I have no idea where the industry (or the Internet) will be in 10 years, but here are some of the factors I think may have a significant impact on the domain industry:
- The dominance of walled gardens/closed platforms. While big corporations will always have their own domain-based presence on the internet, a number of small to medium sized end-users are content with existing solely within another platform, without having a website presence on their own domain. There are small businesses that only exist within Facebook, eBay, Etsy, even on Instagram. While all of these platforms have a number of limitations, we might see the emergence of new platforms that are far better than these, and a lot of the users who set up their business exclusively across such platforms will not buy domains. This mainly affects buyers in the low end of the market (i.e. someone who might have bought a $XXX domain to post their writings just registers for a medium.com account instead).
- Corporations are trying to alter how the internet functions to prevent piracy. Such commercial pressures may hurt the open structure of the web.
- Google and their war on domains. Like when they started hiding domains from mobile search results. They don’t want you to be able to access websites directly, type-in. They want all traffic to go through them.
- The weakening of western economies and the western middle class, and the shift in the global power balance and trade system is possibly going to impact lower end English language .com demand over time. These are the kinds of domains most of us here hold. These are the kinds of domains owned by HugeDomains and BuyDomains. Many quickly growing economies use their cctlds with names and brands based on their native language, not the kinds of.coms the industry is largely centered on at the moment. So while there may be a decline in many "traditional" .COM markets, the growth in newer economies would probably not do anything to make up for that decline.
- Actions by governments to maintain political control (i.e. China's great firewall). Increased blocking and filtering leads to further fracturing and segmentation of the web. Maybe we’ll have a Web of Webs instead that is splintered and nation-based, and function as disparate and unconnected autonomous spheres, that are walled off from the World Wide Web. Maybe well have governments establish alternative roots. A number of surveillance and privacy issues are also closely connected with the way governments are “dealing with” the Internet, and that could have a negative affect on the open and free Internet.
- The shift from a decentralized to a centralized Internet (in terms of everything from hosting and standardized infrastructures, to outsized service providers that dominate the services that support the Internet). Aside from the security and privacy issues that arise from this, it also makes the playing field less even and makes it harder for users to discover, choose, and change services, and as a result it’s harder for new services to compete on the Internet. A small number of huge companies dominating the Internet is obviously not good for selling domains, as such companies usually only need to acquire a tiny number of new domains each year.
- Voice computing/AI personal assistants could affect how we use the Internet, but I have no idea how they might affect domains.
- As
@anantj mentioned, we might see a system to replace the entire DNS system in its current form. It would take a long time before we see full adoption of new technology like that. I believe it will happen some day, but certainly not in the foreseeable future.
- I don't think we'll see any kind of "hoarding" ownership restrictions on .COM. Pre ngtlds you could reasonably make the argument that "all" the usable domains were taken by "hoarders" and "squatters". But if your name is not available in .COM, you can just register the term you want in any of hundreds of .whatevers. The selection and availability of domains if your term is taken in .COM is just staggering thanks to the new Gs. We might see restrictions that make it harder to so easily sell and transfer ownership of domains though.
- As
@DomainVP mentioned, renewal prices are currently very affordable and that is because .COM has a price freeze in place, but the .COm registry, Verisign, have increase .NET prices as much as they have been allowed at every opportunity they have been allowed in their registry contract. .NETs will likely cost about $14-15 wholesale in five years time (compared with $7.XX wholesale for .COM). Verisign will surely increase .COM prices if/when a price freeze is lifted. With ICANN no longer under US control, I’m not sure if/why Verisign has to answer to the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration, who are the ones behind the price freeze. So when the .COM contract is up for renewal in 2024, and when Verisign will likely get it again, there may simply not be any price freeze stipulation at all as part of it.
Some believe that Verisign will use the shift from thin to thick WHOIS as a reason to lift the price freeze even sooner. It’s possible that we might have significantly higher .COM renewal fees to pay in the future. That would affect people who own many average quality domains and play the numbers game. It would not affect the people who own a smaller number of super premium domains.
- Companies like TurnCommerce, GoDaddy and Uniregistry serve domainers, but at the moment they seem to be primarily interested in expanding their own .COM portfolio’s and selling names in the aftermarket, competing with us regular domainers (using the money they earn from us being their customers - in what other industry is it accepted to compete against your own customers?). If you get outbid at NameJet it's more likely that it is by Frank Schilling’s Name Administration bot than by a fellow domainer, or if you get outbid at GoDaddy, it’s most likely HugeDomains piggybacking bidding bot, rather than a human being. These and a number of other corporate domain portfolio operations that are spending big day in and day out and as they grow larger and larger, they will likely squeeze out most regular domainers, who just won’t have the funds required to compete in this environment.
- The availability of domains is also becoming highly centralized. GoDaddy is acquiring more and more pre-release partners, and due to open auctions and GoDaddy providing real-time bidding activity details to their API users, a few deep-pocketed buyers can use bots to automatically bid on virtually every domain we regular domainers bid on. The bot tax is real, and you hardly ever manage to buy a domain without paying it nowadays. So more and more domains are being funneled into a platform that is very unfavorable to regular individual domainers. Similarly, on the drop, DropCatch is totally dominating, and their open public auction system makes it extremely difficult to buy anything for a reasonable price. Anything we don’t order, they catch and put in their own portfolio. What little gets caught by NJ/SN tends to be widely pre-publicized on NameJet's "the drop" list, so prices are only marginally better at NJ/SN. Previously we could buy healthy amount of inventory of domains from a number of pre-release sources, and catch domains on the drop in a number of different ways at a number of different price points. Nowadays most good stuff goes through GoDaddy’s and DropCatch’s public auctions that lead to significantly higher wholesale prices than this inventory would have fetched otherwise. It has become very expensive to buy even average quality domains.
I think the path ahead for domainers is a challenging one, and I don't think there's much we can do to affect all these developments in a way that is favorable to us. I am very positive about the short to medium term, but beyond that I am very concerned about the longevity of my livelihood as a full-time domainer.
I think the only thing we can do is stay cognizant of what is going on in and around the industry, and utilize the opportunities that arise along the way with a view to carving out a favorable position for ourselves in the future of this industry, an industry that on the whole seems to be following a trajectory that is increasingly unfavorable for us.
Chinese will sooner create a Wechat account than make a website. Generally, I'm surprised how few Chinese small businesses have websites.
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