First .dev Domains Go Live

https://blog.google/technology/developers/hello-dev/

by adamschwartz • 7 years ago

122 220 7 years ago

blog.google

CedarHill• 7 years ago

Stupid expensive for what really?

mtmail• 7 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19179465 suggests it's an ICAAN rule to charge higher prices on initial offering.

444 comments a couple of days ago in "Google .dev domain early access" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178757

barbecue_sauce2• 7 years ago

They get progressively cheaper as we approach February 28. After that, I believe registrations are free with a $12 maintenance cost.

CydeWeys29• 7 years ago

Minor correction, registrations are never free. Come 2019-02-28 16:00:00Z, they will be available at the base price. Registrars set their own prices, so depending on which registrar you're using, expect that to be around $12-20/yr (including the initial year).

swebs• 7 years ago

free with a $12 maintenance cost

So $12?

snowwolf3• 7 years ago

Slack and Github were so worried about someone cybersquatting that they were willing to pay $11,500 each to get those domains today? I guess that's the point of the Dutch auction system, but still seems like a waste of money.

lgierth• 7 years ago

The sunrise period for trademark owners was a whole month until today, with a much more reasonable price tag.

snowwolf3• 7 years ago

That makes more sense. I had missed that there was a sunrise period for the .dev tld.

morpheuskafka2• 7 years ago

For Microsoft (which owns GitHub) that is a tiny expense, but if they couldn't really afford it they could just file a dispute under UDRP.

reaperducer3• 7 years ago

But does the money come from Microsoft or from GitHub?

In a lot of the large companies I've worked, money is siloed from one operating unit to the next. They would send bills between units and sometimes even departments.

The larger the company, the more common this seemed. It's not one giant piggy bank.

arkitaip• 7 years ago

It's the cost of coffee for a couple of days or so.

snowwolf3• 7 years ago

Is this Venezuelan coffee?

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-venezuela-cafe-con-l...

But note I think you mean the $12 price but that’s only available from the 28th Feb. To buy today it is $11,500 (unless as others have pointed out you got it as part of the trademark sunrise period)

JMTQp8lwXL• 7 years ago

If you buy the domain during trademark holder's period, you pay the normal price, and not the day 1 landrush price. So no, Slack et. al. did not pay $11,500 to secure their name.

sdinsn3• 7 years ago

11k for a large company barely registers on their radar.

victor106• 7 years ago

Would rather spend that money on validating a product idea or improving customer experience.

sascha_sl3• 7 years ago

12000 a pop and filed under "small business".

Ok.

CydeWeys29• 7 years ago

It's a descending price auction. That's the highest price; it goes down with each day.

sascha_sl3• 7 years ago

Okay I appreciate you're still willing to engage my snarky commentary, but I really really disagree that 12k is going to be a good barrier to enable people to "get the domain they really want". It enables people with money to do that.

It looks like someone looked at this and said "well 12 grand is affordable but not at scale so people will think twice" - no this is just impossible for some people and amplifying unequal distribution. People with this kind of money already have a "I can get 1000 of em" advantage at $12 a year. No need to give those people more of a head start.

This policy comes from a place of privilege and I despise it. Period.

What's next, ReCAPTCHA bypass if you have Google One? (Ha I say that like it's not already implicitly the case that RC trusts a well tracked Google user more.)

CraftThatBlock2• 7 years ago

Also as another commenter said, Trademark owners (GitHub, Slack, etc) could get their domains earlier at a lower price.

sascha_sl3• 7 years ago

Which is funny because trademark owners tend to not be "small businesses".

denom• 7 years ago

I sort of get the appeal of a '.dev' TLD, but I wish that google donated the whole thing to those who were using it informally for local development.

That would have been a good gift to all the devs out there.

francislavoie• 7 years ago

There are more devs than just web devs. Just sayin'

organsnyder• 7 years ago

Web devs aren't the only ones that need test/dummy hostnames. That being said, as mentioned in another comment, there are other TLDs already reserved for such use.

