This goes right to the top for me, along the ubiquitous "please verify your account" emails with NO OPTION to click "that's NOT me, somebody misused my email". Either people who do this for a living have no clue how to do their job, or, depressingly more likely, their goals are just completely misaligned to mine as a consumer and it's all about "removing friction" (for them).
The amazing this is that I bet scammers working this system can get through this faster than I can.
I got hit by this from google.
1. Gmail added requirement for 2FA on my primary email address. Since I had no phone number on file, it instead used my recovery email address. Thankfully, I still had the password for my recovery email address, and could continue to (2).
2. Gmail added requirement for 2FA on my recovery email address. Since I had no phone number on file, it instead used by recovery's recovery email address. Thankfully, I still had the password for my recovery's recovery email address, and could continue to (3).
3. SBC Communications no longer exists, as it merged with AT&T in 2005. Email addresses at `sbcglobal.net` were maintained up until around 2021-ish, when they started purging any mailboxes that had been idle for more than 12 months.
Fundamentally, this was google's fault for misusing a recovery email for 2FA. Unfortunately, the only way to fix it would be to contact AT&T, asking them to pretty please update the email settings for somebody who hadn't been a paying customer for two decades.
I constantly remove it whenever Gmail sends me the notification.
I can't help but think there is some method for the other person to steal my Gmail account if I never remove my email as their backup.
I hope it's because I have small simple email and not because they want to steal it.
“We’ll be right over.”
I've had this happen several times... There's a lawyer I used for a dispute a few years ago, and they now have another "First Last" name that matches mine, and he keeps emailing me... my reply, "Wrong Michael, again..."
It's kind of annoying all around... I need to get off my butt and get a few things shifted, then just start relying on my own MTA again, instead of forwarding *@mydomain to my gmail to. I'll still wildcard the domain, but to a single mailbox on my own mta.
I'm not sure how bad the spam might get though... I've had a test account on my mta for a couple years and it hasn't really recived any... my wildcard accounts either... I use the wildcard so I can do things like walmart@mydomain, to see if/where an email address is sold/leaked from regarding spam.
Not jsmith, but kstrauser. Not Gmail, but Yahoo. And I still get banking docs, and HOA meeting minutes, and birthday party invitations, and Facebook logins, and other bizarre random stuff.
I have so many questions. I’ve typoed my address before and had to correct it. That’s understandable. But to wholly invent one and say, yep, that looks good even though I’ve never used it before, I’m sure it’ll be fine! I just don’t get it.
They may well be looking for targets.
>You send it to johnsmith@gmail.com
>You receive a new message, it says "Hey, can you please stop using my email address?"
>You're johnsmith@gmail.com, you only know that's the address that's being used
PD: I know that if he resets the password he can get the other address, but this scenario was funny in my head.
I get TONS of emails of people trying to join services that use my address as a "fake email".
I wonder if finding people responsible and spamming then with their own service emails would make the team care enough to fix this. But of course that's mostly dubious, probably illegal, and shouldn't be a responsibility of some vigilante hacker
Malicious in-attention then, by the profit driven org? :)
They can't just say "we don't want to deal with small timers who will not pay us big bucks doing nonstandard things" without pushback but they can write the policy so that a huge fraction of those use cases fall into some crack that can only be got out of by incurring the kind of expense that's a non-starter for those users. Your municipal code is rife with examples of this.
I do wish there was a requirement for some sort of "no" button that would stop sending sign up requests entirely.
That doesn't prevent a huge majority of them from sending you notification emails all the time even if you never verify.
