100-Year Domain Renewals?

Ryosen writes "I received an email this morning from Network Solutions. Seems they are offering their current customers the ability to renew their domain names for 100 years. Is this is a realistic investment considering most companies don't last 100 years? Given that the Internet is a recent phenomenom, is it realistic to expect it to be the same in 100 years? Will Verisign be around that long? Does this make sense?"

Um...no

[mercan01]

I can't imagine this is a worthwhile investment for the myriad of reasons the submitter. Stick with the 10 year renewl option.

Makes a lot of sense for Verisign...

[iapetus]

Nice to be paid up front for a service you may well not end up providing.

For the users, it's pretty much equivalent to being able to buy your domain name for all time, with no risk of it somehow falling to a domain squatter because you failed to renew. If you've got the money to throw at that sort of peace of mind, then why not?

Yeah, it makes sense...

[terraformer]

...for Network Solutions' bottom line. ;-) But in all seriously, this is the kind of short sighted, pump up stock crap I would expect from the MBA set. Take in a huge amount of money up front at a severe discount and then lose the regular income over the long haul. The only way this would work for netsol is if they invested most every dime of it in long term investments and were really conservative with it. The reality is, there will be a peny or two higher dividend this quarter.

Lamers

[optisonic]

It looks to me like they are out of decent ideas to generate revenue and also want to give the impression that this service somehow is going to be around for that time period.

Face it, the current system will not last through leaps and bounds of technology that are coming. We are still in the stone age compared to what is ahead.

It would be better to take that money and buy ten years and invest the rest so it is actually doing something useful for you.

Best,
BJ

Renewal costs

[bitmason]

The submitter makes valid points. On the other hand, for a large company, we're really talking about very little money here and the internal administrative costs of dealing with a renewal are probably fairly significant. So , for a Ford or GM or whatever, it may well make sense to pay the few thousand dollars for their various primary domains and then not have to worry about it.

Probably Not.

[Jexx Dragon]

I really don't think that would be useful. Not only will you be dead in 100 years, but the company issueing these names may not be. But, I guess its up to you, at least you wouldnt have to worry about someone trying to steal it.

it's a tradeoff...

[psycho_tinman]

For some people, heck for most, money can buy you conveniences.. This is just an additional service offered by them for a nice round number of years. They're just promising to take care of the hassle of domain renewal. At the end of the day, 10 year or 100 year renewal makes little difference. The person/organization which is organized won't need ANY renewal services, while others may opt for this service.

Some people pay money to buy tax software, while others hire an accountant and yet others do their taxes by themselves. It's the degree of customization and service which differs. Isn't that all there is to it ?

I'm not sure if the internet as we know it will exist in a 100 years, but then, people were arguing that snail mail would be extinct and there would be paperless offices throughout the planet. That hasn't happened yet. Let those who want this service spend some additional cash and buy themselves peace of mind, if they have the cash to spare and wish to do so.. Simple.

Where does the ownership go?

[192939495969798999]

If network solutions dies, where do those ownerships go? That's a critical question, and one that this article is really asking. Suppose Microsoft steps in and buys the outstanding interest in Network Solutions... the results could be really disastrous. On the other hand, the government could step in and regulate ownership of domain names, and then it would be like getting a business license or something like that. One last thing - it's spelled PHENOMENON.

Why pay $9.99/yr when you can pay less...

[alpha1125]

You have godaddy.com [godaddy.com] which is alot cheaper. Others maybe cheaper...

With godaddy, you can subscribe for a few years, I know at least 6 years in advance. I can't remember if it's more.

With the money you tie up, you can invest, use the investment earnings to pay for more years or hosting. Or even better yet, free beer for your friends. :)

I'm not affiliated with godaddy, they're just my domain name registrar.

Snapnames

[beakerMeep]

Another interesting thing to consider -- as a recent snap names customer, (for a domain I feel I have the right to but don't own and dont want to pay ICANN $1000 to arbitrate) this would really negate the value of snapnames. In fact if the ower of the domain I want were to purchase 100 years I would certainly want my money back from snapnames.

Re:well why not?

[FalconZero]

Precicely. It may also be that this is a product targeted at non-technical staff within companies. I know quite a few managment types that would jump at this kind of offer without even consulting someone on the technical background.

Innovating new product offerings

[Que_Ball]

While the company is not one most geeks would trust I do admire this move.
Other registrars are complaining about the control and lack of innovation by ICANN yet Verisign is finding ways to intruduce new products.

If nobody buys this service then it is a failed experiment but I suspect they will do a slow but steady business selling these virtually unlimited domains. I know many companies that went out and registered their domains with the longest expiration possible at the time. If a 100 year registration was available I'm sure at least one would have done it.

