They're inventing the demand for this TLD, then telling developers to pay up if they don't want someone to take their name.
For a lot of developers the demand was already there because they had their local virtual hosts on .dev. It wasn’t standard, but it was extremely common.
Then one day Google announced that it owns .dev and all the developers had to move their development domains to a different imaginary TLD or .example since Chrome would no longer let them test web sites on their development environments.
I am a developer. I will not pay Google or anyone else to use .dev simply because I have learned that Google can not be trusted. What prevents Google from taking .dev back in-house one random day and kicking everyone’s web sites to the curb? Absolutely nothing. Because you don’t own the domain. You only rent it.
I keep my development and testing on locally routed .dev and simply don’t use Chrome. Fortunately the people who sign my paychecks only care about Safari. Not everyone has that luxury, but I do, so I will make this minuscule stand that Google will never know or care about because an algorithm cannot know or care.
For a lot of developers the demand was already there because they had their local virtual hosts on .dev. It wasn’t standard, but it was extremely common.
Then one day Google announced that it owns .dev and all the developers had to move their development domains to a different imaginary TLD or .example since Chrome would no longer let them test web sites on their development environments.
I am a developer. I will not pay Google or anyone else to use .dev simply because I have learned that Google can not be trusted. What prevents Google from taking .dev back in-house one random day and kicking everyone’s web sites to the curb? Absolutely nothing. Because you don’t own the domain. You only rent it.
I keep my development and testing on locally routed .dev and simply don’t use Chrome. Fortunately the people who sign my paychecks only care about Safari. Not everyone has that luxury, but I do, so I will make this minuscule stand that Google will never know or care about because an algorithm cannot know or care.