I run a few websites that accept an email address (all noncommercial, I have no interest in spamming anyone). One of them is the "contact me" feature on my personal website. To prevent spam, I had people just put in their email address and it'll automatically email them my email address. This works perfectly to this day, haven't got a single spam email on any of the addresses I've handed out, but the ratio of emails sent out to received is probably 50 to 1. Why would anyone put an email address in there if not to contact me? I've been wondering if it's used by mail bombing services, idk if that's a thing but I know of the concept of annoying someone by signing them up for a hundred newsletters. My site doesn't send recurring emails, though, and it doesn't allow putting more than two email addresses per month in, per /24 IPv4 block (and even more strict on v6). It's useless for mail bombing services but the (presumed) bots keep submitting a steady rate of maybe 2 new email addresses per day, each time from a new ISP in a random country. No email addresses is ever submitted twice. No rhyme or reason to it. If anyone can make sense of this, that might help me in stopping the abuse
how naive. most of the world work to survive, not because its their dream vocation. they probably dont care as much as you do
.store .online .tech .site .fun .pw .host .press .space .uno .website
So, might as well to block entire TLDs and never buy a domain under those TLDs
Scam websites will use any TLD in my experience. Based on the ones that made it to my Google search results, .it and .info are the TLDs I should be blocking. When I search for "free roblox cash", most websites are .com. "Free robux" also brings forth a few .ca websites. "Free steam gift card" leads to .org and .com.
Aren't they only affordable for the first year though?
I use them when I need a random domain.
Et voilà ... ! this is precisely the slippery slope I warned about a decade ago. The indirect censorship becomes direct censorship, defeating all the arguments about the morality of such a list. And:
> Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately. I don't need their analytics and wasn't really planning on having any content on the domain, so I thought, why bother? Big, big mistake.
Yet more monopolistic power to Google.
The external people treating these lists as absolute truths and automatically taking domains down are the ones at fault here. Google didn't grab power, Radix gave it to them without asking.
What Radix does has no impact on Google, and I don't see how Google would be incentivized to pressure Radix. So I don't see how to make the leap blaming Google for Radix's incompetence. Yes, Google should recognize the risk of this happening, but they'd have to balance that against the rewards (or at least what they consider rewards)
And Google has the right to publish a list, there should be more lists not less. But Google was at fault for not correcting their blacklist. Until the article appeared on Hacker News, this was not 0% on Google. A small, correctable mistake, but they deserved a tiny bit of blame.
If all it takes to be taken from the blacklist was to temporarily delete the NS record - the list would be useless against malware.
What is to stop everyone from doing this blacklisting?
Spyware filters used to boast about how many domains they filter out because they wanted you to buy their filters instead of someone else's. By the time they hit a false positive, they've already sold a year's subscription to that customer.
The incentives are different.
Step 2: Alter filters to mark newly-registered domains and low-traffic websites as "potentially harmful".
Step 3: Charge a lot of money for "business verification" - which gives them a fancy badge somewhere and incidentally makes their website trustworthy in the eyes of your filter.
Step 4: Profit!
The Big Tech cartel has been doing this pretty successfully with email (see the weekly "Don't self-host your email" posts), why should we assume they are doing anything different with browser-based website blocking?
Indeed. I was going to register an account somewhere the other day, and the signup form had a list of acceptable email domains. Gmail, Protonmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Icloud... a few others. It's not the first time that's happened to me. Sad.
EDIT: Didn't even include Fastmail, who's pretty big after all. They host MX for my domain, so I could have "circumvented" it that way with their disposable address feature, but nope.
- They make almost all their money on advertising
- They have deep ties to the US intelligence agencies (To the point that a Google employee managed the appointment calendar for our Secretary of State a few years ago!)
So, how would these incentives apply to their Internet blacklist?
- If you are parking lots of Google ad spam, they are taking a cut of your revenue, so they have an incentive to take you off the list (evidence and testimony from the antitrust trial documented ongoing fraud in every layer of Google's vertical ad monopoly)
- If you are hosting something the intelligence agencies dislike / are neutral to / like, that'll impact your presence on the list.
There is also the headache of PR issues when they get a false NEGATIVE. “Google didn’t protect grandma from this scam website!”
There is no incentive for adding false positives to lists of malicious websites.
Chrome is big enough that a website owner can't afford a false positive on their malware list, just like they can't afford to have all their email end up in spam for all Gmail users.
