Gab.com which was informed by GoDaddy they had to hit the road has found a new home at Uniregistry.
In a hotly contentious thread on Namepros
The thread posted as a domain discussion thread turned political with some religion sprinkled in. Many members went back and forth at each other, and these are the threads that always lead to people doning exactly what two people mentioned to me. They were infuriated by some in the thread and will lock to block those members on Namepros.
The only threads that get more blocks are outrageous domains wanted threads.
Rob Monster updated the new whois info.
Just looked at their site. Looks like one page explaining that they are working round the clock to get back online.
GAB –
“You have all just made Gab a nationally recognized brand as the home of free speech online at a time when Silicon Valley is stifling political speech they disagree with to interfere in a US election.”
Not sure if this entire statement of theirs is correct or not, but the first part definitely is.
Because I sure never heard of them until 2 days ago.
As a domain name, It is really one of the most brilliant, short, brandable domain names for a social media site.
That NamePros thread is one of the craziest threads I have ever read on there in 10 years.
Free Speech, Violence, Religion, Porn, Moral Debate, Politics, Hidden Agendas, Passion, Capitalism, Stupidity…
Oh and a sprinkle of beastiality too… WTF
If you can read thru that whole thing without wanting to punch somebody in the throat, well then you’re a liar.
Thanks for the update Rob and thedomains.
“If you want domains to matter for more than another 10 years, let freedom ring.”
– Rob Monster
And that to me is the most important issue. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt, are entering into the foundation of the internet, domain names, at a breath taking pace. Unless there is confidence in control of a domain name, and the investment one puts into creating a site on that domain name, its all over folks. In fact before I read this post and that thread today, the GAB.COM incident has had me thinking we probably don’t have 5 years at this point, maybe 3.
The next step in F.U.D. will likely be when Verisign is freed of pricing controls …
Its not a coincidence that all these things are happening at the same time.
“ominous continuity”
– john taylor gatto
Charles is a wise man. Winner Take All has many dimensions. Karl Marx wrote the script — predatory capitalism has been seeding its own destruction for some time now.
Specific to the domain industry, it is imperative that the domain community protect the sanctity of private ownership with due process. Failure to protect sustained individual ownership with right to use will seed the destruction of the entire industry. Even Sir Tim Berners-Lee himself is getting ready:
https://medium.freecodecamp.org/an-introduction-to-solid-tim-berners-lees-new-re-decentralized-web-25d6b78c523b
This is still a really great industry. Epik has clients with tens of thousands of domains moving from strength to strength, buying wholesale and leasing/selling retail. We know that Gab.com was a financed purchase. If the lessee defaults, whoever buys it next will likely value the residual traffic and back-links, and perhaps pick up the brand in the process. The domain owner will be fine.
More generally, the naysayers who doubt domain leasing need to get a clue. For ~98% of the domains, the recurring income from parking is now DOA, insufficient to fund the continued renewal fees. Had the owner of Gab.com contracted with Epik, they would have one entity as registrar, DNS provider and lease administrator. That is a whole lot less counter-parties and a lot fewer weak links in the chain.
“A domain escrow service that doesn’t hold the domain is like a bank without a vault.”
Rob Monster – CEO of Epik
More here:
https://www.epik.com/services/escrow/
“they would have one entity as registrar, DNS provider and lease administrator.”
Something else comes to mind here. The recent prediction by ICANN of large scale reduction in the number of registrars seems to be playing out, with registrar costs now very low.
For a company like GAB.COM, having the domain in their own registrar seems more than prudent, and wrapping a high value domain name sale up with a low cost registrar would be a very effective solution to this issue for both buyer and seller. The ultimate insurance policy if you would. And the buyer reaps significant benefits after the final payment as the registrar is then transferred to it. It would be fairly trivial for a company like GAB to run their own registrar (its actually easy for anybody), and certainly the current loss of revenue is likely far more than than the cost of their own registrar.
It also pushes up accountability one level in the food chain to the Registries and ICANN itself. FUD at that level of the food chain would have profound political and financial effects right where scrutiny would be of great value these days. In other words it takes us here very fast for those who can do it:
“Specific to the domain industry, it is imperative that the domain community protect the sanctity of private ownership with due process.”
If you can’t protect your domain with your own registrar, then checkmate, the game is over for everyone.
I don’t propose that anyone who owns a domain should become a registrar. Candidly, the compliance, mandatory fees, and enabling technology alone would make that impractical.
That said, as leasing grows in popularity, I do believe that it is inevitable that registrars, market-makers, and financing administrators will converge unto unified offerings.
