Google has announced the establishment of Google Domains, a registrar that will allow customers to register their own domains. The service is expected to be launched in early July and will stay in an invitation-only beta for a couple of months. To become a customer, you need to apply for an invitation and hope for the best, as the number of available TLDs will likely be limited. Google’s plans indicate that the corporation has come to the domain market to stay.
Google Domains customers will be able to buy or transfer domains for $12 a year, which is very cheap. Go Daddy, a privately held Internet domain registrar and web hosting company, offers a comparable price in the .com area. However, Go Daddy charges about $8 extra per year for privacy and about $5 a month for email. Google’s $12 fee includes privacy protection and the ability to create up to 100 email aliases with your domain.
It appears that initially Google will only support established TLDs, such as .com, .net and .eu, but the company plans to support “a wide range of new domains” in future. This may mean that Google intends to sign the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement that would allow it to work with new top-level domains.
Google is an ICANN-accredited registrar and signed the 2009 Registrar Accreditation Agreement, but it has never used its accreditation to sell domains before.
An additional fact is that Google announced its decision to start selling domains ahead of Go Daddy’s IPO. Analysts say the appearance of such a strong rival as Google could have a highly negative impact on Go Daddy shares.
“The domain business is only a tiny part of Google’s income structure. Rather, this market offers the company an opportunity to monitor potential threats, keep its finger on the pulse, and also offer a maximally broad range of services, for example, domain hosting services,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, CEO of the Coordination Center for TLD RU/РФ. “Google has always taken an active part in ICANN’s events, like many other players who at first sight are not connected to the domain business. I believe that Russian companies, such as Mail.Ru and Yandex, have a similar policy.”