Due to their near-monopoly Google also has no incentive to avoid adding false positives to their blocklist - provided they don't accidentally block high-profile targets. And if a CxO is screaming over your shoulder that your website has been blocked, arguments about "false positives" aren't very compelling: they'll just demand you move off the "shitty basement provider" and switch to "proper hosting, like the Google Cloud"...
that whiny bullshit about somebody elses website? you dont have to rely on a website or app. either you need their monopoly because you cant do it yourself, or you have options.... in both cases the whining is not needed
It doesn't really matter that it's Google. It could have been Microsoft, or PAN, or McAfee or some fly-by-night vendor. The problem was Radix taking the list as iron-clad truth and disabling the domain without any notification or way to resolve the issue.
Libel suits can be financially catastrophic, so even a tiny false positive rate could present risk that disincentivizes producing such software at all.
And a threat detection mechanism that has a 0.0% false positive rate is conservative to the point of being nearly useless.
In other words, if you can't deal with the false positives in a timely manner. You SHOULD be liable for the damages.
I can't build a budget car put together in an unsafe manner. Then complain I can't compete due to all the peoples cars crashing and blowing up and suing me.
Scalable systems need to use heuristics to catch threats. Needing concrete evidence in every case means that an enormously higher amount of malicious resources will not be flagged.
There is a policy argument as to the right balance of concerns here. But there is a clear trade-off to make.
It’s not libel. Defamation requires a false statement of fact. Marking a website as “unsafe” is an opinion.
No, it's not.
You're welcome to cite case law if you want to insist. Otherwise, unsafe (in the context of infosec) has a definition of likely or able to cause harm or malfunction. Something that is provable or falsifiable with evidence.
I reported a falsely flagged site repeatedly for weeks with absolutely no action from them.
Mozilla and Microsoft both did actually remove the warnings after the reports (Edge and Firefox stopped displaying the warning). Google did not. Google strong armed me into registering for google products, like a fucking bastard of a company.
This was the moment I went from "I don't love google anymore" to "Google can get fucked".
I wish them bankruptcy and every damn legal consequence that is possible to enforce.
For clarity I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, but what means sense to the layperson (including experts in a particular field) is sometimes at odds with what the law says.
If the opinion is meant to be just another opinion, then it shouldn't cause any blacklisting of any sorts anywhere.
I agree with this! The registrar should not have triggered a suspension because of this. They're not obligated to, and the two processes should be decoupled.
No.
The source should be more careful. It's the equivalent of a renowned newspaper printing warning a restaurant being unsafe to visit. Should the customers' willingness to visit be magically decoupled from this opinion?
Fuck Google.
This is absolutely libel. They put a big fucking red banner on top of my site, telling the world that it's unsafe, using all the authority they have as one of the largest tech companies in the world.
In my case - it was a jellyfin instance I'd stood up to host family videos of my kids for my parents.
It was not compromised, and showed only a login page. I reported it as a false flag repeatedly, for weeks, with Google doing jack fucking shit.
Only after signing up in their search console and registering the site did the warning disappear.
They are abusively forcing people into their products. Fuck Google.
In case it wasn't entirely clear - Google can get fucked. Fuck Google.
“unsafe” is a term that is both broader and more vague, so I would consider it opinion unless backed up by appropriate facts (like “contains CSAM”, “contains malware”, and so forth).
Except when it isn't. CSAM may be easier to define and identify than pornography, but there still exists material that treads a moral grey area.
What you can't do is imply non-public knowledge, aka "I heard from my cousin who works in law enforcement that Kyle murdered a hobo when he was 12 but the records were sealed", or state specific facts that can be proven true or false: "Kyle murdered a hobo on September 11, 2018 out back of the 7-11 in Gainesville, FL"
The standard for libel/slander is much, much higher than people think. It's extremely difficult to meet them, and for public figures, it's almost impossible.
In other countries local TLDs are of course normal (e.g. .it for Italy, .za for South Africa, .cn for China...) and not only used for scam links.
I dont care if their pre-LLM ai says "thingy bad". They are responsible for the scripts or black boxes they control. I dont care if they dont give a reason.