As for the larger pattern of “winner take all” and what to do about it, you might enjoy this one:
https://medium.com/@robmonster/the-global-revolution-against-rigged-capitalism-has-begun-aa7e300a140d
“I don’t propose that anyone who owns a domain should become a registrar.”
“Anyone”, you are right, that would not make sense.
But as the domain value or liability increases, there comes a point where it does make sense. The key here being a self registrar and not a retail registrar. To me GAB.COM clearly past that point.
“That said, as leasing grows in popularity, I do believe that it is inevitable that registrars, market-makers, and financing administrators will converge unto unified offerings. ”
Yes. Perhaps that will be the point at which registrants start consideration of this, at least registrants beyond the domainer community many of which do this now.
I’ve just informed my account manager at Godaddy I am moving all of our 4500 domains to another registry over sea.
If you hold Gab.com responsible for the murders of those people in PA, then you should hold yourself and very American tax payers responsible for the murder of hundred of thousands of innocent people throughout the Middle East by our government, for the past 17 years, not counting prior to 2001. Your tax dollars fund these wars and murders. I like Vito’s idea, let’s go and punch every tax payers in the throat. Violent is always the answer for leftist.
On a tangentially related note, one thing I find really fascinating is where Wikileaks.org is registered, which is Dynadot.
This guy is pretty famous in independent media. Is he right about this Gab.com affair(?):
“The Tech Purge Is Here And Truth Is The Target”
https://youtu.be/JhPv6sDUCoc
Personally I can’t recommend Epik more highly, by the way, and it has certainly become my favorite for a long time now and I think people are nuts if they don’t make use of it, but just out of curiosity what would be the minimum cost and effort involved in becoming a “self registrar” for the sole purpose of maintaining your own domains? And are you required to even have a technical registration and management infrastructure of your own if you have no intention of doing retail?
I hear registrars are going for well under $10,000 right now (it can vary a lot over time), yearly fees are about $6000 per year. There is very little needed to be a self registrar. Going retail is where the nightmare begins.
There is some technical stuff to do and maintain. For a technical person it is fairly trivial to take care of over time. For a non technical person it would be overwhelming. Thus, if you have a decent size internet business, then you’d have the technical resources available to take care of a registrar with little additional effort. Most of the time there is nothing to do, and some tribal backend stuff that you set and forget. Each registry has an admin panel just like the one you are using at registrars and that is how you admin your domains. Generally the Registry admin panel is designed for managing just a few domains at a time so its perfect for a company just managing its own domain(s). If you are a dominer with thousands (or even just hundreds) of domains, then you need additional software to do bulk edits and again the cost and difficulty increases as its just too tedious to manage that many domains without code..
Thus as Rob said, its not for everyone. There is a very specific niche here that is not taking advantage of this opportunity to protect their domains.
But it is a perfect solution for GAB or say a huge corp who’s domain is likely to be a target of hackers for example. Access to your registrar account is via an email account. Access to your registry account is via phone, pass phrases, and calls back at your listed number, two factor authentication, declared IP addresses, etc, thus it is much more difficult to access without authorization.
Thanks, Charles.
I can I am one of the one’s you mentioned, though I did not contact you. I blocked about 20 members from that thread so I never have to see their stupid words again. #NameprosSucks
free speech without accountability is hate speech.
cannot support uniregistry after this. might even take a trip up to that worthless names ‘con’ to make my point
gab promotes hate speech, plain and simple. we need to contact uniregistry and protest
Yeah I am sure Frank Schilling really cares what you think.
>”free speech without accountability is hate speech.”
Even when someone says “I Love You”?
https://www.france24.com/en/20181101-chinese-style-digital-authoritarianism-grows-globally-study
“Governments worldwide are stepping up use of online tools, in many cases inspired by China’s model, to suppress dissent and tighten their grip on power, a human rights watchdog study found Thursday.
The annual Freedom House study of 65 countries found global internet freedom declined for the eighth consecutive year in 2018, amid a rise in what the group called “digital authoritarianism.””
Seriously can you stick to domain stories so these fucking conspiracy theory, tin hats can stay in the basement? What the hell man, this industry is bad enough have to read about nurseries, marathons, what morgan linton ate for dinner, .new domains. Like enough bullshit already.
Hey man, this was a domain story, I talked about a domain name moving to Uniregistry. It got picked up a lot of places too, like HackerNews and a bunch of non domaining outlets, the post did 2,000 uniques the first day posted.
Looks like they are coming back online.