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?"

One Winner

[RobertTaylor]

100 year registration is plain silly. Ten year ones currently are popular but really only to those who have very valuable names or dont want the hassle of re-registering names every year.

The idea of allowing a user to specify a date for renewals is best, for example April 1st could become the date all the domains for a company are renewed, rather than scattered dates throughout the year.

My Auction: Pan Tilt Moveable Ethernet Webcam, UK! [ebay.co.uk]

useful for 10 years ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't assume your domain will be useful for more than 10 years. Given that, if it still makes sense price-wise then go for it.

well why not?

[gbjbaanb]

the thing is, if you're a company like MS or IBM, spending $1000 on a domain is worth the tme it would otherwise take to get it renewed every 10 years. You don't know the paperwork, the invoicing, the bills, the accounts, the 'why do we need this domain' questions... buy it once for $1k, forget about it.

and, as far as Network Solutions is concerned, they get the full money, even if the client does go bust! Its win-win all round.

I remember something similar to it

[lingqi]

Just before the Nationalists fled mainland china to Taiwan, they pre-charged everyone something like 50-years worth of taxes.

Let's just say that for everybody that paid, it wasn't a very good investment.

(That said, it's not that people had a choice in the matter or anything)

Re:Yeah, it makes sense...

[bitmason]

I would be very surprised if Network Solutions can report this as lump-sum revenue in the quarter received. Like any subscription, I would assume that it has to be spread out over the length of the registration. If so, they're actually potentially giving up some nearer-term revenue for this (because there's a discount involved)--even though they're getting cash in hand.

Family Names

[sandypants]

For those of us with Family names as domain names, holding that domain name for 100 years.. while debatably evil.. does become a viable use. It can be passed on from generation to generation. A legacy kinda thing.

100 years of interest loss

[kjba]

just $9.99 a year. This is a savings of over 70% compared to paying annually

This does not even come near the truth. If one dollar that you're paying now is used in a hundred years, you would actually have $131 when taking interest into account (assuming 5% each year).

What a loss!

Well you could make a great deal, look at Guinness

[damgx]

In 1759 Arthur Guinness, rather speculatively, took over a deserted brewery at Dublin's St James's Gate, moreover he leased it for 9,000 years at a rent of 45 per annum - obviously intending on staying awhile.

Source: [viewlondon.co.uk]

I guess he made a great deal don't you?

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, if you just happen to check a domain name that interests you and then don't buy it immediately, they'll quickly snap it up for themselves. Good luck getting them to sell it back to you for $9.99 ...

Re:Um...no

[cshark]

I could see 30 year registration. That would make sense. But 100 years? Who says domain names will even exist 100 years from now?

Re:Where does the ownership go?

[v1]

I asked my registrar (register.com) a similar question, and found out at least for them how it works. Apparently when you pay for your domain, they forward the registration fee to icann or whoever, so your domain is registered with them for however long. From there, you can transfer your domain to any registration service, usually free of charge.

I asked the rep then what is to stop me from registering my domain at the cheapest place possible for an extended time, (10 yrs etc) and then transferring it to register.com to take advantage of their free 800# support etc. She said that although that's abusive to them, it's allowed, and that some people do indeed do that to get their higher quality services without paying the higher registration fees.

This being the case, if NS goes under, you can just transfer administration of your domain name to another registrar. I suppose you can think of it like stock... you pay a broker to buy and manage stock for you. If the broker or his company goes away, it doesn't mean you've lost your stock - you just have to find another broker to continue providing you services for the stock you own. That, and you have the right to change who manages your stock at any time.

Why not?

[joeszilagyi]

All the companies offer you long-term registrations at a slight discount. Register for one year, it's $15. Register for five instead, and it's $12 a year. Small discount, convenience for everyone, but most people won't take the registrar up on it since most people for a personal domain won't drop $60 in such a fashion outright. This is why with most services like this--including hosting, cell phones, insurances, etc., that "Joe Normal" pays by the month while "The Business" will pay quarterly or annually. It's less of a hassle for the business and a tax write-off anyway.

So why not offer 20, 50, or 100 years at $12/year? I'm sure MANY businesses will leap at this, since it's the equivalent of guaranteed online trademark protection for your single most valuable asset, your domain name and online identity.

Re:companies dont last a century..