Twisol2• 7 years ago

The `.test` and `.localhost` TLDs are already reserved for such purposes: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606

reaperducer3• 7 years ago

.test is OK, but as was pointed out in the HN discussion on this topic last week, .localhost is problematic in some operating systems.

dragonwriter6• 7 years ago

localhost is reserved for a very different purpose, though .local is a reserved pseudo-TLD for a purpose encompassing much of what was suggest by GP for .dev.

jolmg• 7 years ago

Interesting. Because my /etc/hosts file had the following as a default:

    127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
    ::1  localhost.localdomain localhost

I thought it was `.localdomain` that was reserved.

marksomnian2• 7 years ago

There is one thing that annoys me about generic TLDs like .dev, .website, .cloud, .network etc. For example, Salesforce have https://crm.dev - are they the only CRM in the world? Hell no, but they're the biggest, so they can be the only one in the .dev space. Same with workers.dev.

stanleydrew• 7 years ago

What's your proposed alternative? That generic category names should be disallowed within a TLD? Or that some public or community-driven version of a for-profit service should control the generic names?

ianai• 7 years ago

Probably the former as it doesn’t require as much aggrandizement.

I wonder whether a different approach would work. Instead of basing TLD name spacing on nebulous terms (com,net,org,io,edu,etc) create a naming system that better reflects the real world. The abstracted terms lead to clashing. So addressing actually reflects physical addressing. There’s only ever going to be one company at Apple’s corporate address. Not sure how it’d work.

Edit-the tech to do this via gps even exists today.

derefr2• 7 years ago

Maybe names that have obvious “generic” squatter value—i.e. names that (at the time of their attempted purchase) describe entire verticals, rather than uniquely identifying a business—should be put up for auction rather than being first-come-first-served.

(That would also include names that describe a vertical that someone tried to trademark into being the name of a business anyway: pets.com and the like. If that trademark isn’t already well known, then this is just an attempt to end-run the auction system, rather than a valid claim.)

Given that TLDs can decide their own allocation policies, I’m surprised none of them have tried this yet.

CUViper• 7 years ago

Some computer company gets to have apple.com, the car company does not have nissan.com, etc. etc.

djsumdog• 7 years ago

I'm really glad the Nissan case went the way it did. It was the guy's family name after all, as well as a word in Hebrew.

jakejarvis• 7 years ago

For those who haven’t heard about it, the nissan.com fiasco was a crazy yet fascinating story: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_vs._Nissan_Com...

morpheuskafka2• 7 years ago

First come, first served. Just like real estate. It's not a trademark or anything.

OedipusRex3• 7 years ago

Except it's not, Google has price ranges for registration dates. So if you wanted to registered today (Feb 19th) that's gonna cost you $11,500, but if you want to wait until it's free, that's 10 days from now.

https://domains.google/tld/dev/

zavi• 7 years ago

You can buy it from Salesforce if you like it.

TheDong3• 7 years ago

There is one thing that annoys me about generic TLDs like .dev, .website, .cloud, .network

And this doesn't annoy you about '.com' or '.org'?

'pets.com' is owned by petsmart, and they're sure not the only pet store. Practically every generic sounding '.com' has been taken and has the "issue" you cite. 'x.org' was registered in the early 90s, and the Xorg foundation certainly isn't the only 'X' out there.