Of course in 100 years from now and your company has moved 6 times, phone numbers have been extended many times, email addresses in the form used now don't even exist anymore so all the contact info on your record is completely stale. Is someone going to remember to renew? Will the renewal notices ever have a hope of arriving?

This is dirt cheap....

[Asprin]

VeriSign is selling the functional equivalent of a lifetime registration.

You know, like US copyright law.

Sure, it's not for every domain, but $1000 for 100 years of not having to rely on the kindness of others [com.com] (who may even hate you [com.com]) because the boneheads in your internet services division let your company's registration lapse is dirt cheap. It probably won't sell like hotcakes, but jalapeno poppers isn't out of the question. Speaking corporately, it's a lot cheaper than lawyers and bribes you'd need to fund to win your lost domain back. ;)

Of course this is a good idea

[dave420]

Keeping a domain for 100 years is a great idea. All it does is add to the value of the domain.

If you buy a domain for cheap, build up a decent web site (profitable would help), your 100-year lease on your domain becomes one hell of an asset.

Take the property market in the UK, for example. In London, most properties are "lease-holds", which means even though they're owned by private entities, when the lease-hold runs out (about 100 years), the property is given back to the Queen (so people can't just buy up all the expensive real-estate, and keep it). Most people use a long lease-hold as a selling point to buying their house. It guarantees you the house for as long as the lease-hold. It's the same with domains. You can't just look at the obvious financial aspects, but see how it pans out over time. A guarantee is sometimes worth more than the product itself.

www.microsoft.com isn't very useful if it's only yours for 2 minutes. A 100-year lease, however, would be worth billions.

Re:Um...no

[Anonymous Coward]

For large companies, I suppose the management problems of renewing domain names (even once every 10 years) outweighs the cost.

Case 1:
There is a special department to handle this matter. All right, now there's no such need.

Case 2:
There's no special department to deal with domain name renewal. Once every few years, when everybody has forgotten the matter and suddenly somebody realises the domain is going to expire tomorrow. So now the problem would cease to exist within your lifetime (that's good enough, isn't it?)

Company Life?

[Tomahawk]

I don't think the problem is whether or not my company will last 100 years (or, for that matter, whether I will last for 100 years). I would ask whether Network Solutions would last for 100 years.

The max term of a domain name lease is 10 years. Network solutions provide this 100 year lease by automatically adding an extra year to your lease on a yearly basis. If Network Solutions suddenly disappear, then your lease it left at 10 years, and you loose the other 90 years that you paid for.

T.

Re:One Winner

[mumblestheclown]

100 year registration is plain silly.

Really? Tell me, who exactly is working at IBM, Apple, Ford, Xerox, Boeing, etc who is the single person responsible for making sure that the domain gets re-registered say 10 years from today? Such a person might lose his job and/or be easily lost in the system by that time. Constructing an internal system to keep track of this costs well more than $1000, and in fact it costs probably a minimum of $200 of people-time to do such renewals even in a medium-large sized company.

Frankly, for all the stupid and evil things that NetSol does, this is a brilliant marketing move and more power to them. Not only does it get them desperately needed up-front cash, but they get paid above the odds and lessen the chance of some embarassing squatter incident involving a medium-large company in the near future.

big internet domain crash in 100 years ?

[Atreide]

in one century I do not think my corporate maintenance procedures created today will be available / archived
in one century I do not expect to be working any more, so procedures & knowlegde will be lost
in one century I do not expect to be able to find my Verising login/password neither my bill to renew my corporate domain name for another century

when you do not regularly work with nor do you maintain something it disapears from your thoughs.
In one century many corporations (if they live that long) will just forget to renew.
What happens if they do not renew in 100 years ? Do they disapear from the internet ? What can Verisign tell us ? Noone at verisign will be there in one century. There is really no engagment from a corp that will probably not be there in one century.
Besides, would you dare give your provider the responsability of calling you in one century to remind you you must pay ?
I would not dare that.

That total nonsense.

moreover, who can say if domain names will not be free in 30 years ? Therefore you would have paid 70 years more, will Verisign give you change ?

If that's serious news, it's probably more some kind of advertisement from Verisign than a real product. It means "we are confident we will be there in 100 years, you can trust us to register for any length of time".
Sorry mister VS I do not trust you.

Re:Renewal costs

[bitmason]

Yes they have procedures, but it still costs money. And there have been any number of documented cases of companies losing their domains because they forgot to renew, notices weren't sent out, paperwork got snafued, etc. This isn't a service for an individual or a small business, but IMO makes a lot of sense for a large company. The financial downside of doing it is almost trivial in the scheme of things compared to some of the potential (however low probability) downsides of messing up a renewal.

Is it a good deal for the issuer as well? Hell, yes. Pre-pays are great--the longer the better. You lock in the customer and, for any of a variety of reasons, you may never need to provide the service (the customer goes out of business, you go out of business). Or registration costs could drop so far that this is the world's most expensive domain registration in 10 years.

