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Comment by optymizer | Hacker News Reader

Hi, offtopic question: I tried to register a .app domain on namecheap which suddenly became unavailable once I tried to add it to cart and is still unavailable. It was a strange coincidence that someone would buy that domain name at the exact same time as me, but Google Registry also says it's no longer unavailable, so I wanted to know who bought it. The weird thing is the Google Registry WHOIS page says "Domain not found" for the 3rd day in a row, which I find bizarre - the domain name is not available but also not registered. Any thoughts on what might be happening?

(I am omitting the actual name because HN is a public forum)

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If you send me the domain name in question privately (use my HN username here @gmail.com), I can dig into it further. I suspect it's either an issue with the domain name registrar, in which case you should try out some others, or it's a case where the name is reserved and is not available for registration by anyone. If it is reserved I can find that out very easily. Note that it would not have been reserved as a result of a domain name search; it would have been reserved years ago, and perhaps the registrar you attempted to use didn't handle it well.

EDIT: The user reached out to me privately and the domain name in question is indeed reserved (because it is a Google trademark), and has never been available for registration. Looks like the registrar did not correctly display it as unavailable for registration.

Thank you! I emailed you from my @proton.me email (in case it went to spam).

Pre-reserving domains that have been searched is a common business practice. Some domain brokers implement this at scale IIRC.

Unethical & Predatory? Sure, but it's not illegal.

They didn’t claim it was illegal? It makes it less economical for someone to hold a domain they aren’t planning to use for 20 years. The squatting just gets more expensive.

Yes it’s a common business practice. Doesn’t mean google has to encourage that industry.

I was highlighting that pre-reserving domains is predatory and unethical.

IIRC the domains that are reserved by registrars are usually moved into a temporary hold status with the TLD, so the registrar isn't paying to register the domain, they are just getting the exclusive option to buy said domain for a number of weeks or months. Much cheaper way to squat on domains than actually buying them!

This is not correct. Only registries can reserve domains. If a registrar "reserved" a domain, they'd have to have bought it from the registry.

At least in the past there were cases where some registrars automatically registered the domain if someone searched for it, it may have been in cases where their algorithm deemed the name somewhat premium. They would then essentially hold it hostage for some time, but would then cancel it during the refund period. AGP Limits policy (https://icannwiki.org/Add_Grace_Period) was created to combat that (and some other issues with refunds).

This is called "front-running" by the domain name registrar and it is a big no-no. Fortunately it's not what happened here though.

That's what I assumed simfree was talking about.

GoDaddy did this. Good domains registrars don't.

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