It's a little too late to protest now, this problem has existed since the dawn of the domain name system.

austenallred• 7 years ago

If I own box.com can no one else sell boxes? It's just a namespace.

everdev4• 7 years ago

Owning a category domain name is not a guarantee of success or market position. (ex. pets.com)

Think of all the companies with domain names that do not reference their product category. (ex. google.com, amazon.com, etc.). It's not like they needed search.com or shopping.com to be successful.

benologist6• 7 years ago

On a recent thread Google personnel mentioned that ICANN forces all domain providers to backup their data so that any domain provider going bankrupt won't affect domains. However there was no mention of what procedures Google Domains themselves have put in place to protect their customers in case their customers get irreversibly banned somewhere within Google's vast empire.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178757

If the answer is they keep your domains, like they do with Adsense revenue when they ban accounts, then you should definitely be getting your .dev through a different domain provider who Google cannot avoid cooperating with because of ICANN rules they have to follow.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/adsense-lawsuit/248135/

sudhirj• 7 years ago

The domains customers aren't tied to Google user accounts. You buy them from the regular registrars like Gandi.net or (heaven forbid) Godaddy, and use them from your dashboards there. You don't have to use a gmail address anywhere.

benologist6• 7 years ago

If you buy them through Google Domains you need your Google account to renew domains, set nameservers etc, which is why these other registrars should be used.

This same argument actually dates back years for not using your web host for your domain registrar, because of contrived problems hindering domain transfers.

reaperducer3• 7 years ago

I think that's what he meant by, "you should definitely be getting your .dev through a different domain provider."

C1sc0cat2• 7 years ago

I used to work for a registry, and ICANN had very strict escrow rules for registrys'.

This was for a real TLD but I suspect that there is something similar for vanity domains.

dragonwriter6• 7 years ago

The new gTLDs are just as much “real TLDs” to ICANN as the older gTLDs and ccTLDs.

PunksATawnyFill• 7 years ago

ICANN is a scam. It should have abolished canned TLDs altogether, but instead turned them into a profiteering scheme.

There’s no reason that a domain can’t end in ANY string. Bingo, no more fake “shortage.”

babypuncher• 7 years ago

For what reasons does Google actually ban accounts?

core-questions• 7 years ago

Google owns Youtube, which bans people for any reason they feel like, including people for whom it had become a full-time job with their channel monetization paying the bills.

It is extremely unwise and very much against the founding spirit of the Internet to allow one company this much control, especially one that has shown itself to be censorious in the past.

benologist6• 7 years ago

Information withheld - https://www.reddit.com/r/k12sysadmin/comments/9qg2vw/google_...

System errors - https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/7nrx07/google_...

We're twenty years in so likely there are actually thousands of legitimate reasons, the problem is their system seems designed to dismiss any evidence to the contrary so a false positive is a lifetime ban too.

joombaga• 7 years ago

Credit card chargebacks to the Google store can do it.

Aldo_MX• 7 years ago

Reselling a Pixel Phone:

https://forums.dansdeals.com/index.php?topic=68066.0

the_jeremy• 7 years ago

do you have a registrar recommendation? I'm planning on a .dev being my first domain.

jug• 7 years ago

I have no good idea how it compares to others these days but Gandi has had pre-registrations for .dev.

wave100• 7 years ago

I've had good experiences with Namecheap in the past.

doublepg23• 7 years ago

I also have a good track record with Namecheap for bussiness and personal domains.

ryanmarsh• 7 years ago

I'd really like to see which .dev domains are getting registered at the higher prices. Is there any way to see a feed of this data?

icebraining9• 7 years ago

In theory, you can get that here: https://dnpedia.com/tlds/daily.php (write "dev" in the TLD column)

Doesn't seem to have those listed in the top article, though, not sure why. Maybe it'll update later.

EDIT: The official source seems to be https://czds.icann.org/

CydeWeys29• 7 years ago

CZDS is a once-daily export. So the earliest you'd see information about domains registered today would be tomorrow.

J_cst• 7 years ago

On dnpedia they state that spothero.dev was registered today

ImJasonH• 7 years ago

https://google.dev/ says:

There was no service found for the uri requested.

notafrog2• 7 years ago

Looks like they were in a hurry with the page title too:

Error 404 (Not Found)!!1

toast02• 7 years ago

That's an attempt at humor / adopting a jokey tone. Not an actual typo.

jrockway2• 7 years ago

All of Google's errors do this. It's wonderful.

