I've just tried negotiating with a squatter. I'm trying to resurrect a web game with a few thousand players which the original dev neglected. I've rebuilt it on another domain but the community have game data stored in the browser localStorage against the original site. I offered US$200 and was told no - not even a counter offer. I believe they see the domains as lotto tickets - it's in their interests to let a lot of the negotiations fall though so they can win big on a few massive deals.
somebody runs those whois servers. verisign runs .com and they like money just as much as the next guy - i wouldn't expect your lookups of unregistered domains to be unsold no matter how you do them.
With this infrastructure move especially, it is hard to trust in Google. This can't have been losing money or been that costly. Google why?
Google Domains integrates well with Google Cloud and Google Workspace and other products. Even if it was a loss leader it had to be useful. Tell me how this makes sense.
Surely this was at worse profit neutral, or could have been with a modest price hike, I know I would have continued using them even if their domains were an extra $1/year vs competitors because I trusted them more
Domain service - name registry - is a weird market because it includes cross-subsidizing businesses and the information has value (and people will pay for anonymity to avoid hassle), so buy decisions aren't just price/performance.
Google and Cloudflare can offer it near cost just to build goodwill in their clients (i.e., to save them from predation). Cloudflare promises for renewals to only pass through their costs, which makes sense (they make back their customer acquisition cost on the first purchase).
What's the business model of others like porkbun? By hypothesis, you have to pay more to go without the cross-subsidy. If cost is on par, then you might expect them to be marketing the information or to customers somehow. Perhaps just making it back on anonymity charges?
At a minimum, the company would need to have some real reputational concerns about maintaining good relations with customers. E.g., with porkbun, it's super-cute in an ostensibly-benign jurisdiction, but it's a completely hidden LLC who's privacy concerns seem limited only to WHOIS anonymity. What exactly prevents them (or any successor in interest) from misusing the information they have?
On the internet, associating real people with IP's will always be a key goal of governments and criminals, and yet domain name services are a free-for-all with no underlying privacy guarantees.