It's not short sighted....

[raehl]

You have to keep in mind that even at a paltry 6% return rate, the value of money doubles every 12 years - or about 8 times by the time 100 years rolls around. That's why these company's love these long-term domain renewal options - even if they charge you one half of what you'd pay over 100 years, they'll still, in the long haul, get 4 times as many real dollars out of you.

In business, it's always better to get money sooner over later. 100 years early isn't a "trick", it's almost theft.

Re:Um...no

[pr0c]

With deflation they are going to make a killing off of selling 100 year renewels to fools. Well that and the likleyhood of prices dropping.

10 dollars paid 100 years in advance.. think about it people.

Re:Family Names

[DjReagan]

Do you really think that in 100 years domain names will exist in any way vaguely recognisable as what they are today? Sure, you could pass it on as a legacy, but your grandkids are going to wrinkle their noses and say "What is this .com thing stuck on the end?"

Just another example...

[jbarr]

...of responsibility being removed from people's lives. Really, how tough is it to renew a domain? If you can't manage a simple task like regularly renewing your domain, you deserve to have it snagged away from you. It's all a matter of priorities. If you don't view your domain as something valuable then you deserve the consequenses of being irresponsible with managing it.

100years, realy relay stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me see, what did we have 30 years ago? Oh, we didnt have the internet? The Arpanet might had been working? Did they have DNS? Not that I know off (I could be wrong). Who can guess who the world look like in a 100 years, for 15 years ago I still had my Amiga with 2400baud modem, calling BulletinBoardSystems. No BBS that I used to call is around anymore, the BBS Systems (software) people used is no longer around or hasnt been ported from Amiga to Linux. The internet totaly killed the BBS world. Why wouldnt the internet as it looks like today work totaly diffrent in say 30 years? Scotty, Beam me over!

Re:One Winner

[oniony]

I imagine it might be the same guy who is responsible for renewing other memberships, subscriptions, patents, etc. You don't seriously think domain names are the only product or service that fall under the subscription model, do you?

Re:One Winner

[Epistax]

I think the idea of creating a product based on poor customer service is not acceptable. Any reasonable system would allow a ten year contract to go over by at least a month for renewal. Not allowing any sort of grace period is simply rude and irresponsible. It's like a bank auctioning off your possessions after one missed monthly payment. Sure, they can make more money that, but it isn't right.

Now one thing I am a strong proponent of is fair use and ownership. For exmaple you can take over microsoft.org if you plan to use it as is legal, but to merely squat on it is not using it fairly, and the company should be able to take it back from you. The problem is defining it on a case-by-case basis.

Re:Family Names

[Sandman1971]

Assuming domain names still exist in 100 years. Assuming Verisign is still in business;

I registered my last name as a domain. Assuming it gets passed down to my (i don't have yet) children. How are they going to renew the domain? I'll be long gone 100 years from now. My address, email address, etc... will no longer be valid. How will they get the renewal notice? According to Verisign, the domain belongs to me. If I tranfer the domain, I lose the remaining years on my 100 year contract. Since I can't transfer the domain, how will me heirs prove the domain belongs to them?

The USD1,000,000 question is?

[amigoro]

[This is probably going to get me in trouble Karma-wise but anyway]
Is this is a realistic investment considering most companies don't last 100 years? Given that the Internet is a recent phenomenom, is it realistic to expect it to be the same in 100 years? Will Verisign be around that long?

Is the human race going to last that long?

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Re:Dead

[AKnightCowboy]

I'll be dead in 100 years so what good will it do me. I'm not seeing a plus to being dead and owning a domain.

This is obviously aimed at companies. I'm sure IBM, GM, Ford, Microsoft, etc. have no intentions of going anywhere and $1000-$3000 for 100 years of domain registration comes out of petty cash for them.

This is antisocial

[Schlemphfer]

Just last week I took out a ten year registration on my website. And it was great to be able to do that, since every year I always had the fear in the back of my mind that I'd forget about renewing it, and lose the domain.

So when I read about the 100 year domain thing, I thought, "that would be pretty great." Just pay a relatively small amount of money up front, and you're set for life.

But then I realized that there's a pretty big anti-social aspect to allowing 100 year domains. It may not be totally fair that the dotcom domain name ownership thing was a first-come, first take lottery. But we're stuck with it, and, fortunately, nobody owns a name forever -- they have to reregister each year or two or ten. If you can't make a go of flowerpots.com, then it won't be long until it goes back into the pool of unclaimed domains for somebody else to take. Well, that's sort of true anyway. I know at least one company [ultsearch.com] has arrangements with a registrar where expired names fall directly into their hands.

