Google to Become Consumer Domain Registrar

According to this AP story, Google in partnership with domain registrar GoDaddy, will start offering domain registration for the major TLDs at $10 per year. Why is this important or meaningful? Because it becomes a “foot in the door” to offer other services (e.g., website building/hosting, advertising services, productivity tools) to small businesses.

We’ll see if it turns into that; but it’s a kind of channel strategy potentially.

___

Here’s the official Google statement:

Adding the “D” to Google Apps for Your Domain

Getting powerful communication and collaboration tools up and running for your organization just got a little easier. That’s because we’ve added domain registration services to Google Apps for Your Domain, a platform that allows organizations to offer tools like email and shared calendaring to all of their users — and have them all hosted by Google so there’s no hardware or software to install or maintain.

Starting today, we’re partnering with eNom and GoDaddy.com, two industry leaders in domain registration, to offer users without a domain an easy way to find, register, and buy a domain and start immediately using our services. When you register a new domain as part of the sign-up process for Google Apps for Your Domain, we’ll work with our partners behind the scenes and automatically configure everything so it works with all of the services available through Google Apps for Your Domain right out of the gate. We also give you full control of your domain settings, so you can use your domain for other services not provided by Google.

We are offering domains for $10 per year, which includes private registration to protect your personal information. We currently support .com, .org, .net, .biz, .info, and expect to support more domains over time.