What does HackerNews think of nomulus?

Ask HN: Why would Google sell Google domains to Squarespace? | Jun 2023

My guess is because it just doesn't bring in enough profits. Most domain registrars make money through volume by either having a relatively small team (porkbun etc.), having most of the team located in a low CoL jurisdiction (Namecheap and eastern Europe/formerly Ukraine), or from value added services/the registrar acting as a loss leader (pretty much every service do this to an extent, CloudFlare, GoDaddy etc.)

For a company like Google that pays top tier salary, there is no way that selling domains (especially not in bulk, their targets are mostly consumers and businesses, domain traders use other services) make enough money. If you take a look at the commiters on https://github.com/google/nomulus

That's at least 10 engineers maintaining one component. Add in SRE and product executives, you are looking at expenses in the two digit millions minimum.

The decision is definitely short sighted but somebody high up no longer wants it as a loss leader.

Remind HN: .com prices increase Sep 1, 2021 | Aug 2021

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There were a lot of people who thought like you and thought they could just whip up some perl scripts to do it. Then they all got hacked, and since when you hack a domain registry, you hack every domain it manages too, they'd usually snag a google.whatever domain and say haha we hacked google. Eventually Google got so angry about this happening that they sent a crack team of security experts to build a top-level domain registry the right way, and made it open source. https://github.com/google/nomulus It wasn't easy.

Google open sources the code that powers its domain registry | Oct 2016

Github link for the lazy: https://github.com/google/nomulus/

Introducing Nomulus: an open source top-level domain name registry | Oct 2016

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In my opinion your comment, now removed, wasn't informative. You complained the title was clickbait and that you initially didn't want to click it (ok, then don't). Then followed about Alphabet's ever increasing privacy invasion.

The source "googleblog.com" next to the title on HN is clear enough. It's a company that open sources a project on github (https://github.com/google/nomulus). I don't think the announcement is disguised, spinned or misleading.

My downvote as off-topic came because it didn't address the announcement itself. To be honest I had the impression you read the title only, not the announcement itself.

That said I think the title techcrunch chose is clearer "Google open sources the code that powers its domain registry"