Can you transfer it to a less greedy registrar? Or is it always a TLD-wide issue?

This is highway robbery.. maybe even worse than being robbed.

Imagine if your mobile phone plan rate could vary on a floating basis year by year depending on how "premium" the carrier decides your number is. Gross.

Chinese mobile carriers used to (and may still) do exactly this. Numbers with multiple 8’s were more valuable because 8 is lucky, whereas a single 4 (a homophone for “death”) meant a reasonable discount.

It's also a thing with US-based numbers, e.g. repeating digits. However, the pricing not variable year over year, and may even be only a one-time fee if at all. Once you are assigned the number, it's yours and the annual reservation price doesn't change significantly.

This instance is straight up Google acting in bad faith with the bait and switch. Are they really that desperate to make a few extra bucks? What PM decided this was a good idea?

Day by day, Big-G is burning every ounce of public goodwill they ever had, speedily on their way to sinking down to FB Meta territory.

I'm pretty sure it's TLD-wide basically all/most of the time.

It's usually a choose your own frontend registrar for the TLD. Whether that is Gandi, Namecheap, Google Domains, Cloudflare, etc.

But the TLDs fix the price underneath, registrars are just resellers.

One can argue scalpers expecting 3000 for a domain means the domain is premium-enough to be worth that renewal.

ICANN could have just prohibited registrars from doing this, but it seems like the neo-TLD thing is just a cash grab for them so they probably don't mind.

I don’t exactly like it, but isn’t it an effective measure to reduce scalping? So many .com domains are owned by entities who bought piles of dictionary words just to slap them on a SEO ads page, only willing to part with them for exorbitant prices. What better means are there to fight these people who insert themselves into the internet namespace to siphon money while providing zero value?

Unless the money goes to help the Internet somehow, it is still going to scalpers, but only a few billionaires instead of anyone who is willing to speculate.

Here’s another perspective. We own voltive.com. It cost us $28k. “Us” is me and my partner, small business owners with families and bills, working to build something of value in the world. We bought the domain from someone who had never used it for anything. Is it just that some guy fleeced us for $28k by squatting on that domain for 20 years at $12/year when we were actually trying to do something productive with the name? I certainly don’t think so.

Out of curiosity, why pay so much for the domain name? Could you not have chosen a name that had an open .com domain?

Aldo, if this was your trademark before buying the domain, are you sure you couldn't have used the ICANN trademark squatting process to seize it? That would have only cost about $1500. Some people look for trademark registrations to preemptively buy the .com domain (and then sell it back to you for $10,000+), but the ICANN specifically has a process in place to prevent this kind of extortion.

We were deciding on a business name at the time, so we didn’t already own the trademark. Based on other similar names that we were considering, voltive.com should probably have been under $10k, but the seller absolutely refused to budge (why not, carrying cost is only $12/year after all).

But getting a decent name is hard. We wanted something that was two syllables, not trademarked (trademarks are important when selling on Amazon, as we do), easy to spell if you hear it said, had a toll free phone number available (we have 888-VOLTIVE). That narrows things considerably.

Maybe HN can pool together to form a non-scalping, dev-friendly TLD.

Why does it even have to be a TLD? You have have a subdomain of an existing TLD. Kind of like the dynamic DNS services that give you your-custom-name.foo.example.com.

I would rather pay a once off high price to acquire a domain than randomly have a domain I have owned for some time get marked as premium and now the price is high every year and I can’t move it around anymore either.

Predatory, abusive price increases are forbidden by section 2.10(c) of the baseline registry agreement. It applies to pretty much all of the new gTLDs. It's no different for .sbs [1].

> The parties acknowledge that the purpose of this Section 2.10(c) is to prohibit abusive and/or discriminatory Renewal Pricing practices imposed by Registry Operator without the written consent of the applicable registrant at the time of the initial registration of the domain and this Section 2.10(c) will be interpreted broadly to prohibit such practices.

From what I've seen, people typically tend to be confused about what they bought when you see threads like this. In the past several years I've never seen anyone produce documentation or screenshots that show they registered a non-premium domain that was reclassified as premium while they had it registered.

1. https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/registry-agreements/sbs/s...

My lastname.sbs was a dollar or two for 1st year. $200 2nd year. Understandable, but still its bad. Good thing I didn't use it for something big, being lazy paid.

I hate the practice, it’s scummy behaviour.

One of my domains got hit by it and now I can’t even move it because it’s market as premium.

I've never heard of .sbs. What does it mean? In junior high after P.E. class we would joke that we had SBS - sweaty ball syndrome - that acronym has always stuck with my friends.

"Special Broadcasting Service", belongs to the "Special Broadcasting Service Corporation"

Hah. Wow. At this point I feel like we should just do away with new TLDs altogether and let anyone register any domain with any ending they want, if it's available. The idea that you can buy a TLD and then dole out domains if you have enough capital just seems antithetical to the ideal of an open internet. Unless you're a country, I guess.