Claiming bad/malicious/etc site is 100% libel. And doubly so, anybody who has been forced to agree to a ToS with binding arbitration should have it removed for libel.
No it isn't. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/defamation
Please, use words correctly.
> a plaintiff must show four things: 1) a false statement purporting to be fact; 2) publication or communication of that statement to a third person; 3) fault amounting to at least negligence; and 4) damages, or some harm caused to the reputation of the person or entity who is the subject of the statement.
They falsely marked the site unsafe[1] on a published list[2], the results weren't checked and couldn't be appealed[3] and OPs site was taken down[4].
Opinions and facts in a legal context usually comes down to who is saying what. Someone personally says "this soup is bad" on a review site = opinion. A news site plastering it on their front page = fact.
A person saying something as an individual is usually considered an opinion. A company doesn't have that same protection.
Same with if they become aware of defamation and fail to retract and make a statement. But newspapers will generally also thoroughly investigate themselves to make sure what they are publishing is true.
It’s not libel. Defamation requires a false statement of fact. Marking a website as “unsafe” is an opinion.
The problem is that these gatekeepers of the internet respond to false statements of facts/opinions by so called professionals.
I had cloudflare mark a worker as phishing because a AI "security company" thought my 301 redirect to their clients website was somehow malicious. (url redirects are normal affiliate things)
If the professionals don't understand the difference and cloudflare and google blindly block things, this is scary.
That is more than an opinion. Chrome has a monopoly and should act accordingly. Blocking entry to a website should be a last resort, not just because someone didn't add their website to the whitelist.
I get that's mostly what corporate lawyers argue about, but it's functionally dishonest in this case.
On the flip side of the coin I cannot get a site removed that is a blatant rip off of one of our websites being actively used for invoice redirection fraud.
Considering that getting a domain is a normal part of business these days, this kind of thing should be illegal. Not to mention, why does Google have any say in this?
Because keeping Google happy or at least not bothered is an existential priority for registrars
Which likely is slow without a poke it's reasonable to base the decision on whats available.
That's just how reputation works.
There are lots of domains out there other than .com that are just fine.
Free is good, but sometimes it's not.
If you plan on building a legit site, do not use any of these cheap TLDs.
I know someone with a .org domain, and even they have a ton of issues with false flags on their emails due to not coming from a big email provider. They’ve been blacklisted a couple times and regularly get flagged as spam. I’m surprised he hasn’t given up after dealing with this stuff for 25 years.
These new TLDs, I thought, were supposed to open up more options for regular people to get a domain that is semi-decent. Instead they’re essentially useless. Some of the prices are also still insane, due to assumed “premium” status or domain squatters.
There has to be a better way to police this stuff.
I had the same experience while buying another TLD. For ~1 month, certain people whose ISP "helpfully" had "safe browsing" features, simply blocked us outright. For being new and different.
The learning for me was that new domains are no longer trusted, and seemingly some vanity domains get even more strict treatment.
Want to set up a new domain for whatever purposes (conference, new product, etc)? Be prepared to spend the first half a year fighting the various blacklists before people can actually reliably connect.
Would make so much sense if you could just have a .well-known/other-domains.txt (or something something DNS) with a list of domain names that should be considered just as trustworthy as your main domain.
It's not even about .online or other weird TLDs, it's just that the domain is new and therefore "not trustworthy". Even worse if you need to use your existing branding on the new domain - instantly flagged as a phishing site everywhere.
We struggled a lot when we opted for the .online domain for https://pinggy.io urls
> Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately.
I don't understand. What is Google Search Console, and should I add all my domains there right now?
And yes, you probably should, if only to pre-register your ownership thereof if google ever decides to nuke you from orbit
Google's way of tying real identifies of people to domains, without making it explicit.
Basically, your domain will be weirdly treated by a bunch of entities, none the less Google themselves, if you don't add your domain there (or some other Google property).
Especially with less common TLDs, like .online, they really want to be able to tie it to some identity, so unless you add it there, eventually your domain ends up on some sort of blacklist, in the case of the author it seems they used the "Google Safe Browsing" blacklist to get the author to involve Google somehow.
