feelings of somehow being society's elite?
Oh look at me, I'm highly paid for my amazing webpage programming skills. Very few people could possibly comprehend my level of electronic wizardry. I'm the man and chicks dig me! My skills also (aparently) make me an expert on any and all subjects. Allow me to share my cast knowledge with you in only the most articulate and well-spelled manner. Slashdot is truly a haven for the embattled renaissance-man/geek.
u.r.a :
Anonymous Spanker
Shit, that should have been "vast knowledge"
Note to self: watch your typing when making fun of people and being a general nuisance
It's more fun to munch on a big, fat, horse's dick
Anonymous Spanker
I miss my girlfriend, and you'll pay for that Slashdot!
Try sluttylu.sh. I've been living in cardboard boxes since someone stole drunkenwhores.com from me.
I was going to be richer than Gates, damn-it!
Anonymous Spanker
If I were NSI, I would try to horizontally procreate, it's much more entertaining (especially on the internet, 35% of web traffic CAN'T be wrong)
Anonymous Spanker
Registration details:
101.md is available
Please click next to each domain name that you are interested in registering
No. Natual monopoly's only when something is too expensive to dublicate, like fiberoptic in the ocean, oil pipes etc. Software is by no means hard to copy, isn't it? So one can't justify that some data is a natural monopoly (unless it is something like NSA).
what if the stuff will be distributed with Linux/BSD? In fact, I find the idea that DNS is owned by someone who charges completely indecent fees unacceptable. Why won't the Internet community re-code full thing and provide zillions of domain names for us all? No cenzorship, many first level domains (not just com/org/net), why we wait for those guys to dispute for ages whether to intro .shop/.web etc, when it is damn easy to automate the whole process? Of course it will require some big guys to have hardware to run servers, but well, if FSF could charge get involved (we need some organisation), sponsors or advertisers could pay up all hardware. After all, Linux doesn't require much?
I say, screw those greedy bastards from NSI. If someone wants to own fuck.net, it's his personal desire. In fact, some guys from Russia created such a thing, which enabled them to have domain name in Russian, free service you can register ANY domain. Drawback -- requires client on the user's computer to translate everything on the fly. While personally I do not support their efforts to promote only Russian language, but the whole idea is viable. They are there: www.names.ru (in Russian)
$299 is more than an average annual salary there in Moldova, compare this with 2-3 ours of work of the so-so programming guy in the USA, got a clue?
yeah so does voxel and a few others. does va require banners for their oss sites? im looking for a host for my open source guitar-tab editor..
Haha "upgrading"
more like fixing their security problems.
I'm serious about this one - I emailed them offering to help (with source code of one of their cgi's attached) and a few minutes later they shut down the system
In what sense? Given their sedentary lifestyles, some of these guys are bound to be pretty "vast". Knowledge of any consequence is not the norm around here, so you must mean that.
Your monkey-love connection,
Anonymous Spanker
What do you mean "off-topic" that was flame-bait!
Anonymous Spanker
Sure, you don't pay them anything, but each registrar pays them something like $17 dollar for every domain put into the registry--which NSI still owns. If this is competition, I'd hate to see a monopoly.
Suppose I register foo5150.com with NSI, while someone else registers foo5150.com at register.com. Obviously one registration wil suceed and one will fail. The question is, who wins? Somehow I don't see both registries synching their clocks to WWV and logging all registrations to nanosecond resolution on UTC. IRC had net splits. Now we've got domain registry splits to worry about. How cooperative are these places with each other anyway?
What happened to the other group? I thought there were supposed to be 4 or 5 companies registering?
The big problem is the lack of good names. I thought this was supposed to be attacked by 7 new top level domains like .firm, .info, .web, etc.
Does anyone know what ever happened to the new domains?
Yup, here's the code chunk
/^(shit|tits|piss)/i ) {
whois.cgi.990607:if ($domain=~
There security is really horrible. I mean, really really bad. I wouldn't trust them one bit.
A quick thing I wrote to discuss this, I'm out of time (have other things to do), but some of you might find this a good read:
http://coca.kellogg.nwu.edu/econ.html
It discusses why this "competitive" market, is in fact, not competitive.
Last time I registered a hostname with register.com, I was bombarded with email
solicitations for web hosting, site creation
software, etc, etc. It's the same old crap.
Your discussion seems to assume that there will be a limited number of companies that will be selling domains. It's true that the current test phase only allows in five companies, but once the test is finished any company that can gain accredidation from ICANN can sell domains. Last I heard there were about 30 more companies lined up.
