Google Domains Now In Open Beta For U.S.

[engine]

Google has said it's lifted the invitation restriction for Google Domains for US customers.

It's described as an open beta.

Today, we’re excited to make Google Domains more widely available by lifting the invitation restriction for those in the U.S. For those in other countries, you can sign up here to be notified when it is available in your country. Google Domains Now In Open Beta For U.S. [googleandyourbusiness.blogspot.com]

[RedBar]

Am I missing something, what's the point of this?

Simply to sell new domain name extensions?

[engine]

Not just that, but any domains. [domains.google.com...]

Here's the original info about the service. Google launches domain registries service [webmasterworld.com]

[RedBar]

Yeah, I knew that however aren't they way behind the curve with this?

[engine]

One could speculate that it's a way to see more detailed information about registrations.

Wild speculation: It's as way of sending a signal to google that the registrant might be legitimate, and it may become a small ranking signal, up or down, according the spamminess of all the properties owned.

[jmccormac]

Google does not seem, on the basis of that rather clueless presentation, to understand much about the domain name industry. It may be a move against Amazon, Microsoft and Godaddy. Google has form on nasty spoiler actions (its "knowledge"/wikipedia scraper graph thing being announced when Facebook was going for IPO. Godaddy had been making noises about going public. Amazon and Microsoft are doing quite well in the Cloud computing market and Google is a comparatively small player. It does have approximately 1.4M sites on its IP space though.

Most ccTLD registries stopped publishing their new registrations (and existing registrations) in 2003. This is different to the gTLDs where the zonefiles are publically available. Thus it has been reduced to detecting new gTLD sites from its spyware, Adsense, Analytics and links. The problem is that due to all the propaganda from its FUDbuddies about how linking is bad, websites no longer link heavily and this has impacted detection. The important things to watch for will be the deals with ccTLD registries to sell ccTLDs like .DE, .UK domain names. The North American market is highly contested and it is up against serious players with more experience and more registrations. It would have been more logical for Google to have bought marketshare by buying one of these operations. However this is a highly complex market. Owning a business selling ccTLD domain names would go some way towards resolving the blackout problems created by the Animal Farm maggotry.

I'm less sure about Google's new gTLDs. The new gTLDs are not evolving like gTLDs but rather like ccTLDs. The expectations of some rather clueless "commentators" of particular new gTLDs doing millions of new registrations in their first year have been rather wide of the mark by a few orders of magnitude. The gTLD business itself has some definite Subprime vibes and .COM had the lowest December (01/December/2014 - 01/January/2015 difference) increase for over a decade. Much of the growth in .COM, and to some extent the other main gTLDs, over the last few years has been driven by discounting. The renewal rate on one year new registrations has been falling in .COM and was down to about 54% for 2013 new registrations.

Regards...jmcc