CydeWeys29• 7 years ago

Yeah, that site isn't configured/launched yet; if/when it is, expect to see some kind of announcement. It's common to not resolve at all or display a simple error message when you already have your domain but aren't using it yet.

mchannon• 7 years ago

This landrush is different.

Try putting a one-character .dev domain in your cart (0.dev is available as of now). It's not a lump sum plus $12/year. It's thousands every year after registration.

In a way, I guess this is useful for deterring "domainers".

Even a 4-letter word or name .dev is hundreds of dollars a year. I wonder if the annual fee will drop as the days go by or just the purchase price.

icebraining9• 7 years ago

They're called "premium domains". I think all new gTLDs have them.

celdon25• 7 years ago

It's not "deterring" domainers, it's asserting an unfair monopoly over the practice itself.

jlarocco• 7 years ago

I'm not familiar with all of the details of how domain registration works, but will these always have to go through Google?

I'm interested in buying one, but not from them.

judge2020• 7 years ago

Many other registrars, like Namecheap, Gandi, etc. also can register .dev

CydeWeys29• 7 years ago

The full list of participating registrars is here: https://www.registry.google/register-a-domain/#!/

ravenstine2• 7 years ago

Do TLDs even matter? I'm working on building a professional blog, and although a .dev TLD seems appropriate, using a cheaper one like .co or .be, or even .io seems functionally identical and a lot less costly. Paying hundreds or thousands for .dev seems like paying for pure vanity.

Is it going to help people reach your site? I kinda doubt it. Will Google use it to index your site differently? Maybe, but I dunno. I hope not, but it would kind of make sense.

CydeWeys29• 7 years ago

.io domains cost a lot more than .dev domains.

ravenstine2• 7 years ago

On a per-year basis, yes. However, this is the subtotal at the checkout on namecheap when I typed in ravenstine.dev:

C$14,572.71

icebraining9• 7 years ago

You just need to pay hundreds or thousands during EAP or for a "premium" domain. A regular .dev domain will cost less than $15/year.

cbhl• 7 years ago

I believe the price of a .dev eventually will go to $12/year. The hundreds/thousands price applies to people who want to pay more upfront to get the first shot at a "popular" domain name.

timdavila• 7 years ago

TLDs matter, in that you want .com if you can get it. Otherwise, personally I would use something more well known, but most of the differences are vanity, unless you're using a country specific TLD such as .co.uk or .us

uniformlyrandom• 7 years ago

.dev is only prohibitively expensive during the pre-sale. After Feb 28, there will be no extra charge ($0 one-time fee).

cutety• 7 years ago

The initial $11k premium threw me off at first, but if you click the (not immediately obvious) “Early Access” button you can get the full EAP pricing chart, or here’s a direct link: https://support.google.com/domains/answer/9232417?hl=en#inva...

To save some clicks (in addition to the $12/year):

Feb 19: $11.5k

Feb 20: $3.5k

Feb 21: $1150

Feb 22-24: $350

Feb 25-27: $125

After the 27th you only have to pay the normal $12/year rate.

michaelt• 7 years ago

Unless it's a "premium domain" which has a separate pricing structure, independent of the release phase, and renewal fees that stay higher forever.

Hence, right now kjaegrlkjnfvaf.dev is "$11,500 + $12/year" [0] while hn.dev is "$11,500 + $720/year" [1]

So alex.dev and aj.dev will cost $720/year forever, tim.dev, james.dev and emma.dev are $360/year, tony.dev and grace.dev are $180/year, olivia.dev and harry.dev are $98/year, yusef.dev, oscar.dev and sanjay.dev are $12/year.

Maybe not "prohibitive" but a big premium for the Alexes among us!

[0] https://domains.google.com/m/registrar/search?searchTerm=kja... [1] https://domains.google.com/m/registrar/search?searchTerm=hn....