.com, .net and .org databases and will be charging the registrars a yearly fee ($7/domain? I forget.) to "administer" it, so there will be a floor price domain registration, but once large numbers of companies have the right to modify the database, prices should drop to more appropriate, commodity levels.
NSI does maintain a monopoly on the
me too
I've waited all this time...now I can register a domain! I just refused to give NSI my cash.
Anybody know register.com's price tag for a domain? Or is the same?
VENI! VIDI! VICI!
Posted by Nina Simone:
I registered two domains with them last month with zero problems and no additional cost. They even parked them for free.
The sole problem is they had a sales rep call to pitch their hosting & ecommerce services. He was friendly, smart and wasn't pushy when I said no.
I love having an alternative and will use them again.
A .nu domain is $25 for one year.
--
If any other potential registrars are reading this, please consider the following approaches to differentiating yourselves from those evil bastards at NSI:
- Charge a *reasonable* renewal fee.
- Commit to maintaining a domain name in the face of trademark infringement claims until or unless a court of appropriate jurisdiction tells you otherwise.
- Train your customer service reps to treat customers like customers.
Hopefully one or more of the new registrars will be willing to do one or more of these things.I *hate* NSI.
The "new" TLDs (.firm, .web, etc.) were never sent through any standards body. Frankly they were a bad idea from a rather arrogant company (AlterNIC) that a lot of people thought was creating a new standard because they saw "NIC" in it.
-- Old Man Kensey
TLD: .md
Price: $299/1 year as of April 02, 1999
Country: Moldova
Comment: Intended for use by the medical profession
Quick, somebody tell the people in Moldova their entire country is part of the medical profession...
-- Old Man Kensey
Seems they're having server problems; most CGI's give internal server errors. *sigh* Can't even find out the prices! (although I saw $35/yr mentioned in another article; it's less than both the old service and a lot less than the .uk service)
--
Hrm, would that mean a dog lover wouldn't be able to register shitsu.org? (Note: It seems this isn't registered yet, so any shitsu owners can feel free to register it. I know I don't want it)
--
.us domains are free and ugly.
They look like:
john.robert.smith.podunk.arkansas.us
Full name, town, state. So farewell to any privacy about personal information, plus no indication of content of your domain unless you're a k12 school.
Am I the only one who thought this was some sort of "first one to register foo.com wins a prize" deals?
Actually I believe there is a review going on about the .ca domain names and it is very likely that they will no longer be free. They are talking about a $10-20 Canadian Fee
Gee, it sounds like someone has been there.
Either that, or someone who's remarkably prescient.
Somehow, I get the feeling that there are other people out there who might feel like saying the same thing as Benedict. Or maybe not.
A little too popular. Or maybe just the usual /. effect.
whee!
I was all psyched about getting 101.md but alas it appears to be taken already. Damn it.
F /...
---
Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
Actually, they were one of 5 official registrars for the test phase which began March 31. I took advantage of their service May 5. Let's hear it for competition.
I can't really elaborate, but let's just say I would not trust these people with my data, vital or otherwise. Rich Forman is a lying sack of sh*t.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
The base registry information (basically, the name servers for the domain and who the responsible registrar is) is available separately from NSI's whois, on a web page at www.nsiregistry.com. I'm not sure whether I think their consequent hijacking of the rs.internic.net whois gateway that all our whois commands point to by default is good, but at least in the open source community we can fix that problem quickly if we decide to. On the other hand, since NSI is probably not going to be running the registry long term, 'nsiregistry.com' is an odd choice of domain name.
We are a long way from this multiple-registrar stuff working smoothly!! But, in the long run I think it will be better than what we have now. The transition is going to be painful and confusing, though.
--BitDancer
So I do a normal, workaday 'whois' query, and today it says at the bottom:
Well, I most certainly do NOT agree! How can my tech support people help our domain customers if we can't make "commercial use" of the informtation returned by a whois query, for gnu's sake? There's noplace *else* to get this info. I just check register.com, and their whois page just queries the NSI database, and that same message shows up at the bottom of the response screen. Which, I'm sure, is why NSI put it there.
NSI has been trying to claim that they have a compilation copyright (or something like that) on the current database. This smells like an attempt to assert that, and I sure hope the stuff hits the fan over this.
This is intolerable.
--Bitdancer
I mean, isn't the whole point basically the database, and isn't that a natural monopoly?
/is/ their business.