[DarkKnightRadick]

Levi and Coca-Cola have been around longer than 100 years just to name a few.

Re:Family Names

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess would be that you should legally incorporate yourself. Not as painful as it sounds. The domain name could be registered as a corporate asset/property and, assuming you're not planning on publically trading yourself, the whole thing can probably be pass on to your children.
IANAL

NPV sorry for all the techies but an MBA had to..

[OlivierB]

.. answer this

I've seen a few comments targeted against MBA's in a few weeks and the one I saw today just was too much BS.
The argument that this is a stupid "gain money quickly move" doens't stand.

Well some people obviously have neve heard of NPV, or Net present Value of money.
Net present value gives you the value today of a series of cash flows to happen in the future.

The formula is as follows:

NPV = SUM(Cash Flow *(1+i)^-n) | Where n ranges from 1 to 99 in our case.

i is the opportunity rate. In a company money typically has a greater return value than the money market. IE you would expect money invested in a company to be more profitable than on the money market.
This means that if the money market rate is 5% than you would expect a higher internal return to compensate your risk (risk premium principle). Thus the internal rate of return of a company would be market rate+risk premium.
So the IRR could be 10% in a company.

Let's just imagine these guys at NetSol are a bunch of losers and will only offer the market return rate, or will simply put the money in government bonds at 4% (constant over 100 years for simplicity skaes).
Let's say also that the cost of a web name renewal will be $10 per year for the next 100 years (it's more likely to be more as the inflation cathces in, but heck let's keep it simple).

Even with these very pessimistic variables, the NPV of these cash flows is $306!!! Tha's a $700 profit for the Netsol guys.

So please, don't say they are making a stupid move doing this as you have no idea what you are talking about. This is a very profitable operation.
It is very likely to be a success as people will think " hey 100 years * 10 dollars = $1000. So I am not getting ditched and it is peace of mind. Let's take it"

BTW, if the NPV is $1000, than the discount rate is only 0.12%. Impossible.

Re:Yeah, it makes sense...

[acroyear]

but in the long run, it may hurt them. To take an example from computer history, IBM gave it a run in the late 80s of having their customers buy their servers outright instead of leasing them as they had done for decades before. short term, it infused a LOT of cash into IBMs coffers in a relatively short time.

long term -- well, at some point, the last IBM leaser bought his machine, and suddenly (and the accountants simply did not predict this would ever happen) the sales bottomed out and flatlined. pretty dramatically too, as the machines were often plenty fast enough for what they were doing (much as PC hardware is today). IBMs recovery effort on that one cost them several thousand jobs, if I recall correctly.

So Versign is doing the same thing (heck, I think I said that here on /. when the 9 year options were first branded). They're effectively selling the names instead of leasing them, to create an influx of short-term cash, which will run out and not be replenished when the need to purchase domain names eases off.

One can predict that either Verisign expects to be in another line of business by the time that happens, or they're going to suffer greatly for it.

Time = Money

[mattlary]

For some companies it's worth the $1000 to register their domain for 100 years so they don't need to have someone worry about it. Granted, it takes 5 minutes to renew your domain, but if they save some money on top of that, it's totally worth it. (Not to mention $1000 is nothing to most companies)

Re:Um...no

[Loconut1389]

This is something I've pondered often. I think the DNS model will only persist as long as the impression that a website must be a .com does. This is fading, but I remember a long time ago when people thought there was a mistake if there was no www. on the front or it wasn't a .com.. Granted, the tech public knew better, but the average joe had no idea. (im talking back when = 6), eventually it will just make more sense to have sort of a distant cousin to a search engine type DNS system. Or maybe websites will be more or less a sentence (company slogan) or word pair (company name)? Who knows, but I agree, machine naming is going to change drasticly someday.

Heck, what if there was enough IP space such that the ASCII codes for the letters in your site name somehow made up the actual IP. That would eliminate the need for a DNS system altogether, but would waste a lot of IP space as we think about it in our current paradigm of fixed ip lengths with groupings etc etc. Perhaps future systems will not need fixed length, perhaps not. Who knows.

domain name hijackers

[morcheeba]

Even if you get the 100-year renewel, Verisign could still give it away [com.com]. They've got a history of not properly authenticating transfer requests, so you're not really buying any piece of mind.