Re: price, say the .dev registrar decides to offer domains for a hobby-dev-friendly $1 flat fee, first come first served. Wouldn't that just immediately lead to a resale market where predatory squatters register all the domains and extract the market price from anybody who wants one?
I think it would be cooler to have programming challenges or something neat.
But a cash grab just seems kind of, lame I guess.
I wouldn’t say I have bile, but I went from “this might be cool” reading the headline to “this is really stupid.”
Because the problem of resellers buying up TONS of domain names is a real one, and thus far a dutch auction style seems to be one good way to combat that (since buying 10000 names and selling 10% of them for an overall profit is a LOT more risky when getting them first means shelling out a LOT more money).
A challenge or something would probably drive costs up across the board, and it would still exclude those who want to use the domains that might not be able to complete the challenge (IMO a worse situation), and other methods of "verification" would either be gameable or would exclude many devs.
I don't know of any more "fair" way of allowing people to buy domains. Why should a hobbyist be able to buy "paypal.dev" when potentially thousands of devs could use that domain at paypal, and similarly "klathmon.dev" would be awesome to have for me, and it's pretty unlikely that someone will buy that out from under me with this scheme.
Not to mention that the timeline here is literally half a month. After Feb 28th, there is no additional charge. So we are talking about 2 weeks of waiting.
Literally: "We will create monopolies and increase competition."
Unbelievable.
Really not at all impressed by this, and it only serves as a stark reminder of the failed state of TLDs.