Was reading about Sony and how their domain names lapsed due to lack of payment. Turns out that nobody was reading the email that would have said that domain name was expiring.
Now for the average joe, buying a domain name outright may not be a good move financially, but an organization like sony or microsoft, it would seem like a prudent idea.
Is there a technical reason why this cant be done.
Declan
Yes: the institutions in charge such as ICANN can maximize their income. If one granted licenses to breath air it would be much better to issue annual permits rather than a bulky, inconvenient, complicated life-pass.
Guarantees repeat business.
There’s no “technological” reason that you couldn’t buy a domain name for life, but as Claverhouse has said, it’s a poor business model for the people who have to maintain the databases.
Actually, come to think of it — and it would depress me to look it up, cos one can overload on domains/hosting/and website trivia — but long before I ever got on the net a company called Network Solutions, which had a mini-monopoly, did offer 100 year domain names. And no doubt a few companies have these still. Not many though. NS charged a lot for regular time periods.
And then Network Solutions made some questionable business decisions.
Plus: In August 2009, Network Solutions notified customers that its “secure” servers were breached, and led to the exposure of names, address, and credit card numbers of 573,928 people who made purchases on Web sites hosted by the company.
I was the manager of billing systems at Network Solutions from 1998 until maybe early 2001, leaving the company in 2003 just as VeriSign announced they were selling it off. I’m glad my name wasn’t associated with the 2009 incident.
I had not heard about the Sony incident. We had a similar incident with Microsoft in 1999 and took down Hotmail over an unpaid $35 invoice. At that time our systems would automatically generate snail mail to the company’s address, but they were comically addressed to “President”. Imagine what would happen to a letter addressed
President
Microsoft Corporation
1 Microsoft Way
Redmond WA 98052
I don’t think we had 100-year domain names at the time but we did start offering more personalized service packages (maybe a few hundred a year) for larger companies to prevent this from happening. I don’t think it ever caught on.
Of course it could be done, but as has been mentioned it wouldn’t make as much sense business wise. Your domain name is sort of two things. The actual name, which could easily be something you owned outright, and the service necessary to make it do its thing, which I suppose you could own by being a registrar … but not really.
same as IBM never sold their computers outright; they always leased them. Decca did the same for the Decca Navigator, until the patents ran out and then anybody was free to make the receivers, and Decca weren’t in business for much longer.