But if you do - you would get some notifications from Google about that website/domain.
I've only ever seen emails of the "There's an increase in 4xx/5xx errors on site/page(s)"
Was called webmastertools before.
You can also request Google to index your site on GSC as well.
You should probably add your websites to GSC.
It's quite possible that the domain you chose was registered previously and dropped because the previous owner misused it and burned that domain. The .ONLINE extension has been around for several years now.
I'm not particularly familiar with SEO or the massive black box that is Google Search - is this really as critical as the author makes it seem? I have both .lol and .party domains, both through porkbun (and the TLDs seem to be administrated by Uniregistry and Famous Four Media, respectively), and both are able to be found on Google Search. It seems like this preemtive blacklisting would be the result of some heuristics on Google's end; is .online just one of the "cursed" TLDs like .tk?
It is critical in the sense that if you want to appeal the decision in a case like this, it will go much better if you pre-verified that you own the domain.
(I don't think it has much effect on google search placement at all)
I've also never added domains to Google Search Console and haven't had blacklisting issue other than with a free .ml (another "cursed" TLD) site that was by default assumed to be spam by Facebook Messenger.
It's unfortunate that this category exists, but I don't share the OP's .com purism; I've used a mix of TLDs and even the cheap ones like .fyi and .cc haven't come under extra scrutiny as far as I can tell.
The only issue was the usual trap with all Namecheap domains: They tell you it's all set, and it works, until they randomly email you a week later asking for email verification. If you don't do that promptly, they suspend your domain until you trigger a resend. Which is easy to fix but also strange.
So yes, this appears to be a TLD- (or at least registry-) specific issue.
Getting Google to index my personal site has been a pain. Every other search engine works fine, but ever since I switched the images on my site to .webp (a format created by Google!), my site's content just doesn't get indexed anymore. I've given up since web search traffic matters less and less these days with LLMs, and it only really bothers me when I'm trying to search for my own articles.
The problem is the vanity domain registrar Radix using that as a reason to _put the whole domain on hold, including all subdomains, email entries etc._
This means:
- no way to fix accidental wrong "safe search" blacklisting
- if it was your main domain no mails with all the things it entails
- no way to redirect API servers, apps etc. to a different domain. In general it's not just the website which it's down it's all app, APIs, or anything you had on that domain
Google Safe search is meant to help keep chrome users safe from phishing etc. it is fundamentally not designed to be a Authority Institute which can unilaterally dictate which domains are no longer usable at all.
Like basically what Radix did was a full domain take down of the kind you normally need a judge order for... cause by a safe browsing helper service misfiring. That is is RALLY bad, and they refuse to fix their mistake, too.
You normally don't have _that_ level of fundamentally broken internal processes absurdity with the more reputable TLD operators (which doesn't mean you don't have that in edge cases, but this isn't an edge case this is there standard policy).
That's not me saying there shouldn't be a warning and a recourse, but the time-to-profit for domain abuse is really short so anti-abuse actions have to be quick.
At first I was stoked to have a two letter domain, but then I looked into it and learned these companies will get you hooked with a low initial price, then jack up the prices as the domain becomes established.
Quite the grift. My plan is to tread lightly on that domain and be ready to back away from it when the rent seekers move in.
You’d think there would be some sort of rules to the neutrality of these TLD administrators, but nope.
The second time around I wised up and go ogplus.net for an API domain instead of ogplus.media. I’ll take neutrality over vanity any day.
Also, some TLDs directly speculate on having very low prices for the first year or two, then 10x it on year 2 or 3.
Also, go figure Namecheap works with these morons.
.store, .online, .tech, .site, .fun, .pw, .host, .press, .space, .uno, .website
not sure about other registrars
https://prezkennedy.com/2026/01/15/the-free-domain-trap-the-...
> Freenom’s terms of service allowed them to “cancel” a free domain at any time without warning. Users reported for years that as soon as their free site started getting significant traffic (and becoming valuable), Freenom would reclaim the domain and fill it with ads, effectively hijacking the user’s hard work.
