Registrar gives free .me domains to students with .edu email addresses.
Domain registrar Namecheap has now given away a half million free .me domain names to students as part of its Namecheap for Education program, the company announced this week.
The program, started in 2014, offers students, educators, and others with a .edu email address in North America, the UK, and Australia a free .me domain name for a year. At various times, the program has also thrown in free online tools.
Namecheap reported it had given away 200,000 names by February of 2019, so it seems to be giving away around 75,000 domains per year in recent years.
The registrar says the program has been integrated into the curriculum of several high school and college computer science classes.
Many technology companies (e.g., Apple, Microsoft) offer student discounts as a way to introduce young people to their products and make them lifelong customers. This is a smart giveaway for Namecheap to attract new customers when they register their first domain.
In summary, Namecheap forgets many students in underdeveloped countries to fawn over wealthy students in the United States.
In other words, fuck the rest of the world!
Andrew, if you and the other bloggers knew about this and deliberately didn’t publicize it so that people would even know about a deadline to make comments, then you and every one of you are dirt bags:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/05/01/2023-09180/introduction-of-accountable-measures-regarding-access-to-personal-information-of-us-registrants
Not surprisingly, for those who know anything about what’s going on in this country, I never saw even a single mention of it anywhere in the industry, and I check industry news virtually every day, and the blogs still frequently too.
I do hope it was not deliberate, since it’s .us, and that you and the other bloggers are not just a bunch of deplorable dirt bags that way.
https://domainnamewire.com/2023/06/08/u-s-gov-considers-whois-privacy-for-us-domain-names/
Thanks. I must have missed that while dealing with some things. Sure wish someone had posted about it well before the 5/31 deadline though.
Although after over 20 years I really wish I did not miss (a reasonably and fairly well publicized) opportunity to make a comment, and perhaps it’s even remotely and slightly possible a public comment could even make a difference, one thing we know by now is that generally the outcome has already been decided and any such opportunity is 99.9% likely to be theater anyway. But there’s still that .1%, and the principal involved.