I thought most people were faulting NSI's database administration more than any other part of their business - mainly because that
So what's the point of having "competition" when the only value added a competitor can bring to the table is friendlier web forms?
D
----
I think varesearch hosts opensource projects for free as a community service.
Actually, if it would improve the service, most would be happy to pay $100 or more. Charging less than a hardcover book for a domain name only benefits the squatters and overloads the system.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Why not everyone get together, compile an open (but controlled) database (similar to the cddb situation) and spontaneously replace internic? If nobody points their DNS to internic, it doesn't exist and we rid ourselves of NetworkSolutions. I have been trying to get changes through on a new domain since close to 19 May. No luck yet.
Also, if nobody challenges the notice at the bottom of the whois results soon, I don't think the courts will be disagreeing with it as much in the future.
The only way this company can survive is offering incredible customer service. I'm personally quite surprised they're charging the same price. I suppose they don't want to get into a rate war, which they'd loose since they don't have a foothold yet.
I see no reason to use them yet. If they don't offer SOME form of incentive to use them, they'll die.
the great compitition that many people expected. But it's a start. 70$ for a domain instead of 75$ over at NSI is still a savings...five dollars can put a gallon or two of gas in my car..but it's a start. Hopefully more companies will get on it and we'll end up with more higher level domains and a little more choice in our domain names, along with a smaller price tag. it's not alot but it's a start.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
They already have 741984 domains registered? I didn't think that they had been around long enough for that. Have they pre-registered a bunch of likely names and will then pass them on to the visitors to their site? That would be domain name squatting on their part.
Or is the 741984 value the total number of domain names registered on the entire 'net, including those registered by NSI? In that case, they really shouldn't have that number on their page. I mean, I could start a hamburger stand and put up a sign saying "Billions and Billions sold", but that doesn't mean that I did the selling of them.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
First off Register.com continues to censors registration requests even for domain names that NSI itself will register!!
Try registering SHITSDAASDASD.COM or some similar variation at Register.com and it will say the name isn't available even though it really is. Then goto NSI and try registering the same domain and select 'Reserve' and you'll find it works as it should since NSI removed the SHIT filter awhile back.
Appearantly Register.com isn't up to speed and when I emailed Register.com yesterday, they denied they are rejecting registration *requests* based on profane keywords even though they really are.
A more disturbing problem is that Register.com has *appearantly* blacklisted some people preventing them from registering domains through them (not sure the exact machanism, but assume it's either done via email address and/or phone#). Perhaps, this is just bad luck, but my personal experience suggests otherwise. Anyone else experience similar problems, please post and/or email me.
Bottom line is until Register.com gets their customer service and their policies straight, I'd strongly recommend people to avoid them.
At least NSI is a known quantity and while their service isn't great, they for the most part have done a decent job. So for now I'm sticking with NSI until there's a compelling reason to switch to another registrar - ie. better price and/or extra services.
Ron Bennett
... can they take "existing" domains and do the renewals for them, or do I have to take a chance by letting my current domain "Expire", enter it as new with register.com and "hope" that nobody grabs it in the mean-time?
I'd LOVE to start dumping money somewhere OTHER than NSI, but I'm not about to chance losing my domain to do it.
Their site doesn't seem to make any mention of that and you would THINK they'd also be trying to make some go of grabbing renewal profits if they could do so...
"vast knowledge"? I think you're half right.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
The problem with the new registrars is that they still have to go through Network Solutions' horrible database system. Almost every problem I've had with my domains has been due to records not being changed in the NSI db, usually without any indication of what was wrong, and sometimes with no indication either way for days. I have friends that have sat for weeks while their dns change forms get denied over and over again.
NSI's customer service is terrible, and I'd love to use another company that placed importance on customer satisfaction, but if you're having problems changing records on your dotcom records, I don't know how a second party like register.com can help.
If NSI allowed a competing firm to build a web interface that let you edit your records directly (instead of having to use antiquated e-mail forms with cryptic functions and names all over them), I'd move my domains to the new firm immediately. But NSI has registered over 5 million domains (and making half a million a day on registration fees!) and wants to continue doing so, so you'll never see a competing firm offering more features, a better interface, or a price less than $35/yr.
It's called a monopoly, and I think Network Solutions enjoys that status immensely.
But I guess registering in the .com domain is cheaper than the .ac (Ascension Island) domain.
-- Alastair
I have registered 4 domains for my business over the past week, and the final confirmation for each one came within 20 minutes. It used to take several days. As much as I hate NSI, I have to hand it to them - their response time has improved.