I suspect there is something the author is not telling us.
There are many of reports of the same happening to other sites, some of the top ones (you can find many more by searching HN for "google safe browsing"):
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33526893
OP says:
> no gore or violence or anything of that sort
That’s not even the right criteria. OP is confused about Google Safe Browsing vs Safe Search.
At this point, NEVER buy any radix.website TLD domains.
I am seeing pinggy had the same issue with their .online domain and this actually definitely caused hurt to their business https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40195410 (I saw this post from their comment in here referencing it)
I don't think that they could ban emails from .de for what its worth.
Personally I like .in domains too. Makes more sense to me because I am well Indian and we all use it quite frequently/sort of intutitively know fwiw but if I just want a domain for email purposes for cheap. Honestly, .de could be good.
https://tld-list.com/ [Try seeing the cheapest renewal rate with top level TLD and ignore .storage which costs 465$ for registration smh]
Some other domains like .top exist as well in this league imo but .de is one of the best if you can find a relevant domain in .de
It said that https://aid.de was available. I was out of the moon happy (silly me) thinking that its such a good domain or something.
Then I saw aid.de available in namecheap for around 2$ ish but for some reason I took a bath and hten later it showed 10$ ish.
Okay, I then went to spaceship and it also showed me aid.de available. I then took my card and signed up
Well the transaction took place but got refunded. It said that there was an issue or something and got insta refunded
Silly me, thought that the payment had issues and decided to do payment again. This time though my refund had to wait 10 days to come back because of international laws.
Now I had only very little amount stuck btu I can see someone losing substantial money/having it stuck
I contacted their support and they told me that both namecheap/spaceship have a bug where some domains show available when they aren't.
I haven't checked but since the amount was like 1-2$ now but this whole thing really soured my relationship with namecheap/spaceship.
For context, before this, I also had a hate/love relationship with namecheap because once I bought a domain with them using crypto and also bought their vpn which was like 20 cents basically
It had auto renewal on and my domain costed 1$ but crypto payment requires 10$ minimum and the VPN charged me money from that.
Luckily I had spotted before the 2nd month and to be honest, like only 1 month 10 days or something and I urged the namecheap company to do what's right (in that moment because a lapse of judgement had been made from my side/error and I hoped that namecheap could realize it and do "right" instead given that the cost was only around 10$ fwiw)
After waiting for many days, they finally did what's right and gave me my credits back as a one off thing and I then turned off their domains.
I also used a crypto swap thing to convert b/w usdc and btc (what namecheap accepts) and I had an issue of doing two times payment after the timeperiod of btc payment (15 mins) but they also fixed that issue by adding the credits manually when I raised the issue.
Their customer support at times can be good but the platform itself is a little shady in my opinion. For the VPN thing if I remember correctly, the auto renew was written with grey and I genuinely didn't read it without my specs.
I am gonna keep my domain with namecheap that I have and if I get deals from namecheap/spaceship then use them, but for individual domains without deals, hell no.
I know that many people don't like the centralized nature of cloudflare but cloudflare is a good thing for domains :/
I personally just buy domains from wherever's there's a deal right now as some domains I have are some that I keep for only 1 year or similar.
To be honest, if I want to pick a domain-thing, I'd rather pick the one which is the cheapest or if not, then the one which only sells domains
I just looked at porkbun and they only sell domain related things and at best mail (they also have a deal with proton which can be interesting to many)
Porkbun is also cheap so I think I would recommend porkbun/cloudflare.
I haven't decided if I will transfer my domains from namecheap or not but their customer service is nice but the same can't be said for their service sometimes in my opinion.
If you were a lawyer, you could have fun with this.
Btw, perhaps unrelatedly, we had a domain marked as unsafe by Google as well for no particular reason.
No thanks.
Considering .top domains have cheap registration and renewal. To me, it does feel as if .top are very speculative. I liked to search random things in tld-list to find unique-word.<any tld> so like random.top but my past experience says that .top domains are bought quite a lot/very speculative.
