Domains, from Network Solutions to the Google Domains shutdown.
Domains, from Network Solutions to the Google Domains shutdown.
..and that time when I tried to become the moons TLD manager.
So, the Google domains project was …
Which one?
Oh, you know Google domains, domain names sold by, hosted by, the tlds, that sort of thing.
Yeah, but Which one?
Oh, I see what you’re getting at, the one that hosted consumer domains.
Yes, but which one?
Oh, Right! The one that was sold to squarespace, not the one that was retained for cloud customers of a certain size, or the tld hosting stuff or public DNS.
Ah, okay! I think I get you. The one that sold consumer domains, not the one looking after Googles own internal DNS, or the 8.8.8.8 hosts , or the TLDs, or the google cloud project that looked after google customer domains. Or the external company1 that Google used to look after its domains? You mean the one that was sold to squarespace, except for some domains that were held back as Squarespace couldn’t take them on. That one?
I think so? Uh, wait, now I’m confused.
I don’t think you’re the only one.
When I was at Google, I was a big booster for the domains team. They weren’t what I’d call loved inside the company, the only time I’d say they felt a little stable was while briefly they reported through Ben Fried, Google’s CIO at the time. I did what I could for them, as I did for other projects, to help Google understand that canceling projects like Domains was toxic for their ambitions in the cloud and with developers , etc.
Explaining, as I seemed to have to do quite a bit, that If you can’t be trusted with fundamental infrastructure like domains that people will lose trust in your running of their fundamental infrastructure. I know, I know, you’ve heard it all before, Yada yadda yadda, Google Play Music! Reader!2
My relationship with the domain name system goes back nearly 30 years now. I registered DiBona.com in the 90s using the very manual internet process back then to do so. 3
To get a domain, you would first register your userid4 with them via email. Then you would email network solutions with a very specific template with the fields all filled in with the details of your cool userid, nameservers, addresses for the three contacts, etc..
Since I wanted DiBona.com, .net and .org, I had to agree that the .org was not going to show ads, be non-commercial, etc. It was gloriously manual and of course I loved it to bits. For me understanding the levers underpinning the internet was and still is thrilling.
The internet back then was a pretty idealistic place. I’m trying to think if I ever redirected .org to .com, I know I did for mail. I think I must have after the commercial restrictions were dropped from .org. The internet was such a nice place to hang back then. Gopher! Muds! FTP! UseNet newsgroups that were actually forums!
A few years later, some friends and I from the local Linux user group came up with a silly plan. I shot an email off to IANA petitioning the elders of the internet with the subject line “Application for management of lunar TLD.” in which I proposed managing the .LN top level domain noting:
“This is serious. We only want to act as a trustee for this domain until there are settlers to take it over. This is not an action of any governmental body.”
The answer was wholly predictable, if disappointing:
Hi.
The IANA is not in the business of deciding what is and what is not a
country, nor what code letters are appropriate for a particular
country.
The codes we use are those from the ISO 3166-1 standard.
A country must be recognised as such by the ISO; the code used must be
the ISO-3166 code.
(In a few exceptional cases, a code has been used which is reserved
with the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency at the request of the UPU).
Thanks.
IANA
Years later I would joke about this with Vint Cerf over what was certainly an epic glass of wine from his cellar. One of the great pleasures of working at Google was being able to work with Vint. We bonded over our shared love of science fiction and the open internet.
He told me that I was hardly the only one sending odd TLD requests to IANA and they likely had a good laugh over this one. He told me that if I could have convinced ISO to add it5 they’d probably have approved it and then I’d be in trouble having to make it work!
Funnily enough in 2016 I worked with the team at Google that released Nomulus, which is and was, yes, software to run a TLD. It even looks like its still being maintained! I guess add that to the many projects that Google pulled into the confusion of the consumer domains shutdown.
Anyhow, as Google indecisively killed a component of the consumer oriented domains project and messaged it poorly.6 I asked myself if I wanted Squarespace to take on hosting responsibility for my domains. I had a friend whose company was pulled into Squarespace and I didn’t find myself optimistic about them holding my domains.
So I moved all but 4 domains out of their impending clutches to WordPress, who had a transfer option that was cheap and efficient.7
For the former game company, we had moved name serving to Cloudflare8 as their product line had features we needed for our cloud infrastructure and it’s actually been a terrific registrar. Since we didn’t use the advanced/costly proxy features and kept to the ‘free’ tier, it’s been at their ICANN/IANA cost so it’s literally the cheapest, highest quality domain host.
As we were shutting down , gently, the game company’s infrastructure, I decided to move all the domains to cloudflare to reduce the administrative toil for me, the sole person looking after the infra. I admit that hopping around Wordpress, Squarespace and others was tiring.
And then… This whole WordPress/WPEngine mishegoss started mishegossing all over the place. That made it a little more urgent to clean up my nonsense, transfer some domains, make sure others were expiring. I mean, do I really need to renew “triangleornot” or “ubercoyote” ? No, I don’t. Let em expire!
Anyhow, in WordPerfect’s defense9 moving off of WordStar10 or canceling renewals has been fine, efficient, etc. Not a problem at all. The 4 domains that went to Squarespace…. It seems to take a *lot* of time to get the domain transfer codes out of them.11
WordLe took all of 3 or 4 minutes, it was quite efficient. I suspect SquareSpace has a person chiseling out the code from a one time pad they hide in the broom closet. I’ll update this post when it actually comes through but we’re currently 4 hours since the request was submitted.
The internet forums seem to think SquareSpace is the slowest to produce the transfer codes, so I’m doubly glad that I moved everything I could off of Google Domains12 when I did.
I admit the whole thing with WordPad imploding has made me feel like the technology industry, again, has demanded I spend an otherwise fun Sunday doing a project that I can’t ignore, even though I started the project to move to a single registrar before the whole WingDing thing started.
It sure feels like an unfunded mandate, first when my previous employer pulled their nonsense, and now when WinePress is going through its own nonsense…..I just can’t abide to not trust my domain provider.
Maybe Cloudflare will last. I guess we’ll see if I end up posting another post like this in 10 or so years when Cloudflare decides to be, i dunno, absorbed by private equity, get out of this technology stuff and become the largest names in dog translation and cat boarding or something.
Back when it was just Network Solutions, I ran my own name servers. Which I admittedly loathed doing. Since then, EasyDNS was probably the most reliable of DNS registrars/providers. The folks running things there are top notch, decent, people. Great support, too! So if you don’t need Cloudflare, or just want a good company to handle your domains, check them out. And remember, if you’re having a problem with your infrastructure, it’s probably DNS. You know, maybe.
MarkMonitor, which a ton of big companies use, in case you were wondering.
I tried, and failed, to save reader. That's a longer post. But I’m still surprised at the blinkered short sightedness of that place that I used to work.
it would be about 5 years until Vin DiBona’s production team would try to snag it from me, unsuccessfully. It was surprisingly ham handed. I offered to forward email to him, but I might as well have been speaking gibberish to the lawyer that emailed me. I mean, I loved MacGyver, I could have forwarded mail to the dude who made that happen!
cjd32
Sadly, ISO was a pretty humorless body, so I don’t think that would have worked.
At some point it’s gotta be a weird fetish, right?
Cue the foreshadowing music!
Not cloudstrike! That's not a thing and as Delta would tell you, shouldn’t be a thing anymore.
This is me admitting when I see WP, I think WordPerfect, even though I was a WordStar user in the 80s.
See?
For consumer domains that are somehow not GCP controlled domains or spelled with a silent q or something. Goodness knows what they were thinking when they did this. I mean it took them over a year to figure out the clunky move to squarespace.