WorldMaker4• 7 years ago

Just don't forget that .co is subject to Columbian jurisdiction, .be to Belgian jurisdiction, and .io to British jurisdiction. Also, .io has colonialist/imperialist baggage: https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how-the-u-...

perlgeek• 7 years ago

... as opposed to .dev, which is under what, google's jurisdiction?

mslev• 7 years ago

Me: "Wow [myfirstname].dev is available! I gotta get it!"

Aaaaaaand its $11,500.

CydeWeys29• 7 years ago

Yeah, it's a Dutch auction. This is the first price step, so everything costs that much today, even adgfhjklhajklsdfghaksdfasdf.dev. The price will go down according to the schedule, and it'll be bought when someone is willing to pay that much for it.

markdown2• 7 years ago

The rich get first pick. How very capitalist.

ASalazarMX• 7 years ago

"Vamoose, provincial. These are not your lands."

qnk3• 7 years ago

Mine is not available either and I doubt someone paid $11,500 for an Italian name with the dev extension. How come? My guess is some providers are "reserving" them.

technofiend• 7 years ago

Which is exactly why I won't check on any domains I want until I'm ready to buy them: I don't need a "domain taster" locking them up for profit.

xienze• 7 years ago

Try to register through Gandi. They give you options that decrease in price all the way down to ~$16 -- that's the "get it when it GAs" price. If someone scoops it up before you, you're refunded. Otherwise, it's yours.

I managed to get <lastname>.dev, and it's a somewhat common last name, for $133.50 on the "GA" pricing. I expect someone will grab it before then. But if not...

qnk3• 7 years ago

Nah, it says "Unavailable" on Gandi. It seems that somebody paid full price, although it is not operative => mauricio.dev

ehsankia• 7 years ago

It'll be 12$ on get.dev once it hits GA.

rynop• 7 years ago

Same experience, huge turn-off. I was hoping for `.dev` to be free and along the lines of letsencrypt.org. Very disappointed

CydeWeys29• 7 years ago

The huge problem with free domain names is the unfathomable amount of abuse, phishing, scamming, etc., that they are used to perpetrate.

satysin• 7 years ago

Just wait a week. If it is still available on the 28th it will be $12

burger_moon• 7 years ago

Kinda weird that Google issued itself web.dev and opensource.dev

It feels like those would've been better suited for non-profit orgs

nbar1• 7 years ago

The content on those domains is highly relevant and appears to be thorough. What do you think a non-profit could have used them for that would be better?

davchana• 7 years ago

Well they are the owner/operator of .dev, so first dibs are for them.

frou_dh• 7 years ago

Only if you for some reason attribute gravitas to it.

This is just yet another scattershot TLD. It's about as consequential as .ninja in the grand scheme of things.

jgrahamc• 7 years ago

Such as https://workers.dev/

iambvk2• 7 years ago

$98 a year? Are they serious? Do they think all developers live in the first world?

thfuran• 7 years ago

They only care that enough do that they can make bank.

icebraining9• 7 years ago

Where are you seeing that price? Maybe you found a "premium" domain, the base rate seems to be (will be, after EAP) about $12/year.

iambvk2• 7 years ago

Google domains page says $98 a year after early-access.

hombre_fatal• 7 years ago

As another comment says, .dev is about as inconsequential as .ninja.

It just happens to be cute for developers from a vanity perspective, but it doesn't matter.

tschellenbach• 7 years ago

It didn't work, top domains were already gone at 09:00

kowdermeister2• 7 years ago

It certainly worked to stop me grabbing top domains.

strictnein• 7 years ago

...it requires HTTPS to connect to all .dev websites. This protects people who visit your site against ad malware and tracking injection by internet service providers

The latter is true (it protects against injection), but I'm not sure how the former is. How would it protect against ad malware?

toast02• 7 years ago

It protects against ad malware injection by ISPs. It certainly doesn't protect users from the other end of the TLS socket.

dragonwriter6• 7 years ago

I think you are reading it wrong. It's not “(ad malware) and (tracking injection by ISPs)” but “(ad malware and tracking) injection by ISPs”.

josteink2• 7 years ago

But nobody with any respect for themselves has an un-ISP doing borderline illegal shit like that.