But anyway, my point is that there ought to be some mechanism where the scarcest property in cyberspace, dotcom names, falls back into the hands of the public if they are not being put to full use. And it's not in the public interest to allow 100-year domain names. All sorts of people will register all sorts of useful domain names, fail at making them profitable, and give up on the domain name. However, like neglected inner city property, the domain name will stay in their possession for a friggin century, and deprive the Internet community of using it for any value.

Re:Dead

[tiled_rainbows]

Yeah, but it's like buying a house with a hundred-year lease. You might only plan to live in it for twenty years, but when you come to sell it, the depreciation in value from a hundred-year lease to an eighty-year lease is far less than that from a thirty-year lease to a ten-year lease. So, if you're buying a resaleable domain name, say www.shopping.com or www.computer.com or whatever, then yeah, I'd say a hundred-year contract would be worth it. It's the closest you can get to owning a particular domain outright, forever.

Having said that, I can't imagine that people will access web sites in fifty years (if there's even anything that still exists that's remotely analagous to a website by then) by typing text into an address bar. I don't know what they'll be doing instead, but I get the feeling that owning a cool domain name will be about as valuable as having the rights to a particularly catchy morse code callsign would be now.

100 year lock-in and STILL too expensive

[sirshannon]

You would think that buying a domain name for a century would score you a better price break than that. For the 100 year registration, NSI charges $9.99 a year while GoDaddy.com and other companies charge $7.99 a year for single-year registrations.

In addition to that, GoDaddy includes several services for free (domain forwarding, email forwarding) that NSI charges extra for.

Re:One Winner

[Guanix]

Remember that you can renew domain names before they expire. Therefore you wouldn't have to remember to renew it in exactly 10 years; you only need to remember this at least once in every 10-year period.

Re:Um...no

[wfeick]

Why on earth would anyone lock in a single service provider for 100 years? Would you sign a 100 year cell phone plan? I sure wouldn't, because it removes any incentive for the company to do a good job.

It also removes any opportunity for you to vote with your dollars if you don't like the behavior of the company. I used to have my domain registered with Network Solutions, but when their parent company, Verisign, started hijacking NXDOMAIN responses and sending people to their advertising instead, I moved my domain to GoDaddy as a protest.

I don't want my dollars going to a company that seems to want to use their ICANN granted monopoly over the root database to "innovate" themselves as much profit as the can, at the expense of everyone else on the internet.

Besides, the discounted 100 year price from Network Solutions is the same as GoDaddy's everyday price, so it's not even a bargain. I've also found GoDaddy's support to be much easier to get to, and much more responsive and knowledgable than Network Solutions. I'm definitely very happy I made the move.

What's with the Active Directory fetish?

[b00m3rang]

Every post about DNS has someone saying we need to make DNS more complex, more resource-intensive, and more prone to problems. I don't get it. DNS works great.

Re:Um...no

[budgenator]

actualy I'd guess most organisations have a guy in IT who pays on his personnal CC and submits for reimursement from the dept. A 100 yr registration is probably verisign's way of getting cash for services that'll be for longer than they exist.

Re:Time = Money

[stilwebm]

At $10/yr they aren't saving money... And if you consider the value of that $1,000 invested in other ways or used to pay down interest:

$14.99 per year invested at 5% compounded annually for 100 years is worth $41,080.49 in 100 years.
$1,000 invested up front at 5% compounded annually for 100 years is worth $131,501.26 in 100 years.

The $14.99 is the per year rate for 10 year renewals on Network Solutions. Since Network Solutions sends dozens of emails reminding you to renew, you have no reason to forget. Just make sure the contact address is not an individual but hostmaster@ or domainadmin@ since a 10 year tenure at a company is rare these days. I think time is unlikely to account for this difference in opportunity cost.

Re:Dead

[StrongAxe]

This is obviously aimed at companies. I'm sure IBM, GM, Ford, Microsoft, etc. have no intentions of going anywhere and $1000-$3000 for 100 years of domain registration comes out of petty cash for them.

And it's good insurance; some bureaucrat forgets to mail an annual $10 checque, and a squatter grabs www.microsoft.com for the next century...

Re:Um...no

[UNIX*DR]

DNS is here to stay. There are many reasons for humans to have names assigned to IP addresses, apart from just web sites. With IPv6 this becomes even more true. No network administrator is going to want to type 128-bit IP addresses very often, even in hex (which only covers A-F, so someone gets DE:AD::BE:EF but never ME:AT::HE:AD).

Even if you eventually allow spaces in DNS and get looser about the notion of top-level domains, like "My Company Name" instead of "mycompanyname.com", you still have DNS.

Right now you have Google I-Feel-Lucky which converts long name to DNS which converts to IP.

But this all misses the point: 100-year is just a marketing ploy. It's still a business decision to pay $1k and never worry about it again.