I haven't had to deal with their customer service... from my past experiences with them it has a *long* way to go before it would even be considered equal to that of the California Department of Motor Vehicles (lowest possible denominator).
Perhaps they have turned a new leaf now that they have competition. However, as far as I'm concerned, it's too little too late. They should have done this at least a year ago. Unless they lower their prices, I will be taking my business to register.com.
--SONET
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. --Benjamin Franklin
I knew it. Someone got root.sh and login.sh already! =)
-- The intelligence on this planet is a constant, but the population is growing. --
http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,3 5221,00.html
But it's still very sketchy. It's going to have to happen someday, just like IPv6, namespace is just pitiful right now.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
I was hoping they would have new TLDs ... where is -definitive- information on what new TLDs are going to be proffered and when they will activate?
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
you'll never see a competing firm offering more features, a better interface, or a price less than $35/yr.
Personally I would be willing to pay up to $100 a year if there was good service/interface I have been requesting since january to have my conformation permissions changed and have not heard a word from NSI/internic. Would switch in a heart beat.. even repay the 2 year price if I can be allowed to change my info instantly and easily.
...If their customer service is better than NSI (and how could it not be?), they'll make a killing, even if they do charge the same price.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
They're still using Network Solutions' proprietary lookup database for their queries.
Aaron
They also registered all of nacurh.com, nacurh.net, and nacurh.org, even though they're really just and
But it does appear that NSI grabbed at least one domain that people had been banging down the doors for and that they had refused to give out, about two weeks before register.com went official.
As for domain registrars registering queried names, well, I wouldn't be surprised if most domainmongers do that if the name looks useful to them.
Could register.com legally charge a higher price for one domain than their posted rate for registration?
Regards,
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
So what's the difference? They even call themselves "the first domain registrar to register domain names." Huh? Isn't that a redundancy? Doubletalk even?
Don't expect this to help any of those nagging NS censorship issues... since we should probably assume that NS bought all the leftover dirty ones themselves recently. Goodness, what if register.com had allowed someone to buy the mother(~.com'er)-of-all-domains?
Regards,
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
I was under the impression that the whole point of having domain registration competitors was to improve service and prices. NSI has, to a degree, improved their service since they found out they were going to lose their monopoly. I recently changed the NS records on five domains. I had confirmation for 4 of the domain changes within 20 minutes. The fifth domain took 45 days, with an email complaint after thirty, and a telephone call (with a 45 minute long-distance hold) on the 42nd day. So, better, but not great yet. But I don't see how NSI has anything to fear from register.com as yet. The web site looks like it's easier to navigate, but since their using NSI's records, and they don't have NSI's system, some features you have to go to NSI for anyway. How would the telco's survive if you had to get some features from BellSouth to fully utilize BellAtlantic?
this anonymous coward lameness situation is getting worse and worse.
Juln
Their news section claims that they handled 20,000 registrations in July, 1998. Their news items date back to January, 1998. What's the deal between them "going live" yesterday, and having spent a year and a half handling registrations?
Geeky modern art T-shirts
now now... click that happy icon.... there isnt that better? no thought involved... no creativity.... just click the icons.... click the happy icons... you dont have to think or know anything.... click..... nice mousey button... clickey clickey....
How come my toaster dont have a shutdown icon?
I cant be expected to unplug the thing! I'm lost without pretty icons!!! Help me!!!!!!
This scarcasim brought to you by the Letter Q.
What do the big Open Source .org's do about web hosting? I've been considering registering an .org site (hey! nobody steal gnulixguy.org!) but when it comes to inexpensive web hosting for a non-profit entity, what is the OSS crowd doing?
...signed, the ever-lovable gnulix guy!
Thing is, AlterNic wasn't really Open Source and neutral. They were in it specifically to take down and show-up InterNic, IMHO. If a truly neutral, non-commercial, supported by a community of volunteers version of InterNic existed, it might very well work.
'Course, again, ICANN is supposed to be that and do that in it's own way.
We could really use Jon Postel right now, methinks.
The cheapest available is .ca if you're Canadian, .cx if you're from the Christmas Islands, or .us if you're American. They're all as free as can be (I think .us is free; I could be wrong). They have stricter guidelines than the paid-for ones (.ca only allows one domain name per organization), but hey: it's free.
So like what is the point if they all are gonna charge $70 bones? you can get a .nu for $65
if they want to win...make it cheeper!
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
If they can provide better service than Network Solutions which shouldn't be very hard they will make a killing.