It hardly seems like a worthwhile problem to solve at gTLD-scale.

jerluc• 7 years ago

My assumption from that sentence is that both "ad malware" and "ad tracking" are injected by some ISPs somewhere between the client and the server. By forcing HTTPS, you'd prevent some amount of this by ensuring the data in transit from client-to-server-to-client is encrypted (and thus mostly tamper-proof) using the .dev domain's public cert.

CydeWeys29• 7 years ago

Also commonly injected by malicious or compromised WiFi routers.

jmull• 7 years ago

Maybe they mean both the ad malware and tracking are injected by your ISP?

kowdermeister2• 7 years ago

Hmm, any idea why the list of countries are so limited?

https://support.google.com/domains/answer/4639612?hl=en

CydeWeys29• 7 years ago

Google Domains is one of many registrars selling .dev domains. Feel free to use a different registrar that offers support in your country.

kemyd• 7 years ago

Prices for early access .dev domains in other providers are at least 2x higher.

For example, using GoDaddy, you can buy .dev domain for 800$ instead of 350$ on Friday (4th stage of early access).

OedipusRex3• 7 years ago

How did Google get in charge of this? Why did they get to set the price points for registering these domains? ICANN really sold out for this one.

eugeniub• 7 years ago

A couple years ago ICANN started letting companies buy customized TLDs through an auction process. I'm not sure how much they paid, but for comparison, Google tried buying .blog a while ago but was outbid by Automattic, who paid $19 million. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686086

OedipusRex3• 7 years ago

This is privatization of the web.

guessmyname• 7 years ago

You can see all the ICANN auction results here [1]:

• Google paid $25 million for “.app” [1]

• Amazon paid ~$5 million for “.buy”

• Amazon paid $2.2 million for “.spot”

• Verisign paid $135 million for “.web”

• Automattic paid $19 million for “.blog”

• ICM paid $3 million for “.sex”

[1] https://gtldresult.icann.org/application-result/applications...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-just-paid-25-million-...

RileyJames• 7 years ago

Damn, the only domain I want is premium. And renews for $720 per year.

I guess that miiight stop squatters, but I feel like it will result in a squatter with deeper pockets.

everdev4• 7 years ago

The example domains linked to in the announcement are all down for me:

https://get.dev/ https://github.dev/ https://grow.dev/ https://accessibility.dev/ https://slack.dev/

etc.

ekc• 7 years ago

Working for me; sounds like a DNS issue on your end.

everdev4• 7 years ago

Ah, fudge, yep.

I remember people complaining about the .dev tld for this reason. Many people have it routed locally.

hartator• 7 years ago

.dev meh. I would dig an .api tld.

diek00• 7 years ago

I checked out a few, the prices are excessive imo, $11,011.00

bloopernova• 7 years ago

No one has got "null.dev". I'm disappointed.

CydeWeys29• 7 years ago

I suspect it'll go soon, if not at the very top price tier.

lurker213• 7 years ago

where is the men.dev domain? I see there is a women.dev...

john88• 7 years ago

What happens if there is a conflict between companies that have submitted a trademark of a generic term to the Trademark Clearinghouse? (two companies that have a trademark of the same generic name, but on a different field for example) How is this settled?

malinens• 7 years ago

This sucks.

We used .dev domain internally in dev/testing environments and one day we were forced to switch domains because google bought it

dewey2• 7 years ago

That's your fault for using something that's a valid domain and not a reserved one for exactly that use case decided on 20 years ago:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606

.test, .example, .invalid, .localhost

First .dev Domains Go Live

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