Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, a very popular service, announced a noteworthy innovation. Automattic, an ICANN-accredited domain registrar, offers its clients the opportunity to register a domain name for a period of 100 years. This applies to names in the generic top-level domains .COM and .NET (registry: Verisign), .ORG (Public Interest Registry), and .BLOG (Automattic itself is the registry). The service cost is $2,000.
It is difficult to say how much more profitable this will be, compared with the annual renewal of registrations in .COM or .NET for 100 years in a row. However, the main question is not even about this, but whether Automattic, or any other registry mentioned here, will survive for such a long time. The registries tend to choose a more careful approach: no one offers more than 10 years of domain registration. However, Automattic is not the first company to put forward such a long-term proposal. Domain Name Wire writes that, back in 2018, Epik offered a “Forever Domains” registration plan for $420 only. Since then, the company has ceased to exist in that form, and its clients are trying to get their money back through the courts to this day, with varying degrees of success.