If possible I like .de but I think that .top are fine too. Both are great for what its worth.
> It however is falsely maligned by those with small brains who stereotype things.
I didn't know about this, can you please elaborate more about it?
Those with small brains who stereotype things often claim that .top is used only for scams, and that if a site is using .top, it means they're a scam site. In making this foolish assertion, they confuse P(A|B) with P(B|A). To continue, see the ChatGPT share 699f272e-475c-8012-ae9a-a89bd136fd01
> it does feel as if .top are very speculative
Sure, they can be, but again it's no reason to stereotype. They can be or become whatever they want to be.
In my opinion, .de , .ovh , .uk or personally my country's .in (yes OVH has their own TLD that you can use)
.de is one of the more interesting domains to me personally even though I am not german.
I wouldn't party too soon - from my experience getting something removed from Google's libel machine doesn't mean the same process that put it there in the first place is fixed and it you will most likely go through the same thing again and again.
> Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately. I don't need their analytics and wasn't really planning on having any content on the domain, so I thought, why bother? Big, big mistake.
This is just another way how Google has inserted themselves as the gatekeeper of the web.
And you have system and reputational damages.
Go for small claims suit, $5000. It'll cost more than that for their attorney to go to your jurisdiction.
(IAAL, but this is not legal advice. Consult a licensed attorney for legal advice.)
it's not meant to have any other consequences
so basically what happens is that because of hearsay of google thinking you site is not bad Radix does what normally should involve a judge order (taking down the whole domain)
(1): Yes that still would cause damages on any site with customers, but like way less and way more fixable then what happened here.
I was price-gouged out of owning a single, rare .icu domain when renewal fee for it went from 20 usd to 220 usd overnight, just for this one domain... I'm pretty sure it's not Gandi, but the TLD opetator, because other .icu domains I've had were fine. I decided to eventually abandon them all anyway. Moved away from Gandi later when they started doing gouging of their own, too.
What is HN's opinion on Dynadot?
https://www.scaleway.com/en/domain-names/
Could be very interesting for the people who love/host on scaleway.
Scaleway is a good company fwiw imo.
The bigger problem is the unbanning - for which there should be a better system, probably that should take the form of the registrar having a short grace period to aid in the Google stuff (DNS verification etc.) with additional checks by the registrar to make sure it's not being used for spam/malicious content.
The other point being why was Google banning you so quickly? This is the opaque part. Was the site reported? Was there some URL hijinks? That's the thing you'll probably never find out.
If the registrar tracks this information, a possibly helpful course of action would be to notify or warn the domain owner that they are on the list.
In the modern adversarial web, I do not want a registrar that proactively disables my domain because of some third party report.
The was my first thought as well. Yes, using the Safe Browsing list feels wrong, but I don't know enough to speak definitively in that regards. However wouldn't a relatively simple solution be that if a registrar is choosing to use some third party's list of banned DNS entries that the registrar then also implement sufficient unblocked components that will allow people to be unbanned from that third party?
> Add a DNS TXT or a CNAME record.
I haven't had a use-case for a TXT record come up yet, but isn't it low risk enough to allow domain owners to continue to configure TXT records even if the registrar wants to ban configuring other record types? Then the person in the article could prove ownership and could then get off of the third party ban list that the registrar was utilizing.
The registry only maintains a list of NameServers associated with the domain (and records for DNSSEC zone signing). Registries have nothing to do with regular records. They only record who defines those records.
Now whether this downside justifies the massive problem it causes on false positives...
Even google safe search isn't blocking you site per-se, it just adds a very annoying "this site is not safe" dialog you can "somehow" bypass (but most people wont and don't know how).
Like if this where the main site of a company (which it very much could be) this would also have taken down mail, all APIs, all Apps relying on such APIs.
so no this is absurdly unreasonable actions
that they seem to neither know nor care that this makes it impossible to "fix" false positives with google isn't helpful put this in the area of high levels of negligence which can get you into a lot of trouble in the EU