Out of curiosity, I looked up how much it costs to become an registrar. Based on the ICANN site, it is $4,000 USD per yr, plus variable fees and transactions fees ($0.18/yr). Does anyone have experience or insight into running a domain registrar? Curious what it would entail (aside from typical SRE type stuff).
Wow, I had no idea it was so cheap[1] once you're a registrar. The implication is that anyone who wants to be a domain squatting tycoon should become a registrar. For an annual cost of a few thousand dollars plus $0.18 per domain name registered, you can sit on top of hundreds of thousands of domain names. Locking up one million domain names would cost you only $180,000 a year. Anytime someone searched for an unregistered domain name on your site, you could immediately register it to yourself for $0.18, take it off the market, and offer to sell it to the buyer at a much inflated price. Does ICANN have rules against this? Surely this is being done?
[1] "Transaction-based fees - these fees are assessed on each annual increment of an add, renew or a transfer transaction that has survived a related add or auto-renew grace period. This fee will be billed at USD 0.18 per transaction." as quoted from https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/registrar-billin...
Personally saw this kind of thing as early as 2001.
Never search for free domains on the registar site unless you are going to register it immediately. Even whois queries can trigger this kind of thing, although that mostly happens on obscure gtld/cctld registries which have a single registrar for the whole tld.
I can sadly attest to this behavior as recently as a couple years ago :(
I searched for a domain that I couldn't immediately grab (one of more expensive kind) using a random free whois site... and when I revisited the domain several weeks later it was gone :'(
Emailed the site's new owner D: but fairly predictably got no reply.
Lesson learned, and thankfully on a domain that wasn't the absolute end of the world.
I now exclusively do all my queries via the WHOIS protocol directly. Welp.
Probably every major retail registrar was rumored to do this at some point. Add to your calculation that even some heavyweights like GoDaddy (IIRC) tend to run ads on domains that don't have IPs specified.
Network Solutions definitely did it. I searched for a few domains along the lines of "network-solutions-is-a-scam.com", and watched them come up in WHOIS and DNS.
I didn't know that, and you're right. For anyone who's interested, I found the following references regarding the $8.39 additional fee for a .com registration:
